I spent most of last weekend and Monday marking reports, and on Tuesday the exams started… Since then, I’ve done practically nothing except grade those…. and finally finished about half an hour ago.

With all that happening, I haven’t made it to yiquan classes for a while; I had hoped to get there, but it just didn’t work. During the pause on Monday evening, though, I made it to an applications class at Small Steps Neijia for the first time.

We worked on some tang ni bu stepping and bai bu/kou bu, and then some drills; these were xingyi rather than bagua (Liu Lao Shi’s lineage is xingyi-bagua, mixing the two together). It was really interesting; I’ve trained in the basic xingyi forms briefly, but I’ve never done any tui shou. It was interesting to see the drilling movements of the forearm in xingyi, and compare to its yiquan equivalent.

A large part of that class was then given over to freeform tui shou, which was extremely interesting. First of all, I partnered up with Liu Lao Shi himself; I don’t doubt that he was curious to see what I’d got, and I think I made a fairly good showing. My posture and energy flow were obviously off, though, as my right knee hurt afterwards, and is still sore.

There was only one other student there, a western guy who has no real background in martial arts other than a bit of taiji. We partnered up in the second half of the class, and I was amazed to discover that I was able to completely control him, even as he tried hard to push me around. I guess I’ve become used to training at the Zhong Yi Yiquan Wuguan with fairly experienced people, and forgotten what it’s like to work with ‘civilians’…

The very final part of the class was free-form pad work; each of us took a turn, with the other two holding pads and randomly presenting them to be attacked. Not at that point being tied to practising any particular move, it was interesting to see what came up. I found myself using several different yiquan moves but also launching into taiji’s Golden Cockerel at one point, plus bagua’s single palm change, as well as some ballistic punching that almost certainly came from watching systema material….

I also found that in terms of mindset I quickly fell into a fairly brutal “take him down NOW” mindset that I associate with my time training with Zhou Yue Wen in Singapore.

Hmmmm.

After I left the class, I thought back to when I first arrived in Singapore in 2002; the days when the martial application of taiji was only an unconfirmed legend for me, and I’d never seen bagua or xingyi…… Jeez…. I really have come a long way….

Anyhow: that session of just letting rip was rather a high point. And tomorrow…. I’m outta here, flying back to Wales for a couple of weeks. I will have my MacBook, but I don’t honestly expect to be posting much. So: see you all again in August….

The east side of the park is where the crowds are; loads of elderly Beijingers practicing ballroom dancing, Beijing Opera, that weird taiji badminton, kicking feathered weights and so on and so on… There was a new one I hadn’t seen before, of tossing large rubber quoits at one another, and trying to get your head through the centre so that you build up a set of them around your neck like some strange African tribe…. Past all these, and the tourists (both Chinese and foreign), past the vendors of chilled water bottles (yi kuai wu! yi kuai wu! Harlo! Two yuan!) Hehehehe, past the surreal flying saucers of the temple itself, and over the the quieter west side – more open and forest-like. Here, every grove seemed to have its own group of martial artists… One group, near where we were headed, were practising xingyi and bagua; young, heavily muscled, standing motionless in santi, or gliding in circles….

Then I joined Liu Lao Shi, Dalida, and a group of others, who had been there for a long time before I arrived! I was set to working on some of the qigong postures, including a long stretch of zhan zhuang. By the end of all this, my shoulders were really aching! After that, a session of the bagua ‘tea cups’ exercise, which I haven’t done in a long, long time! It was fun, though. All too soon, it seemed, the session was over, and we all went our separate ways.

One of the other students, the Canadian I mentioned, knows something about systema, and we’ve chatted about it before. We agreed yesterday to catch up some time to try training together; I think we could work on some of the exercises from Scott Sonnon’s Softwork DVD….

I went pretty much straight on to my afternoon yiquan class, pausing only for a plate of baozi. Mmmmmm, there’s a branch of the Qing Feng Steamed Baozi chain just around the corner from Yao Lao Shi’s school, and I often eat there on my way to class.

