Staging Swordplay for Safety at Oregon Shakespeare Festival : Pacific Northwest: Much like dancers, fighters must memorize their steps. Rhythm and movements are carefully planned, with techniques borrowed from professional wrestling.

Outside the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan Theater, dancers and musicians warm up the audience with a comical sword fight in which weapons are loaves of bread, a turkey leg and a zucchini.

Within the walls of the outdoor theater, it’s fight call.

Actors in the evening performance of “Macbeth” warm up with the real thing: heavy blades of steel forged in India that easily would draw blood if every cut and parry weren’t carefully choreographed.

“They’re crowd-pleasers,” said fight choreographer James Newcomb. “That’s why Shakespeare put them in. His theater was right next to a bear-baiting pit. It was a violent society. It was the football of its day.”

Part of 60 years of festival lore is the story that during a performance of “Richard II,” an actor quoted, “Yonder lies the tyrant,” pulled his sword, and it flew into the audience, landing in the only empty seat in the front row.

To be sure nothing like that happens, Newcomb gathers the actors before each performance to run through the fight.

Michael J. Hume plays Macbeth. As the greatest warrior in all of Scotland, he is armed with two short swords, one for each hand.

John Rensenhouse plays Macduff. As the underdog avenging the deaths of his wife and children, he has but one sword. To even things out a bit, he also has a black leather cuff, nicknamed “Sluggo” by the actors, that turns his left hand into a club.

Traditionally, Macbeth and Macduff fight with broad swords, but director Jerry Turner chose these nasty short blades to make the fighting more intimate and the setting less historically distinct.

“My voice is my sword,” quotes Rensenhouse and Hume begins circling in the first steps of the deadly dance.

Swords clash, the fighters attack and parry, spin and lunge. The action turns into a slow-motion ballet.

Macbeth is distracted by the ghosts of his victims walking through the fight, and Macduff cuts him across the belly. Then Macduff steps behind and delivers the coup de grace, deftly folding the blade against Macbeth’s back so the audience cannot see it is a harmless stroke.

Macbeth drops his sword and it sticks in the stage.

This is more like professional wrestling than fencing.

Competitive fencing is derived from dueling, in which a contest often was decided by first blood, said Newcomb. “It’s so fast, you can’t see it.

“It’s a very different dynamic when two people square off to kill each other.”

When a mistake could mean your life, people take fewer chances and spend more time sizing up their opponent. Tension builds from the stillness between clashes.

To keep fighters safe amid the mayhem, Newcomb follows four principles:

* First, targets for blows are very narrow. A shoulder cut must be aimed right at the point of the shoulder, so the person receiving the blow knows exactly where it is coming.

* Second is distance--not too close and not too far.

* Third is footwork. Like dancers, fighters have to memorize their steps.

* Fourth is rhythm. The pace may vary, but the rhythm must stay the same.

To demonstrate, Newcomb claps while chanting a cadence of two slow beats followed by two quick ones: “Shoulder cut, shoulder cut, head cut, belly slash.”

To stray from the rules is to invite a knuckle dusting, which can ruin a fighter’s confidence, leading to more injuries.

As a child, Newcomb choreographed his friends in mock World War II battles. He began learning his craft in 1977 from B. H. Barry at Shakespeare & Co. in Lennox, Mass.

Newcomb has been with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival seven years, as both actor and fight choreographer.

For techniques, he often borrows from professional wrestling, where the victim of a throw supplies the energy and control while appearing to be at the mercy of the attacker.

“They’re working as a unit,” Newcomb said. “There is an effortless flow and a seamless quality.”

Newcomb can’t compete with the blood and sound effects in movies, but he still gets to have some fun.

For the death of Lady Macduff, Newcomb hid a syringe underneath her gown with a tube running to her throat. When the assassin kills her with a flourish of two swords, the accomplice holding her from behind presses the bulb, sending a spurt of blood into the air and a gasp through the audience.

But Newcomb is careful not to make the fights look so realistic that the audience becomes afraid the actors will be hurt, or they will lose the thread of the story.

And the actors are careful to remember they are in a play.

“If you go completely into your character . . . “ began Rensenhouse.

“You will kill the guy,” finished Hume.