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Tony Pisculli's fancy footwork in
fight choreography will win him a
Special Excellence award the
Po'okela ceremony Monday

By John Berger
Special to the Star-Bulletin

MANY of the most energetic moments in movies and theater -- dramatic and comic alike -- are fight scenes. When the staged violence is badly done it can destroy the work of the playwright and the director, as well as endanger the performers.

That's where Tony Pisculli comes in. He has considerable experience as a actor and director, has written several one-act plays, and has an MFA degree in directing from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. His resume also includes a long and growing list of credits as a fight choreographer, whose job is to ensure that staged mayhem has maximum theatrical impact with a minimum of danger to performers.

George F. Lee, Star-Bulletin
The Loose Screws Performing Arts group gets resourceful
with props as they stage a fight. Clockwise from left are
Monica Cho, Michael de Ycaza, fight choreographer
Tony Pisculli and R. Kevin Doyle.

Fight choreography is a professional specialty that is not adjudicated as part of the Hawaii State Theatre Council's annual Po'okela Awards program but Pisculli will be one of two recipients of Special Excellence Awards at the sold-out 17th Annual Po'okela Awards ceremony beginning 7 p.m. Monday at the Ko'olau Country Club. (Make-up artist Kathleen Kamakaiwi also will be honored for her success in disguising Bill Ogilvie as Kris Kringle in DHT's staging of "Here's Love.")

"When you look at a play like 'Romeo & Juliet' the fights are significant turning points and you really focus a lot of dramatic attention there. Why do they fight? How do they fight? When one character kills another is it an accident or deliberate?" he asks rhetorically.

Stage fighting must look real enough for the audience to forget they are watching actors, and become involved in the action. A worst-case scenario is one in which untrained performers improvise action, ending up with someone getting injured. Pisculli said he recalls hearing of a mainland production of "Dracula" in which the star almost died.

"They gave him a stab plate under his costume but no one knew what they were doing and he got stabbed in the chest and collapsed a lung."

Pisculli's work can be seen in Manoa Valley Theatre's production of "As Bees In Honey Drown" when Russell Motter appears to pummel Braddoc A. DeCaires. Pisculli's other recent assignments included choreographing the violence in MVT's "Death Trap" and "Of Mice and Men" and working on Kennedy Theatre's elaborate production of "The Snow Queen And The Goblin."

Pisculli combined fencing techniques with physical comedy when he worked with actors Walter Eccles and Herman Tesoro Jr. in preparing the lengthy duels and battle scenes in Honolulu Theatre for Youth's production of "Cyrano" at LCC in February.

Manoa Valley Theatre
Dwight Martin, left, and Jesse Michael Mothershed rehearse
a fight scene for Manoa Valley Theatre's "Death Trap"
as Tony Pisculli coaches.

"That was a lot of work. I choreographed that entirely with rapiers to make sure that the actors had the feel for the actual weapons, and then we swapped in feathers at the last minute to give it a different look. They handled the feathers like rapiers and that made a huge, huge difference because if we had choreographed it with feathers (from the beginning) it would have been a silly little swishing-feathers-around thing.

"(Director) Mark (Lutwak) was great about giving us many, many hours of rehearsal time so it would look right."

Pisculli also choreographed the fight scenes in 1998 Blaisdell Concert Hall production of "Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire." He's worked out numerous fights for shows at the UH-Manoa Ernst Lab Theatre, and shared his expertise in shows at Kumu Kahua, Diamond Head Theatre and several high school theater groups. He has also conducted stage combat classes at UH and Mid-Pacific Institute.

Pisculli traces his interest in fight choreography back to a 1994 UH workshop conducted by fight director Gregory Hoffman. Pisculli and another student, Aaron Anderson, signed up for additional training and went on to co-choreograph several local productions. Anderson eventually moved to Chicago. Pisculli remained here and is certified as a teacher of the art by Hoffman's Dueling Arts International company. He has logged more than 500 hours of combat training in the use of weapons such as rapiers, daggers, broadswords and quarterstaves, as well the techniques of simulating a basic fist fight. He belongs to several professional associations and continues to study his craft.

"Every year I go and train somewhere, and Gregory has been coming back for workshops where we train another dozen people or more. It's fantastically useful stuff for actors to know just in terms of their own safety.

"And it's a fun thing to do. Everybody's got fantasies about swashbuckling."

Although his work as a fight choreographer has put him in the spotlight, Pisculli is active as a playwright and performer. "Guano dell'Amore" and "The Eternal Champion" were two highlights of his career as a UH graduate student. He is also a core member of the Loose Screws improvisational troupe, has written and directed pieces as a member of Cabaret Tiki, and is an active exponent of traditional Italian commedia theatre.

And his next fight?

"I'm working on a knife fight for 'Blood Wedding' this fall," he said.

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