Nathania Bernabe and Jackie T. Hanlin
Having seen Affair of Honor’s highly intricate and imaginative stage combat show Multi-Vs at Halifax Fringe last year I was surprised to learn that the first iteration of the piece was created in just thirty days. I had a chat with Jackie T. Hanlin and Nathania Bernabe about the development of this hit Fringe show that audiences have been losing their minds over, which is playing at the Waterfront Theatre in Vancouver for just two performances: June 4th and 5th, 2026.
Multi-Vs is described thus on the Affair of Honor website, “trapped in the multiverse with no way out, two strangers must fight for their survival. Hard hitting brawls, clashing steel and a whirlwind journey through different worlds, Multi – Vs is a funny yet heart wrenching ride that explores our relationship with technology and each other.”
In 2023 Hanlin and Bernabe were supposed to be taking a break from performing and focusing on their own professional development, but they were directing at Bishop’s University and watching the students working on their projects made them start to feel “itchy” to perform themselves. Since they hadn’t intended to create a new show they had missed all the deadlines to apply for Fringe Festivals, but Bernabe noticed that the BYOV (Bring Your Own Venue) applications for the Varscona Theatre at the Edmonton Fringe were still open, and so they decided to apply. “If we get it, we’ll make a show,” Hanlin says, “What’s the harm in that?” When they got accepted they suddenly had a very pressing deadline that dictated the pace at which they needed to work.
The first show they ever wrote together was called Playthings, about the “Greek Gods of war playing with two mortal souls, like in their version of Mortal Kombat.” Bernabe says that for that show they initially wanted to write it to be just two performers, as that would be the most economical and practical for touring around the country. “But then narratively we were like… it would be awesome to have two more people, which became the gods of war.” She says that as they continued their stage combat training, once you learn how to use a sword, your limbs, and a four foot quarter staff, you start to refine your style. “You start to learn about all the different types of martial arts that are available, like the way that they move the storytelling. The look, the style… we’re like how can we fit all these different kinds of fight styles into one show and make it make sense?” “Without doing Cabaret style fights,” adds Hanlin.
In 2023 with the deadline looming Bernabe and Hanlin had to be strict about creating a show just for the two of them. “We’re still going to try to fit as many weapon systems on stage,” says Hanlin, but in Playthings they kept each of these systems within their appropriate historical context. For Multi-Verses Hanlin says, “Now I think we need to make it weird.” Bernabe laughs.
They were “super inspired” by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), and the idea that they didn’t have to establish why they were where they were or what weapon system they were using. “[that’s why] it doesn’t matter that we are at the top of the Empire State Building, and we’re, for whatever reason, British spies in a modern setting fighting with Italian rapiers.”
Before the show came to Fundy Fringe in New Brunswick and Halifax Fringe last summer Hanlin and Bernabe were working with an acting coach to expand on all of the distinct worlds in the show and the characters that they play in them. Bernabe says that when they were developing the piece initially they spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best order for the various multiverses to appear for the audience, and how the order would also serve the story. “The alien scene that we do in Gibberish actually had text,” she says, “the first time we did it we spoke all of it in English. And then I looked at Jackie, literally the week before we went up in Edmonton, going, ‘what if we did this in gibberish?’ I feel like this shouldn’t have words. I feel like we can just play around as long as we know what we’re saying… There’s a lot of exploration. We were very lucky, after we did that [show] we got another kick at the can at the rEvolver Festival here in Vancouver, which is an amazing festival for new work. So, we got to work on it more, because we only had 30 days the first time. So, we looked at the fight design more, we looked at all our movement transitions… that was our goal before Halifax,” Bernabe says, to make the transitions between the fights more seamless. With each remount of the production at a different festival they have kept working on developing the work- clarifying the story, when they were back in Halifax performing for DramaFest last month they brought some new weapons and added some new choreography.
“The big, climatic transition between the two characters, Jess and Natalie… before- it used to be kind of more running around with weapons, and then we were like, ‘oh, well, why don’t we look at this and try to create a movement sequence out of this whole thing?’ and what does a chase through the multiverse look like? Even since Halifax we’ve changed it entirely. It’s totally different,” Bernabe and Hanlin say.