There were four of us there; two foreign, two Chinese. It was a good session, pretty strenuous towards the end. I managed to get in a tui shou session with all three of the other guys, and was feeling pretty strained afterwards; one of them is a lot taller than me, so I had to work pretty hard. Luckily for me, he has a habit of locking himself into a position and then pushing, so he’s pretty much unshiftable if you push against him – but with a swift change of angle, he can’t defend himself. He’s going to be tough to beat once he figures that out…

Then, on to Zhongshan Park. I worked on the ZMQ-37 as usual, giving it a few rounds. Next, the wuji long xing bagua form of Master Zhou – which I haven’t done for a good long while, and needs a bit of refreshing. That’s got a move very similar to one in the ROSS systema ‘wave’ DVD, of stretching out the arms and sending a wave rolling from hand to hand; something got a bit crunchy in my left shoulder when I tried that….

After that, a bit of xuan xuan taiji dao. Mentioning that, I should note that on my way to the park, I’d noticed that my bike was shaking unusually when I braked, so I stopped at the Drum Tower to get it fixed by the bike repair man there. It turned out that the rim of the front wheel was a bit buckled, so that needed changing. While he was building the new wheel, one of his friends noticed the sword bag slung over my back and wanted to know what was in it, so I told him it was a taiji dao. Oh, he said, a taiji jian. No, a taiji dao. Is it long? he asked. Yes. Ahhh, it’s a bagua dao. Sigh. I got it out of the bag to show him. Hahaha, it’s a Japanese sword, not a Chinese sword, he told me. Sigh. I gave up.

In the bag, I also had my shashkas, of course, and I ended my training session in the park with a spell using those.That, and trying a few simple Cossack dance moves…. I’m getting faster and more accurate with one, and a bit more coordinated with two. I don’t think I’m being too forward if I say that I can already do a lot of what this guy is doing (not as well; not as smoothly; but getting there, bit by bit); what I can’t, I should be able to do soon….

My left wrist is going to take a while to train up to be as strong and flexible as it needs to be, though, and my shoulders definitely felt the strain. The left, in particular, is still too tight; it’s difficult to let the sword in my left hand swing naturally. Hehehehe, and one day I must get someone to take a picture of me doing that while a platoon of PLA soldiers marches past, staring at me in curiosity whilst keeping perfect step….

Oh yes, and I mentioned recently that I was still working on finding the correct way to grip the shashkas. Well, since I bought my new MacBook I’ve switched my default browser from Firefox to Chrome, and discovered with great pleasure that it’s got an auto-translate feature by default – which has seamlessly made a whole lot of YouTube comprehensible… Thus, I found myself looking at this, which kind of answered my immediate questions:

So, sorry, I’m in a bearish mood still. (I never believed in “power animals”, even in the days when I knew lots of neo-pagans. I’m coming to suspect that if I have one, it’s a bear…..)

So, let’s talk a bit about what I’ve been up to.

Others are thinking along the same lines. Dave Pollard wrote about an article on Sharon Astyk’s site, which I liked very much. I recommend reading the original article, but Dave’s summary covers all the key points:

[Y]ou should move if:

Your mortgage is way more than the value of your house (especially since house values are likely to go lower)
You have young children or are elderly, and the people you’re closest to live far away
You have children you want to spend time with, or parents who need your care, living far away
You live in an extreme climate and are not adaptable to living without inexpensive heat, air conditioning, water, and imported food
You live in a community with people with mostly lousy (by your standards) values
You don’t think your children have a future where you live
You are planning on moving anyway (sooner is probably better than later)
You aren’t going to be happy or viable where you are if everything based on oil (transport, bought food, plastics, clothing, heat) gets much more expensive, or if your ‘commuter job’ disappears and you have to take (cheaper) employment locally
You live in an exurban area with no viable public transit, no locally produced food, and few close neighbours
You are not truly ‘native’ to where you live — never really fit in, called it home — and someplace else has always beckoned.

