Fighting and acting merge to provide students with credits and fun

Long Beach City College offers students a chance to make nonviolent actions look dangerous and real through on-stage combat in TART 5A, an acting course rooted in teaching safe and believable stage fighting.

The course is taught by combat instructor Collin Bressie who has been teaching at LBCC since 2017 and was a student at the college over 20 years ago.

“There is nothing more glorious than great moments of violence that you can create through theater and I hope to pave that forward to my students each class,” said Bressie after being asked what his goal is for the students this semester.

Each student in the class is developing how to process information through whole body movements based on different combat scenarios. 

Every class starts off with Bressie leading his students in stretches to get everyone’s muscles loose to avoid injuries.

 In class students perform a number of combat practices that include cross-swings, jabs, upper-cuts, hooks, breathing techniques, quick reactions, moving in tight spaces and much more.

Although class activities may look dangerous, one of the biggest goals in class is to keep a safe environment at all times which includes the use of face masks as well.

The class is made up of about half experienced students and half completely new students but expectations are high for everyone since they use so much class time on repetition and hands-on training.

Students have developed a chemistry between one another that allows everyone to work with anyone where they each expect full effort from their peers since the practice they get in class depends on everyone’s participation.

“I love figuring out how to create something that feels so real to the audience when in reality we’re not hurting each other at all,” said student Mara Stanford after class.

Not all of the students taking this course are theater majors but they all enjoy the time they spend in class developing their technique with one another.

“It started off a while ago as a course I never expected to take, but I fell in love with it and now here I am still today,” said Miguel Bohol, a student at Cal State Long Beach, who attends LBCC for this course alone since it isn’t available at CSULB.