They have gotten their full certifications as teachers through Fight Directors Canada, and that allowed them to collaborate with other artists in the same field, including one of the Artistic Directors of Frog in Hand Colleen Snell, who helped them tweak and the clarify the production. “Forever changing, forever evolving- we’re always tweaking it,” says Hanlin, “even between shows- because this particular tour between the show that we did in Lennoxville, Quebec, and then the one that we just did in Halifax there was a month, so we had time to be like ‘do we like this moment? Do we want to change it?’” They laugh.
They do say there is always a balance between what can be changed and what requires more rehearsal to get changes into their bodies. “The basis of what we do is all based in safety,” says Bernabe. “The biggest thing that we tell people… about stage combat is: do you know why you’re safe within this moment and why you’re keeping your partner safe? That’s how you’re going to create such hard hitting fights. It is actually all about acting and illusion and so it’s like how are we creating this together? How are we supporting each other so that no one is getting hurt, so that it is sustainable for the body.”
Hanlin says that changing things up between performances also is what keeps it fun for them as performers. “Sometimes when choreo becomes run to death, it becomes choreo… we [can] kind of lose the intention of what we want in each moment, so having a little bit of [feeling] this is new and alive, and we really have to be connected with each other- it’s been fun- as much as it can be a little like ‘ooh, we only ran that a couple of times! Let’s go.’”
The idea for Multi-Vs really came from thinking about the level of escapism that contemporary technology has provided us with, and how we can get lost in both the good and the doomscrolling of that. Hanlin says that they had bought a new Zelda game, and then they left the house and went on a hike in North Vancouver where they “literally climbed a mountain,” and yet she was having trouble staying in the present moment because she was still thinking about the game. “We also wanted this to feel like a whole doomscrolling kind of like next, next, next, that feeling- could we create that?,” says Bernabe. And also playing with the idea of the amount of time being lost while someone is lost in that scrolling. They were also influenced by the loss of Bernabe’s sister. She says that she hopes that the show reminds people that even though the technology around them can be so addictive and incredible, the phone, the internet videos, they will always be there, “but the person in front of you, might [leave] faster than you think. So, when it comes to human to human connection, it’s still limited. I think the big goal for us was to be like ‘don’t forget to call your mom… to annoy your sibling. It’s a huge love letter for that as well.”
Both Bernabe and Hanlin were introduced to stage combat in school. “My first run at the Fringe was doing an improvised Dungeons and Dragons show where we all had characters, and the audience would actually watch a week-long campaign.. so we actually had set choreographed fights, but we would have the story be told through a D20 dice. We all had our characters, and then we go on this big journey, and it was so funny because sometimes the fights were like, I would win, but then I’d roll a critical one and then I’d have to lose at the end. So, like trip and fall and maybe hurt myself on the sword or whatever. It was really fun to kind of figure that out. We didn’t have formal training,” says Bernabe. Then someone told her that she could do a stage combat workshop through Fight Directors Canada and she did her first basic training in Edmonton before she moved to Vancouver.
“I remember seeing a performance martial arts team in Halifax [on the waterfront],” says Hanlin, “and then there was a group that came in when I was in elementary school or junior high, and they were a team from Toronto called Team Ryouko, and they were this action stunt team, and they did two different shows, a matrix show in the daytime, and then at night when it was dark they did a lightsaber show, and it was awesome. I went back so many times just to watch them.” From then Hanlin knew this was something she was interested in doing. When she moved to Vancouver she signed up for her Basic Training in Stage Combat and Bernabe was working there as a teaching assistant, and that is where they met.
“After I finished my basics Nathania invited me to keep training with her, and she asked me to be her fight partner, and I was like ‘I don’t know what that is, but okay!’” “Another fight duo out here was working together when they were fight directing, they would go together as a pair, and I was watching them going ‘oh cool!’” She says she was searching for the person who could be the other half of her pair, and Hanlin ended up being the person she was waiting for. Bernabe wanted to be there for students who wanted to keep up with practicing their skills between certifications. “The only person who showed up was Jackie,” says Bernabe, “So we would train all the time together for a few hours.” “And then we realized that we were friends,and our productivity went [downhill],” adds Hanlin. “We were like ‘do you want to get food instead of training?” Bernabe adds.