Now, I love living in Beijing; I love my work here, and there are very good people who share my values and worldview. Recently, I’ve been practising a lot in Zhongshan Park, and as I cycle beneath the walls of the Forbidden City with the morning sunlight and clear air making the red paint glow, or leaving the park at dusk with the air above me full of swallows flitting about and chittering as they return to their nests under the eaves of the watchtowers, or chasing insects amongst the willows that line the moat – well, I have to pinch myself to remind myself that yes, it is real, and yes, I am living in this amazing, fantastic city.

But I know that it won’t, it can’t, last forever. So, maybe it makes sense to think about how and when it ends – and a number of the points on Sharon’s list were already making me a little uneasy. I also got set thinking by a recent article on Afghanistan in the 1950s – a place of engineering success, rock and roll, and liberal values. I wonder if the people in those pictures ever suspected that within their lifetime their world would revert to being “a broken 13th century country“. Kyrgystan used to be a pretty well-developed element of the USSR; who, then, would have foreseen the ethnic cleansing and savagery that’s in the headlines this morning?

A lot of people are talking these days about beginning to build your tribe – or, as military theorist John Robb calls it, a “resilient community”. I’m not sure that I see that happening for me anywhere but Wales…

So, what to do? There are perhaps two options.

One is to seek to retreat from the world and let it go on its way without me. That’s the route of the hermit or the monastery. I still want to write about people who’ve taken that way, in the much-postponed next post in the “What’s it all about?” sequence of entries here. That did seem a strong option for me at one point, to be honest. I’m very drawn to Plum Village, for example… Still, starting from when I began dating the Siberian, I’ve been drawn back into the world of attachment….

The other route is to get involved in building a resilient community. The question is, what can I (or you, reader) contribute?

It’s a question that is provoking a new movement in my martial arts interests – and leading me along the Tea Road…. In other words, it’s why I’ve been posting a lot about shashkas and systema recently!

I’ve been reviewing some of the DVDs of systema that were given to me, and comparing them to the “Systema Spetsnaz” DVD on “Internal Wave Energy” that I recently purchased. I also bought Scott Sonnon’s “Softwork“; I gather that this isn’t what he teaches these days, being from an earlier period in his trajectory, but it brings together what he learned from ROSS and other Russian systems.

To be honest, I really don’t see any huge differences between the practices of the different schools. I really like the philosophy that they all seem to share, and which is outlined in an article that I’ve previously linked to:

The doctrine of Russian Martial Art is based on the concepts of non-violence, cooperation, non-resistance and conformity. The Russian Martial Art master absorbs blows effortlessly, contorts the body to accommodate the threat and maintains contact until the assailant is rendered immobile.

… which fits rather nicely with something I’ve also been seeking in my martial arts studies (see my post ‘The manner of victory is important‘).

So far so good, but if I can get this with the Chinese martial arts, why move towards systema? This is where community comes into the picture…. With the Chinese martial arts, I’m getting great results in health, mental calmness, and combative ability; yiquan in particular, as I’ve mentioned here many times, has been particularly beneficial for me. The thing is, even if I reach the level of being able to teach in one or more of these, I’m not sure how they help to build a community -especially back in the UK where they’re not exactly mainstream; in a community adapting to resource constraints, I rather suspect that they would be seen at best as “nice, but by no means necessary”.

The Russian martial arts, on the other hand, have elements that may be a bit more marketable. In particular, I’m thinking of its connection with Cossack dance and choral singing (hey, I am Welsh, after all!). These are elements that can be used to build a community – dance and singing could attract people of all ages when a lot of what has become popular entertainment turns out to be unsustainable, and people start working in larger groups again…. It is suitable for both genders and all ages… and inside the song and dance are health techniques and systema fighting methods… Add to that the connections with the theatre from Stanislavsky, Chekhov and so on, and you have a system that’s highly appropriate to community-building….

