Storytelling with Movement: Hannah Roccisano Brings Fight Directing and Stage Combat Expertise to USD
One of those professionals is the fight director, who is responsible for choreographing staged combat and other high-intensity scenes. The fight director combines movement, trust and illusion to drive a story forward with action while prioritizing safety for performers.
Hannah Roccisano is an assistant professor of movement and stage combat in the University of South Dakota Department of Theatre and a fight director for professional theater productions.
Following her Broadway debut, we sat down with Roccisano to learn about her path to this dynamic profession and eventually to USD, where she helps students build confidence and rhetorical awareness through stage combat.
How did you get started in stage combat and fight direction?
I started martial arts when I was around eight years old, but I didn’t apply that to stage combat until I took a stage combat class in college; I was picking up on it naturally, so I enrolled in a three-week intensive workshop that changed my entire life. I failed all the proficiency tests at the end of that workshop, but I also fell in love with an incredible stage combat community. They gave me the opportunities to keep trying until I succeeded.
I was fortunate to get a scholarship to pursue additional training and then started working as an assistant for a teacher and mentor in New York City. I spent four or five years just learning, learning, learning the craft from many different people.
But my dream was to teach at a four-year institution, so I went on to earn my Master of Fine Arts and Master of Letters in Shakespeare and performance at Mary Baldwin University. After grad school, I was full-time freelancing as a fight director and as an adjunct professor before joining the faculty at USD.
What do you love about stage combat and fight direction?
Stage combat is a beautiful juxtaposition: For the characters to portray malice, hate or the worst moment of a person’s life, the actors have to be in the best loving, trusting space. Essentially, to create the illusion of the worst of humanity, we have to meet it with the best of us. It sounds corny, but honestly, it gives me hope. To me, this is a way that I can serve a larger society.
Moving from stage combat to fight direction, the question becomes, “Am I able to put the same energy that I do caring for myself into someone else?” That’s another thing I love about stage combat and fight direction: They force people to consider the person in front of them and care if they are okay. Stage combat requires an element of selflessness because you’re taking care for the people around you. Being a fight director is never about me. My part is usually a very small fraction of supporting the larger scope of the story, and in the case of CATS: The Jellicle Ball, the Broadway production that I recently supported as fight director, that is absolutely the case.
Robert “Silk” Mason as ‘Magical Mister Mistoffelees’ from CATS/ The Jellicle Ball. Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.
How did you become the fight director for a Broadway show?
I was doing a fight choreography gig off Broadway for a show called “Wolf Play” by Hansol Jung in 2021. At the opening night performance, this kind man just so happened to sit next to me. He said he moved to New York to become the artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC) after being the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I asked if he was the keynote speaker four years prior at a conference at my grad school, and he said yes—I was talking to Bill Rauch. Then we went down the rabbit hole of nerding out about Shakespeare.
At the end of the performance, he gave me his card and said, “Keep in touch.”
I set notifications on my phone to send Bill Rauch my updated vitae. In the Perelman PAC’s inaugural season in 2024, I got an email in my inbox saying, “We’re looking for a fight director for the revival of CATS. Do you want to come interview?” I interviewed, and they decided to move forward with me—and when that show came back on Broadway in 2026, I was gratefully brought back.
What did you learn while working on a Broadway show, and what will you bring back to your USD classroom from the experience?
A Broadway show, a theatre production at the highest professional level, can be as good as it is only because of the amount of collaboration that it takes. So many people are involved, and every single one of them is so good at their job and so communicative. It doesn’t just take a village—it takes a city to raise a Broadway show. I learned not just from the actors, but from the directors, the producers, the music directors, the lighting designer, the costume designer—and the stage managers were incredible! Everybody was just on their A-game.
What I’m bringing back to USD from my work in New York is that knowledge of how many people it takes to make something that big, revolutionary and beautiful happen. I am taking what I learned from all of those professionals back to the classroom.
The really beautiful thing about the degrees that we have at USD is the requirement that acting and musical theater majors take technical classes, so they’re able to communicate knowledgeably with everyone working on a production. That’s what I saw happening on Broadway, and that is the collaborative experience our students get.
What do you love about teaching?
I had incredible teachers who gave me space to explore, learn, grow, develop and fail. That’s a part of why I love teaching. I am creating the opportunities and the spaces that were given to me. I feel motivated to pay forward—not to pay back, because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pay that back.
What I can do is create spaces in which people can honestly discover and develop as human beings. I can help society in that way.
What does a stage combat class look like? What do you hope your students will learn from your classes?
First, we’re doing basic movement. We do the basics many, many times over. When it comes to a typical stage combat class, I’m teaching different perspectives. What does it look like to do moves with an audience in a proscenium—where there’s only audience from one side? What about in the round—meaning people are on all sides of the theater? There are different techniques. So, I teach the same basic things from multiple perspectives.
I teach students how to fall. If there’s anything my students take from me, I hope it’s how to fall. I also teach hair pulls and punches—but first, I teach basic consent principles. How we make contact with each other, how we push without actually putting force behind it. Remember, it’s all about illusion.
As a faculty member who is also working in the industry, how do you continue to hone your professional skills?
I am a member and Certified Teacher of the Society of American Fight Directors, which is important because of the communal aspect. The majority of the time when I go into a production, there’s only one of me—one fight director. The society allows me to learn from other practitioners, and it also allows me to connect with a chosen family.
I also teach and participate in stage combat workshops. In my fight director community, while it’s great that we get to teach and show off what we’ve been working on, we’re going to these workshops to learn. Our industry changes quickly, so it is my responsibility to continue to educate myself so that I am educating my students about the best practices of the current industry.
What do you think made you the success story you are today?
Nothing that I have accomplished in my life would have been possible without five elements. Number one is luck. Right place, right time absolutely mattered. Number two, working so hard that when that luck struck, I was able to actively participate and engage with what it brought. Number three, I had incredible mentors. Number four, I had familial support. I had a family that saw the value in theater. And number five, be kind to people and appreciate what they bring to the table.
Everyone has different circumstances, and I was lucky that things fell into place for me. I worked very hard, but all of these together made my success possible.
What is next for you?
This semester, my stage combat classes are full. I have performance majors in those classes, but also stage managers, technical theater majors and directing students. With what I do, I have to be able to communicate with every single department, so I’m really excited to teach students that. Stage combat forces everybody to collaborate, which is what makes it special.
Another thing that might be next is figuring out how I can pour back into the Vermillion community with who I am. Vermillion is a very different environment for me—a group of human beings that care so much about their neighbors. What is this place? It’s magic.
In Vermillion, the people around you want you to succeed and be a part of the community, which is beautiful. I’m looking forward to learning from the people here and trying to find what I can give that everybody can benefit from.
About the Production
CATS: The Jellicle Ball began preview performances at the Broadhurst Theatre on March 18, 2026, and opened Tuesday, April 7, as the best reviewed musical of the Broadway season. It went on to receive nine Tony Award nominations and won three: Best Direction of a Musical (Zhailon Levington and Bill Rauch), Best Choreography (Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons), and Best Costume Design of a Muscial (Qween Jean). The production was also honored with three Drama Desk Awards, two Outer Critics Circl Awards including Outstanding Revival, three OBIE Awards, two New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citations, two Chita Rivera Awards, two Audelco Awards, three Dorian Theater Awards, and three Hewes Awards.
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