Right for your fight Whether it's kung-fu fighting or funny fisticuffs, Jacqueline Loewen is Winnipeg's go-to for combat choreography By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018

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This article was published 01/11/2018 (2315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As one of Winnipeg’s more accomplished fight directors, Jacqueline Loewen appreciates the irony that accompanies her work choreographing stage combat.

“I’m a Mennonite, so I do pretend violence really well,” she says. “But as a pacifist, I couldn’t commit any of that violence myself.”

Loewen, 36, has been busy lately on Winnipeg stages, planning and choreographing skirmishes in a diversity of shows, including the August Rainbow Stage production of Beauty and the Beast, the Prairie Theatre Exchange production of Prairie Nurse and now what may be one of her most challenging assignments: directing a four-minute kung-fu donnybrook in the MTC Warehouse production of Vietgone.

The play by Vietnamese-American playwright Qui Nguyen — himself a fight director — is the story of how Nguyen’s own parents came from Vietnam to America, but it’s filtered through a comic/comic-book lens.

Nguyen has carved a specialty out for himself with theatre that reflects his own love of genre movies, with titles such as Alice in Slasherland, Living Dead in Denmark and Soul Samurai.

Vietgone is a work that shows the considerable range of skills needed for the field of fight choreography, especially compared with Prairie Nurse, a comedy in which the violence was limited to a minute or so onstage wherein old-timer handyman Charlie (played by Robb Patterson) administered a two-punch whupping on a confused hospital worker whom Charlie believes has been toying with the affections of a young immigrant nurse.

“I would describe it as a very functional gag,” Loewen says, using the term the pros use for “stunt.”

“The violence in that particular show is slapsticky and it’s meant to be one comic beat within the context of the story,” she says. “And so I do that and try to match the style with what the director is coming in with so that it doesn’t feel like two different plays.”

That same dynamic comes into play for Vietgone… but dialled to 11.

“It’s not a gag,” she says. “We timed the full run of the fight and it’s four minutes.

“Not only is it a fight sequence, it’s a very story-driven and stylistic part of the show,” she says. “Instead of the violence being a tiny little component within the larger scene, this is the story of the scene itself.”

Loewen says Nguyen himself cues the performers to the demands of the scene in the script.

“The stage direction is something like: ‘They break out the most badass fight sequence ever seen on any stage ever,’ “ she says with a laugh. “That gives you some idea of the style that he’s going for.”

The show’s director, Robert Ross Parker, co-founded the New York company Vampire Cowboys Theatre with Nguyen and they are attuned to each other’s styles, Loewen says.

“What the director had wanted was, instead of going into a realistic fight, we talked about how there’s a point at which it makes a whole lot of sense for the realism to stop and for a very heightened, almost 1970s Blaxploitation kind of kung-fu fight sequence to come in with all the sound effects.

“For my part, that’s way, way more fun,” she says, adding that the task required viewing “a bunch of kung fu videos to see the tropes and to see why those storytelling elements are there.”

• • •

Local comedy fans will recognize Loewen for her time with the local sketch troupe Hot Thespian Action, before she amicably parted ways with the company to seek her fortune in Vancouver.

But she has returned to Winnipeg to resume her career here, and she says Vancouver did give her a larger sense of her capabilities.

“When I was in Vancouver, I heard the term ‘theatre maker,’ which I really like,” she says. “It feels really big in terms of the way I can place myself — being a part of making the myriad aspects of theatre, whether performatively, or in the writing part or in the fight-choreography part, or anything like that.

“I’m finding in my own work that what I’m interested in comes out in all of those aspects.”

She comes back at an interesting time in Winnipeg theatre, with newly minted artistic directors — Carson Nattrass and Thomas Morgan Jones installed at Rainbow Stage and Prairie Theatre Exchange, respectively, and a new AD, Kelly Thornton, on the horizon at RMTC.

Loewen got to know Jones at a workshop and says she was pleased to meet someone whose tastes lined up with her own. “I’m very excited that there’s somebody in charge of the theatre in Winnipeg who is more interested in not just basic realism, so that’s cool.”

Thornton, she says, “seems to have a lot of interest in new works and development and she has a really broad sense of experience that we don’t have here.

“I’m very excited.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
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In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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