The first time that they ended up performing together was for a cabaret fundraiser that was looking to have a fight scene, and the theme of that, where two fighters fight each other and then get reincarnated and fight again, and are caught in a loop, ended up helping them to develop their show Playthings. They have also performed for a child’s Dungeon and Dragons themed birthday party, but in 2017 they submitted to the Fringe in Vancouver and got in, and that was how their theatre company, Affair of Honor, came to be.
Hanlin had planned to come back to Halifax after she graduated from Bishop’s University since she had worked with DaPoPo Theatre while she was in High School and she knew Andrew Chandler, Garry Williams, and Kristi Anderson. But one day while at the college bar her friend asked her if she wanted to go to Vancouver with her. “Literally picked up a guitar and a suitcase…” says Bernabe. “A guitar and a suitcase, and I moved across the country with my backpack full of dreams,” says Hanlin, “and the first thing I did was I had set up myself to take that stage combat class.”
“We want to create more plays,” says Bernabe of their goals for the future. “We want to write more, just because the canon of fight-based theatre for women is still quite small. We want to keep producing stuff that can have people like us on stage, and we don’t have to necessarily gender bend… we just did our first adaptation of the Musketeers.. and we rewrote all the characters, so Athos, Aramis, and Porthos are all women, and Aramis is very pregnant- just because that’s inspired by a woman, actually a few women, who trained us, and they were super pregnant, like Casey Hudeki taught us sword and shield basically eight months pregnant, and she was rolling with her sword and shield. It’s so awesome just to see badass ladies, badass moms just doing their thing.” “So we’re keen to create more work where… our story doesn’t focus around ‘let’s explain why women would be Musketeers,’ says Hanlin. She says that they’re much more interested in creating worlds where that’s just the reality, and “[we] just endow them with the baddiness, and then we go from there. There’s the story.” ”We’re just going on an adventure like our male counterparts,” says Bernabe.
They give a shout out to Karen Bassett’s play Heroine, which they performed in 2018 in Vancouver, one of just a handful of plays, especially Canadian ones, where women are taking an active role in fight choreography rather than being the victims of violence. The play tells the story of two female pirates held together in a jail cell in Jamaica in 1722. They say the roles that Bassett created in this play were so fun to play. They also mention that even to this day when they are teaching stage combat they often have to work against the assumption that they are going to be “two big dudes.” “It’s really fun to be able to showcase that anybody can do [stage combat],” says Bernabe. She says that often people are hesitant to begin [classes] because they don’t think they’re fit enough, but they seek to empower people to be amazed by what their bodies can do, and they tailor their training to work where people are at. “We ask them: what are your goals? We have people who… want to try and work on a wall flip, and then we have other people who… want to touch [their] toes. That’s actually the scope of what we’re working [on],” says Bernabe.
Hanlin points out that this work, inherently, can be quite ableist, and they are trying to work against that as well. “If you don’t have a working body a lot of the forms are hard and inaccessible,” she says, but she says that rather than having folks sit out they are trying instead to work with students’ bodies and their abilities to give them different options for being involved. Both Hanlin and Bernabe go on to stress that unless they are confident that the choreography can be executed by everyone safely, and safely within repetition, they won’t use the movement in a performance. “No contract is worth your body. Nothing is worth damaging yourself for a show,” says Hanlin. She also points out that this is where being flexible is advantageous, as even if a performer is unable to do a movement safety for one single performance, they have to be able to adapt the show for them that day.
“That’s kind of our overall goal is just empowerment of body, reminding people that safety is number one, your safety and how you’re executing is number one, and then last thing is just joy. Because theatre is such a privilege- it should be fun! It should be so fun,” adds Bernabe. “Mostly when we do our shows it’s about trying to create joy in our audience, and create a fun night out,” agrees Hanlin.
Multi-Vs blew the DramaFest audience away here in Halifax a few weeks ago. Bernabe and Hanlin said that the force of their excited energy was both invigorating and formidable. Hopefully they will find audiences just as warm in Vancouver tonight and tomorrow night as part of their Fringe Presents series.
Multi-Vs plays at the Waterfront Theatre (1412 Cartwright Street, Vancouver) tonight June 4th, 2026 at 7:30pm, and tomorrow June 5th at 7:30pm as part of the Vancouver Fringe Presents series. Tickets are $25.00 and are available online here or at the door. For more information please visit this website.
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