Mao's Last Dancer

I've been on vacation from the internet.  A much needed rest.  I have much to report over the next few weeks.  Until then check this out.

Student Performance

This show is half of what I've been up to. We toured it at three different sites! Fun! The other half of what I'm up to is a 48 page paper...soon to be available.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZQ_i-alYI

Emptiness Meets Skill

If you listen to the sound at the beginning he explains that he is not moving his body, his actions are empty. A great demonstration of how simplicity is always an option.

Taoist Master Zhuang

Michael Saso has his own Youtube Channel.  Saso is the author of many books on Daoism and Tantric Buddhism.  His early work on Daoist ritual in Taiwan was ground breaking and he remains one of the few people ever to become a Zhengyi Daoshi (Daoist priest).

This video of his teacher and one of his teacher's sons is amazing.  The roots of baguazhang are not totally obvious in this video of pacing the void,  but imagining this ritual done on a national scale and refined over 1700 years, it isn't hard to imagine that baguazhang (the martial art) is just a variation.  In the last part of the series (6 parts) you see the priest alternating between walking the magic square and walking a circle something we also do in baguazhang.

You'll also notice that the shoes do not allow one to press through either the ball of the foot or the heal, creating a walk infused with unexpressed power, shi we call it---potential.  In basic taijiquan for instance, the four powers peng, ji, lu & an, are each executed from either the ball of the foot or the heel.  Eventually emptiness, as ritual action, replaces this type of forceful intention and one paces the void without any agenda.  This weakness, as I've been known to call it, is actually profoundly potent.  Many people over the years (including me) have criticized Aikido for having a "love your enemy, don't hit him" namby pamby approach to martial arts.  But Aikido is correct in describing the potency of emptiness in action as having no intent to harm your enemy.  Does anybody want to argue with me when I say it is quite possible to do harm even when you don't intend to?

Kick-Ass is a fun Movie

I don't know if this is really the kind of movie I'm supposed to review, but I do recommend Kick-Ass to anyone who likes teen comedy with lots of fighting.  For what it is, it is actually a great movie.  Lots of surprises and twists.  If you are one of those people who has trouble seeing film violence as fantasy, you won't like it.  But if you think Kill Bill was high art, you will!

Teaching, Guilt, But the Shows Must Go On

My regular readers deserve some sort of explanation about why I haven't been blogging much. I do hope to get back to regular posts soon.

First of all I'm busy teaching.  Lots of kids classes.  My advanced students are doing a mini-tour of schools and centers with a DeYoung Museum sponsored show for the public on Thursday May 13th at the Band Shell in Golden Gate Park around 1 PM.  It looks like we are head-lining because my kids put on such a good show last year.  Or maybe it was just an accident.  Anyway it should be fun.  Part of our show is a group fight scene and... we have 10 year olds with swords.

I'm also presenting a paper and teaching a workshop at the Daoism Conference in LA, June 4th... at the moment my paper is titled: Theater, Exorcism, Ritual and the Martial Arts.

Also I've been doing nothing but reading and sleeping on Saturdays for the last two months.  At 40 I realized that guilt was a primary motivator for me.  As a self-employed enthusiast, I always have something I feel guilty about not having started or finished yet.  So I decided to invert that.  I committed to doing absolutely no work on Saturdays.  Now I feel guilty if I try to do even a little work on my day of rest.  It's like, my job to lay on the couch.

I'm still looking for a space to teach evening classes and I'm looking to create my own after-school program for next school year.

I started taking a Physical Theater class.  I haven't been in a class like this for maybe 20 years, but I thought I should test my ideas about the relationship between martial arts and theater training in a more immediate way.  The class is called The Flying Actor. At the first lesson we learned two stances which were used together.  The names for those two stances in martial arts are Bow stance and Horse stance.  The way they do Bow stance is with the front heal up and the arms are in what I would consider a basic shuai jiao or "throwing" position.  The horse stance has a high and a low version.  One of the things we did a lot was to put a hood over our heads.  The hood makes it hard to see but not impossible.  I'm used to moving with my eyes open (of course) and also with my eyes closed, but moving with disrupted vision messed me up a bit.  Good exercise.  We also worked on some basic mime and I realized that I've trained myself not to look at anything close up.  My fighter mind doesn't want to narrow my focus to "show" the imaginary object.  But I also realized that one of the beginning shaolin instructions is to slowly look into the distance and then draw your vision back to yourself before beginning.  It never occurred to me to do it as a mime exercise before, but it fits.

Rory Miller is doing a workshop called Responses to Ambushes and Breaking the Freeze, on May 9th, I'm attending with a few of my students.  I will not be wearing my pajamas.  Check it out.

Oh, and I actually wrote a really long blog post which I might still put up, but I don't know how to finish it.  Maybe just a summary is enough:  Traditional exercise routines were not for weight loss because in the old days people didn't have Trader Joe's or even McDonald's.  Anything claiming to be traditional would have been designed to work without consuming very much food, duh.  If anything, a traditional form of exercise would have helped you put on a little extra fat for leaner times. (Wrestling, by the way, is an extreme example.)

And lastly, I've had some stimulating time with George Xu lately and my practice has been really empty, in a good way.