As an example, I’ve been following the “Siberian Cossack Group LAD” for some time; although there are some elements that make me wary – and I know there has been a falling out with Mikhail Ryabko, though I have no idea what it’s all about – they are doing a lot of interesting work in combining the elements I’ve been talking about, and taking these into schools, youth groups, and so on – take a look at their videos on YouTube. (And, as a point of interest, in a recent Yiquan class, we had a visitor from Hong Kong who trains systema there, and who has friends who’ve attended the seminar in Kuala Lumpur I wrote about before. We had a very interesting chat!).

Don’t take this to mean that I’m giving up on the Chinese styles – quite the contrary! I’m still really enjoying the yiquan, though I think this is something for me to work on in my original path of “martial arts and meditation” as opposed to ‘finding a role in a community’. I’ve also been training again in bagua, though for various reasons I’ve kept quiet about that; I’ll be writing about it soon, though.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about all this….

Joking aside: wow. Talk about fitness!

Updated:
According to one of the comments on YouTube, this guy is called Alexander Medvedev. I Googled the name out of curiosity, and it turns out he’s one of Scott Sonnon’s instructors. Hm, interesting.

I’ve just ordered a couple of Scott Sonnon’s DVDs, as it happens, and I’m waiting for them to arrive. I’ve also been reading up on ROSS, and trying to get my head around the differences between that and the various flavours of Systema if indeed there are any differences beyond internal politics….

The first is just awesome. The second, well, nothing you won’t have seen before, but I like the music. The third might get bagua people thinking…

And, by the way, happy birthday Carlos!

I thought it was interesting because it reminded me of something mentioned on the Martial Development blog a while back: “Legends say that Taijiquan founder Zhang Sanfeng resembled a sloppy, dim-witted turtle“. Watch the clip and you’ll see an example….

Speaking of systema, I find myself wondering about the upcoming summer holiday…. I want to do another, more intensive tui na course here in Beijing, and also go back to Wales for a while. I may have time to go overland, on the Trans-Siberian… Don’t know if I can afford it, though…. Still, if I were to do that, ten lessons at Mikhail Ryabko’s school would cost 270 Euros… approximately 2.4K renminbi… That’s over the course of a week. A very reasonable price but hmmm, expensive place, Moscow. Probably won’t happen. Worth thinking about, though….

One of these was learning that ‘Russia’ and ‘The System’ will have meaning, for many, many people – but they will think of Konstantin Stanivlasky and his ‘Systema‘, not of Ryabko or Kadochnikov.

I’d heard of Stanislavsky, but only in terms of Method acting; I’m intrigued to discover that this is regarded as a distortion of his ‘system’. Stanislavski’s system means ‘an actor being “in the moment” but always staying one step away from complete belief‘. Stanislavski developed a method of physical action:

Training was highly physical and demanding, and Stanislavski’s respect for physical action brought his system to a point of apotheosis, a way of reaching emotional truth and psychological realism while maintaining a grip on control of the physical. Further: freeing oneself up for performing anything, be it Modern theater or Greek.

Late in his life Stanislavski put much faith in an approach he called the Method of Physical Action. (The use of the word Method, again, causes confusion with Strasberg’s Method.) This approach, Stanislavski surmised, finally dealt completely with the instrument of the actor and with a universality of performance.

The Method of Physical Action (hereafter, MPA) is complex. It requires an understanding of the significance of physical action, and in the performance of physical action. The idea behind the MPA is fairly simple, but its implications are profound. It is based on the idea that the only thing an actor will ever have control of in his life is “his body.” There is never a direct line to emotions in performance, only to the body. Emotions may be remembered and brought up via emotional memory, but Stanislavski generally considered this a rehearsal tool or technique of research, at best. There is, in the end, only the body.

Does this sound familiar?

