Stage Combat Expert Lends Hand - And Sword - To Middle School
Rivers teachers have never been shy about sharing their interests with their students, and perhaps one of the most unusual examples of this is the Middle School Stage Combat class taught by Dr. Julian Willard, chair of Rivers Interdisciplinary Sudies department.
On Friday, April 15, Dr. Willard invited Chris Cardoni to visit his class and share the expertise he himself learned while working with Mr. Cardoni. That particular class came after Dr. Willard used a Faculty Enrichment Grant to study stage combat at Southern Oregon University a few summers ago.
Mr. Cardoni has been teaching, practicing, and studying stage combat for 17 years in the New England area and has taken master classes with such stage-combat luminaries as Tony Wolf of The Lord of the Rings and Anthony DeLongis of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
After a brief introduction, Mr. Cardoni led the class through one of his more basic fight choreography sequences. Due to the sequence’s simple nature, the students were encouraged to add their own doses of character to the sequences they enacted – all of which led to some very entertaining scenes.
To close, Mr. Cardoni and Dr. Willard provided a demo of the fight scene with a bit of improvised dialogue complete with a pair of movie-quality aluminum stage combat swords. Click here to watch a short clip of this scene on the Rivers Instagram page.
“It’s important to bring experts in to our classes to show how learning is often collaborative,” Dr. Willard said. “To engage with the world outside the classroom helps model for students that Kenneth Blanchard comment, ‘None of us is as smart as all of us.’”
The Faculty Enrichment Grant program allows Rivers teachers to pursue their personal and professional interests in ways that will have a meaningful impact on their teaching. Support for the program comes in part from the proceeds of the Parents’ League Auction, which will take place this year on Saturday, April 30.
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