Taoism in the New York Times

The New York Times had an article about a Daoist art show in Paris today:  A Dazziling look at the World of Taoism.

It has got to rank up there as one of the weirdest articles on Daoism I've ever read.  Admittedly it is about an art show that I haven't seen, so perhaps the article is just reflecting a very weird show.  Still I can't tell if the writer is confused, or sarcastic, or perhaps has a Dadaist editor.  Maybe you can?

New Jet Li Movie

At least the movie had some cool swords!

The new movie Warlords staring Jet Li comes out this Friday and I would have had to see it even if I hadn't been given a free preview ticket because it is a historical epic film dealing with the Taiping Rebellion! This film is really dark and normally I love darkness, but in this film I just couldn't see the point.

I just happen to have been re-reading Jonathan D. Spence's classic God's Chinese Son, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.  There is so much truly great theatrical material in the actual history of the Taiping Rebellion that is truly inexcusable for a contemporary film to bore us by following the bond between three men of prowess--two bandit leaders and a Qing Dynasty general named Pang (Jet Li).  There are a couple of OK fight scenes but we've come to expect so much more, stay home and re-watch Once Upon A Time in China if you want action.

Ching Shih 1836, Female Pirate Leader

I rarely get on my high horse and defend women, probably because none of the women I know actually need defending, but as I walked out of the film with my friend, who happens to be a female martial artist, we turned to each other and the first thing both of us said was, "What was that woman doing in the movie?"  You see, the film makers wrote one of those romantic subplots into the story.  It was totally irrelevant and uninteresting.  You're probably thinking, yeah, whatever, but consider this:  During the period of the Taiping Rebellion there were many well known female bandit and pirate leaders. That's great theatrical material that was completely neglected, no?  These were powerful leaders, some of whom actually went back and forth between being pirates and being bandits--from horseback to sailing-- These were women with skills! Damn it, I want to see that movie! Not some drivel about men who fought for 5 years without taking a bath.  Hello.

But there is more:  During the Taiping Rebellion, copies of the Bible in Chinese were widely distributed.  At one point there are so many people going into trance and becoming possessed by Jesus, Mary, Moses, God, God's wife and other characters from the Bible, that the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion have to go around from village to village authenticating Prophets--you know--is that really Jesus talking, or is it the devil pretending to be Jesus?


And this was a huge war that lasted for more than 15 years, with millions of combatants.  The Taiping population was fanatical.  They separated men and women into different encampments during the whole rebellion.  It's possible that hey fielded millions of female troops for battle.

Would it be too much to ask that they make a better movie next time?

Paulie Zink Workshop in Marin

Here is the info on a Paulie Zink workshop April 17th and 18th in Marin County, California.  This is a bit difficult to write about because he is calling it Yin-Flow Yoga instead of calling it by it's actual name Daoyin.  It's a weird problem, he wants to be able to teach his material and it nearly fits within the yoga class context, but if you read the text of the link you won't understand why this guy's stuff is so special.  And because of that participant's expectations are going to be for yoga not Daoyin.

For those of you not familiar with Paulie Zink, he is the preeminent practitioner of Monkey Kungfu, he dominated the tournaments and exhibitions in the 1980's and I've yet to see a better performer of Monkey Kungfu.  There are better acrobats out there and there are better contortionists, and there are possibly people who act a little more like monkeys than he does--but there is no one else I've seen who puts it all together the way he does.  It's too bad he never had a whole troop to perform with.  He does have a disciple now, so I'm hopeful that his lineage will get passed down.

He credits his ability to years of train in the Daoyin system which he learned along with the Monkey Kungfu.  This system is a combination of meditation techniques, some of them very old and shamanic like spending 4 hours balancing on only your knees and elbows staring at a flame, along with balancing, stretching, folding, rolling, exploding, pounding and scrapping.  It is made up of animal imitation.  Each animal has a whole series of meditations, postures, and forms of locomotion.  It is the forms of locomotion that really sets it apart from a yoga class, but around half of the postures are quite similar to yoga postures.  The difference is, his frog eats flies and hops, his bunny wiggles it's tail, and his downward-dog, scampers around the room and tries to lick people.

I think of Daoyin primarily at a hermit practice done in conjunction with long periods of meditation.  It is a capacity increasing tradition and is likely one of the roots of Chinese medicine.  In his lineage it seems to have merged with a circus tradition.  How did this happen?  The answer is pretty simple but not widely understood, in fact I don't think Paulie Zink agrees with me on it.  But any way here it is:

Paulie Zink

The most common and widespread form of religious experience in China was public Physical Ritual Theater (often called opera in English).  There were quasi elite performing families which were part of a designated caste.  These families were hated outsiders.  It seems likely that Zink's teacher was from one of these families and taught a single outsider (an American) because he wanted to free the art from the tradition.  In the South of China, where his tradition comes from, Daoist priests performed public rituals which included theater and theatrical components.  So it's not hard to imaging that Daoists were working with performing troops and may have even apprenticed there sons and daughters to each other occasionally.

Anyway, if you've got the time, check out the workshop!

Disco Tai Chi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvKPIvDjpsg
hat tip: dojorat