One of Stanislavsky’s pupils was Mikhail Chekhov, who developed and extended Stanislavsky’s system:

In the late 1920s, Chekhov emigrated to the Germany and set up his own studio, teaching a physical and imagination-based system of actor training. He developed the use of the “Psychological Gesture,” a concept derived from the Symbolist theories of Bely. In this technique, the actor physicalizes a character’s need or internal dynamic in the form of an external gesture. Subsequently, the outward gesture is suppressed and incorporated internally, allowing the physical memory to inform the performance on an unconscious level.
[...]
[M]uch of what Chekhov explored addressed the question of how to access the unconscious creative self through indirect non-analytical means. Chekhov taught a range of movement dynamics such as molding, floating, flying, and radiating that actors use to find the physical core of a character. His techniques, though seemingly external, were meant to lead the actor to a rich internal life.

I first started sensing that there was a natural overlap between martial arts, meditation and acting back in 2006, and gradually I’ve become more convinced of that. It turns out, of course, that I’m far from the first to think that!

That brings me to some of the books that I bought on my last trip to Singapore. Phillip B. Zarrilli in Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski discusses his use of Kalarippayattu and taijiquan in training actors in mind-body unity (though he consistently mis-spells it taiqiquan, which gets really annoying after a while!).

David Zinder, in Body Voice Imagination: ImageWork Training and the Chekhov Technique also takes a deep look at the integration of body, voice, and imagination, including lots of exercises for improvisation.

I find it really interesting that all these ideas and techniques were emerging from Russia in the run-up to the revolutionary period.

Another book I bought – more in hope than anticipation of actually using it – was Jumping into Plyometrics. Plyometrics, a method of rapidly improving muscle and nervous-system performance is, it turns out, also a Russian innovation.

Whether any or all of this influenced the development of Systema or Sambo I can’t know; I just find it all very interesting. Plus, as someone I know said on Twitter, “US strategy too reliant on strength, firepower. What to do when you lose them? An individual’s mind is most powerful weapon“, and there does seem to have been this philosophy in the Soviet system to develop human performance rather than equipment systems (though no-one who has read Arkady Babchenko’s book or articles would say that the whole Russian army is efficient…..)

Just part of an ongoing thought process…..

I think of this one as A Dream of the Red Junks. I linked recently to a post of John Robb’s, in which he advocates the development of your own tribe; a train of thought that he followed up here and here. I see this being an important train of thought since, by the time I’m 70 or so, I expect that the world to be very different indeed from what we know now, and support networks will be essential. That being the case, and looking at the skill sets that I either possess or am trying to acquire, the Red Junks look like a reasonable role model – people will always need entertainment…

So, that brings us to “The World’s Most Talented Man”, found via the Emptyflower forums:

What an entertainer!

Here’s a video of that Systema seminar in Kuala Lumpur that I mentioned in my last post:

Systema instructors all seem to understand the value of showmanship…

For fun, here’s a bit of parkour in Beijing:

And to get you thinking… How is it that all these urbanites get fed?

Oh, and by the way, rising temperatures have pushed major Antarctic glaciers past their tipping point, which is not good if you live in a low-lying coastal area… This particular source isn’t one that I would regard as academically reputable but this post does tie together a number of issues that have flashed up on my radar over the past few months: Will 2010 Be The Year The World Runs Out Of Food? “Don’t say you didn’t see it coming“.

It’s from a Systema school in Omsk which, as it happens, is where the Siberian comes from. The school has a website and a Facebook page, but only in Russian; I can read the Cyrillic alphabet, but I don’t speak Russian beyond a few words remembered from my schooldays, so it’s not much use to me. Still, now that I know I’m staying in Beijing, I have been meaning to take the Trans-Siberian railway back to the UK at some point, and Omsk is on the way (and cheaper than Moscow, I suspect!), so if I wanted to get some training in Systema… hmmmm…. watching that clip, I’m intrigued again by the way that ‘Systema’ ie Cossack fighting skills, are intimately bound up with dancing – which teaches relaxation, rhythm, timing, spacial awareness, and lots of other martial arts goodness…

