Assistant Professor Brian Byrnes walks among the whirring blades of thirty stage combat students, as they practice parry and thrust. He stops a pair wielding swords at close range. Too close, and you can hurt yourself or your partner.
Stage combat is more like a dance than a real fight.
At the UH School of Theatre, Brian Byrnes' classes emphasize safety over swashbuckling. As a sophomore, Burke was the star-crossed lover, Lysander, in a community college production of A Midsummer Night's Dream . He failed to consider the stage's slight tilt toward the audience. I was in a headlock, and we both tumbled right off the stage. Byrnes' students use daggers, rapiers, broadswords, and bare hands.