Laura Nõlvak built a career in stage combat after discovering her passion

Estonian actor Laura Nõlvak has made stage combat a central part of her work, creating fight scenes for theatre and film and teaching the craft to others, ERR reports.

Her interest began as a teenager, when she watched productions at Tallinn City Theatre. She was especially struck by “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Three Musketeers,” directed by Elmo Nüganen, where she admired Indrek Sammul’s convincing sword fighting.

Nõlvak later studied in Nüganen’s class at the theatre school and took stage-combat lessons from Sammul. The students did not learn hand-to-hand fighting, but practised rapier combat on the same stage where the Three Musketeers had fought.

The day before her stage-combat exam, Nõlvak injured her arm during a rehearsal. Her elbow swelled, leaving her unable to hold a weapon. Sammul changed the exam scenario so that she would kill everyone at the end. Nõlvak said she survived while the others died, and she performed a few strikes with her left hand. She received a grade of five.

Passing the exam did not satisfy her desire to continue. “I loved it so much. I wanted more, and I wanted to show that it was exciting and that I could do it,” she recalled.

After graduating, she attended a two-week course in Pärnu organised by the Nordic Stage Fight Society and went on to take summer stage-combat courses.

Sammul said Nõlvak stood out in her first lessons for her interest in the subject and her flexible, logical thinking. In combat choreography, he said, ideas must follow the logic of movement and force to work at speed.

Nõlvak has mainly choreographed fight scenes for theatre, but has also worked on film. For Tanel Toom’s “Viimne vahipost,” which featured international actors, she choreographed a choking scene. The filmmakers felt it might be better and safer to have a woman choreograph it because a woman was involved in the scene, she said.