David Woolley has the strut and look of a bar brawler, his black cowboy boots rat-a-tat-tatting on the streets of Chicago. But many of the fights he starts are in Room 305 at Columbia College’s 11th Street Campus.
Here, just south of the Loop, Woolley teaches the fine art of violence–choreographing sword fights and all manner of mayhem to prepare theater students for the day they run up against an angry Henry V on North Dearborn Street–or at any of the city’s other theaters.
Woolley’s work will be on display Sunday at the Hyatt’s ShakesPier Festival on Navy Pier, where his students will demonstrate in three daily performances the skills they’ve learned from the wiry little fight-master.
While everyone from parents to the president calls for curbing violence in entertainment, Woolley continues teaching and directing confrontation and bloodshed. But he
draws the line at gunplay. He will hire other masters of mayhem to direct scenes with guns being fired.
“Guns are what changed the whole face of warfare between countries and individuals. . . . You no longer had to look in the other guy’s eyes. It changed the whole sense of honor and of a just society.”
Woolley’s course at Columbia is for students planning acting careers in the theater, movies or television. Woolley includes tips on how violence should be choreographed so it seems real. Besides swordplay, students learn to hit, slap and fall.
An amiable man with a quick, booming laugh and small hands that he says have never been raised in a real-life fight, Woolley sports a ponytail and carries himself with the swagger of a street fighter. “I think my particular look tends to keep people away from me,” he said.
Woolley is a native of Alexandria, Va., but is Chicago through and through, said stage partner Doug Mumaw.
“It’s true he does have a little bit of the aura,” Mumaw said, “but, you know, who in Chicago doesn’t? I don’t think anybody wants to mess with anybody from Chicago, really.”
If violence makes the city too real, consider Woolley’s brand: The 39-year-old Bucktown man is all about escape–to 16th Century England or any of the other age-old settings where the kinds of confrontations he is an expert at staging once occurred.
“Whether it’s a single slap or a full melee, my services have been called on,” he said. “It’s a cross between magic tricks and mime.”
Woolley is a well-known veteran in a relatively new and small field; the Society of American Fight Directors, founded in 1977, has only 102 members, only 10 of whom are full-time. Woolley is in demand among directors looking for someone to choreograph the staged fights between characters in their plays. In the mid-1980s, he was one of the first fight directors in Chicago.
Woolley, who took fencing lessons as a child and was on the fencing team in junior high school, also acts in Renaissance Fairs around the country. And at Christmastime, he will play Smee in a production of “Peter Pan” at the New American Theater in Rockford.
“For me it seems like a fairly normal occupation to don a pair of velvet tights and go slashing at my partner’s head,” Mumaw said. “But I know it took my mom a long time to get used to it.”
