“The first day I showed up on campus I saw a group of people practicing with swords outside Risley,” said Jennifer Wholey ’10, president of Cornell’s Ring of Steel Club. The combatants, as it turned out, were members of Ring of Steel.

The club, as Wholey explained, “… is a stage combat and theatrical stunt troupe. … Basically, we perform and choreograph fight scenes. Though we mainly work with swords we also take elements from eastern and western historical swordplay, fencing and even dance to choreograph and perform safe and effective fight scenes.”Ring of Steel Around Risley

Some of the fight scenes the group has staged in the past have included everything from Matrix-style battles to traditional Shakespearean death scenes and even a fight between custodians armed with mops. Wholey explained, “We adapt fights from movies sometimes because people know and like them — last year we did two Princess Bride fights and two years ago we did a Lord of the Rings fight.”

“But,” Wholey added, “we also do original fights. We’re definitely going to have a performance in Risley Theater during the weekend of Halloween. … We’re torn between doing something Shakespeare-themed or something zombie-themed.”

In addition to creating their own original fights, Ring of Steel frequently helps choreograph fight scenes for other performance groups. “Last year,” Wholey said, “we choreographed a swordfight for Don Giovanni, which was an opera that was put on by the Music Department in Risley. We also did the choreography for a performance of Cabaret by the Melodramatics because they had some hand to hand fight scenes.”

The group even worked on a movie as part of an Ithaca College senior project, which, Wholey explained, “ … was fun because we got to choreograph fights with multiple people fighting at one time.” Entitled No Country for Married Men, the movie was a learning experience for the Cornell group. Wholey said, “It took like nine hours to film a two-minute fight scene, so it’s a lot more work than you’d think.”

One of the reasons that stage combat involves such time-consuming work is because combatants need to be intimately familiar with the safety rules the group abides by to ensure that no one is hurt. “We really emphasize safety above everything else,” Wholey said, “because we don’t wear armor or anything and we use real swords — everyone always asks us that, but we use real swords made of real steel so they will hurt.”

To avoid any such injuries, the group has a six-point safety procedure they call “the six layers of safety.” The first of these six layers is distance. As Wholey explained, “Basically we’re fighting at such a distance that even if we swing wildly we’d never hit.”

The second layer of safety is simultaneous movement, “So if one person advances, the other person retreats — there’s a dynamic between the two combatants.”

“The third layer of safety is [having] aim points,” Wholey said, “and we have very specific aim points. For instance, we aim for large muscle groups.” Focus of energy, she explained, is the fourth layer of safety: “With the appropriate amount of focus [the fight] still looks good and you won’t break the swords or your friends.”

“Layer five is choreography; everything we do is choreographed, and … we don’t ever do anything unplanned. The last layer,” Wholey concluded, “is practice. We practice a lot. We have three practices a week for two hours each. The hard core members are there six hours a week and it adds up — I’m definitely better than I was last year.”

The six hours every a week are a sacrifice Wholey finds well worth it, she said as she explained her favorite aspects of participating in Ring of Steel: “I really like stage combat because you have the freedom of acting and being another character and you often get to do moves that would never be practical but look really good.”

Whether or not a particular move is practical, though, there is always a specific purpose for it. Wholey explained that, “Ideally every single move in a fight should represent something about the characters, because the two people who are fighting have come to the point where words won’t work anymore. So basically a fight needs to say the words without saying them, so acting is very important to us as well.”

“Not everyone in Ring [of Steel] actually likes to act,” Wholey concluded, “but they get drawn to acting because of Ring. Some people are drawn to acting through swords and some are drawn to swords through acting — you can come at it from either way.” RLD