Anyhow, coincidentally, I had a reader request via email today for more news about the Siberian! I’m happy to oblige, and I’ll have to tell her that she’s developing a fan club She’s happy in her new job, working for a very large and important Chinese company in central China, and is about to leave for a week or so to Kazakhstan, on business. However, I think i may need to clarify that the Siberian and S. are different people; I have a feeling there might be some confusion there…. The Siberian is an ex-girlfriend, and still a good friend (I’m lucky, and am still good friends with most of my exes). S. is the most beautiful and accomplished woman I’ve ever met; she’s younger than me but has achieved more than most people (including me) manage in several lifetimes. She’s my good friend and unattainable muse…. (sigh…)…..

So, ahem, moving on to swords: I found that shashkas are being made by Windlass – an Indian firm, suppliers to Her Britannic Majesty’s Armed Forces, not to mention the US Marine Corps, among others… Their shashka looks rather nice, and I am extremely tempted to buy a couple…. They also sell Hungarian sabres, which seem to be the same as a szabla… Plus, as a fan of Serenity, I’m intrigued to see the Operative’s sword….

Tying this up, it seems that Systema RRB, the Omsk-based school, have an offshoot branch in Malaysia, according to this article… Some of my readers from Singapore may be interested in popping up to KL to check it out and, if so, I would love to hear your feedback!

For the benefit of those visitors, my understanding is that the Asgarda movement is a spin-off of a Ukrainian cultural movement that’s trying to re-discover/re-invent an old Cossack form of fighting dance, which they call “Бойовий Гопак” (“Гопак” being the purely dance version). This gives ample room for flame wars, since Cossacks occupied many parts of the old Tsarist empire, including Ukraine, Russia, and various Central Asian countries, many of which are now tying to exclusively claim them as part of their own national heritage. Furthermore, many Cossacks also lived in the Ottoman Empire, and served Istanbul, not St. Petersburg. Furthermore, as far as I can see, there was a large divide between the members of the Cossack hosts, and the ordinary Slavs living in Russia/the Ukraine/etc. In modern-day Russia, the hosts have received a lot of recognition and autonomy, and are genuine continuations of the historic Cossack culture. I have absolutely no idea what the situation is in Ukraine.

I became aware of the Cossack “fight-dance” through an interest in the Russian martial art of Systema, the Ryabko branch of which traces its roots back to the Cossacks. I also have an interest since my Siberian ex-girlfriend is a Tatar Muslim, whose ancestors would have been on the other side, perhaps…

This is demonstrated by Russian Cossacks** in this clip:

The Asgarda movement, as I said, seem to be a part of a Ukrainian movement that’s trying to develop their own version of this:

As you can see, this has both men and women training. There was another clip that clearly showed Katerina Tarnouska, Asgarda’s founder, training alongside men, but it’s been taken down now. Anyhow, the whole “women seek complete autonomy from men” angle clearly seems like something tongue-in-cheek, said to wind up a visiting journalist. One anonymous commenter (comment #42) on the Boing Boing article says:

Oh man, this is all hilarious.

Let me tell you what it is all about. Asgarda was (I am not sure if it still is functioning) just a martial arts school based on the Ukrainian own style, Hopak. Only adapted for girls. These pictures were taken by some French photographer, who was traveling around Ukraine and are just for photo session sake.

I happen to know few girls, who were studying in that martial arts school, including the one on photo here. When I told them about all that hype around Asgarda, they laughed so hard, that I thought, that I will lose them

The bottom line is do not believe everything you read. You’ll be surprised how many foolish things they try to put into your head/

…which seems to have the ring of truth to it to me!

* NB I have no connection with any of these people at all; I just know what I’ve read online, just like you.

** These guys are members of the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces. Spike TV ran a statistical analysis*** of Spetsnaz vs US Green Berets, and concluded that the Spetsnaz would win. Watch the clip here.

*** They also ran one on “Shaolin Monk vs Maori warrior“, which may interest regular readers, since the monk uses “emei ci” against the maori…