[from the Staging Violence section]
* * *
... about one and a half arm’s distance away. The body of the aggressor must not face toward the victim, but rather at the empty space directly upstage of the victim. The toes of the downstage foot point at the victim’s left and right toes. At this point on, that downstage foot remains planted; it is the upstage foot, the foot furthest from the victim, which performs the action.
Picture: Much like the slap, the groin kick works best when
it comes as a surprise to the audience. And yet there still has to be a tiny
moment that the audience can identify as a precursor to the action we want them
to believe. In this case, it is a very small bit of preparatory body movement in
opposition. It can be as simple as a little lift of the foot off the ground, or
a momentary shift of weight to the rear foot.
Action: The upstage knee rises and points towards the spot upstage of the victim, and then the foot swings out and back quickly, parallel to and upstage of the toes of the victim. Don’t allow the foot to arc towards the victim. The foot must immediately go back to its starting position. Any hang time at all on this and the audience will not believe the illusion.
Reaction: The victim performs the universally understood reaction - bending the knees, sticking the butt out and lifting the chin. Don’t collapse the head down nor bend over at the waist - that only confuses the illusion. The reaction is funnier if the vocalization of the victim can be high pitched, if the knees can touch (knock-kneed) and if there is a slow continuing collapse after the initial shock of the impact. The aggressor should not bend over at all (so many male actors want to in unconscious sympathy), but maintain a victorious posture.
The kick is more of a flick kick than one that is capable of doing any serious damage, so the aggressor’s action must be as quick as possible, especially coming away from the target. There is also a truism at work here in that if the aggressor’s foot actually rises to the height of the victim’s groin, the audience thinks that it has seen a kick to the stomach, because the viewer’s mind always adds a little more movement to what he actually sees. So stop the foot a little lower than groin level. Be sure to include the look of the foot bouncing back from the groin, like a ball bouncing off a wall, to give the illusion of contact. In order to sell this, it might be necessary for the foot to swing up for the kick a little slower than it will move on the bounce back.
If you want to simulate a groin kick with the knee rather than the foot, the basics will be the same, but look ahead to the knee to stomach explanation.
front kick to stomach - victim standing
There are two ways of simulating a front kick, but I’m only going to tell you how to do one kind - the safer one. This one is really the same as the groin kick, with some obvious exceptions. So look at the groin kick pictures on the previous page. All we have to do is change some very minor points:
Set up: have the victim stand full-back to the audience. The aggressor stands in profile but slightly up-stage of the victim, and about one and a half arm’s distance away. The body of the aggressor must not face toward the victim, but rather at the empty space directly upstage of the victim. The toes of the downstage foot point at the victim’s left and right toes. At this point on, that downstage foot remains planted; it is the upstage foot,