Virtual Paddy 

Class Descriptions

Learn basic tricking techniques and dynamic kicks to challenge gravity and expand your range of motion — literally. Perfect for adding impact and flair at any distance in choreography.

It's often useful to know a trick or two with knives that is visible, reliable, and hopefully fancy enough to make your character look like they have a special skill. We often need an onstage or on-camera solution quickly - this class offers a series of airborne tricks for knives and other small objects that you can do with many household objects. Bring your spatula or pasta spoon!

In this class we’ll learn a bit about the history and practice of Afro-Cuban dance and then move into learning some steps and shapes that are designed to honor both the mythical and the real warriors of Afro-Cuban culture -- wielding swords, hammers, lightning, and more -- through dance. This exploration will help students engage both with the meeting of dance and historical martial arts, as well as with possible inspirations for more stylized staged violence.

This class is an examination of traditional Footwork from Rapier to Smallsword to classical fencing. From star footwork to advancing and retreating and all of the explosive ways of closing distance are covered in this lesson. 

We all know that sound is integral to a successful fight scene. Scenes of extreme emotion -- like fights and intimacy -- need extreme vocals to match the storytelling. Healthy practises and technique are essential for sustainable vocal storytelling. In this introductory workshop you’ll learn some of the storytelling principles of VCT, give you practise in vocal health and building vocal fitness and then move into basic effects such as shouting. In this short format, you’ll hear examples of further extremes such as screams, but we don’t have time to practice those safely. For those who are in a space to participate, we’ll round out the session with a short (no more than 3 moves) solo fight sequence, and make sustainable story-based vocal choices.

• Drinking straw. A regular soda straw. Any material, though plastic or something soft will allow you more flexibility.
• Please make sure to hydrate the night before and the morning of the workshop. It takes 2 hours for water to process through your system before it meets your folds.
• Please wear comfortable clothing. This isn’t a movement workshop, but you should feel free to move without it restricting your breath.

• Sound-proof room, or ample notice to people within hearing distance.
• Quality mic

Explore the real-world martial traditions that inspired the fighting style of Alexander Dynis from the video game Hellish Quart. Developed from my personal blade practice, Dynis’s style is defined by rhythmic, swinging footwork—a lateral motion that allows him to fluidly flank opponents, displace incoming attacks, and seize the strategic angle of engagement. His movement echoes bladed arts from the Maghreb and the African Diaspora, where circular flow, deceptive rhythm, and adaptive bladework shape the fight. This workshop breaks down those influences and demonstrates how they combine to create a style rooted in flow, misdirection, and angle dominance.

Whether you're a martial artist, historical fencer, movement artist, or game enthusiast this workshop offers a rare opportunity to study the living blade traditions behind one of Hellish Quart’s most iconic characters.

We're often falling over or bumping into things as humans so how do we do that safely? Let's ping off the walls, bounce off the furniture and get to ground! 

Equipment Needs: Clear wall or door frame, a wardrobe that’s sturdy, chairs or tables they can bump into but nothing that can fall off anything and if possible enough space to lie on the floor with room to spare. Anything you don't have, you can try out later by following along with the recording!

This presentation will explore the origins, growth and ultimate decline of the Duel in Europe. We will focus on Vincentio Saviolo’s 16th century dueling code which Jared Kirby presents in A Gentleman’s Guide to Duelling. Once the historical protocols of a duel are understood, the lecture will examine historical accounts of duels to discuss how many actually followed the correct procedures: -If you duel with billiard balls, is that OK? -Can a dog actually challenge a man to a duel? -Did duels happen in the 20th Century?

From scene breakdowns to risk assessments, fight directors may have various documents they use to prepare for their show. This is a discussion based, sit down class for those that want a physical break.

In this class, learners will get to explore arrival and how to check in with one's self, especially when needing to approach tricky work as a performer or leader. In this class we will get to define consent as a group and how to best explore giving a no in situations. The goal is to leave this class with a better working knowledge on how to draw boundaries for ourselves as we go into work.

The Historical Movement Archive (HMA) is an ambitious research and preservation initiative that uses motion capture, volumetric capture, and immersive technologies to safeguard historical and cultural movement traditions—from historical martial arts to dance and other embodied practices. By recreating movement depicted in antiquarian books, manuscripts, and archaeological records in three-dimensional digital form, HMA enables these systems of movement to be preserved, studied, analyzed, and shared globally for the first time.  

In this session, participants will be introduced to HMA’s mission and methodology, including how its research program brings together scholars, teachers, and performers into a collaborative digital studio environment, and how tools such as bio-mechanical analysis and a dedicated 3D viewer support rigorous, scientific approaches to reconstructing historical and cultural movement.  

A highlight of the session will be a live demonstration of the Hope Digital Host Destination (DHD)—HMA’s prototype 3D research and performance gaming environment, built as a digital reconstruction of the Hope Bear Garden playhouse from the historical record. We’ll explore how the DHD functions as a “digital host destination” where researchers and practitioners enter as avatars, meet in a shared virtual space, and exchange high-level movement research in real time using the Hope Bear Garden Digital Portal.  

By the end of the session, attendees will understand what the Historical Movement Archive is trying to accomplish, how the DHD fits into that vision, and how these technologies can transform the way we preserve and engage with the living heritage of movement.

Telling stories of violence is a charged, and sometimes physiologically dangerous craft. It is a statistical fact that in every room we work and in every class that we teach there will be actors who have lived through real life violence (perhaps even specifically the violence we are simulating.) In this lecture class, ideal for teachers and fight directors, we will unpack consent and power, dive into the science of how trauma manifests in the polyvagal nervous system, what that does to an actor in the work, and how to build strategies for mitigating and responding to those triggers, and show how to structure a classroom or rehearsal in ways that empower actors to safely and confidently bring their whole selves to the art. Applying these practices explicitly in stage combat centers actor wellness and increases the range of performance we can achieve.

A lecture on choreographer contracts and negotiation insights from the perspective of someone who has been on both sides of the Fight/Intimacy Director and Producer table. Come deep dive into important considerations of the negotiation and contracting process, including samples of both useful and problematic contracts and links to more resources!

We have all had that wonderful teacher of stage combat, one who helped us get over a block in our work, or the one who gave us an idea that totally changed the game. While we have wonderful teachers with sound pedagogical instincts, very few in our community have studied the basics of teaching as well as the basics of stage combat. This lecture based class will present some foundational ideas in education theory and give examples of applying them to the stage combat classroom.