In depth discussions of internal martial arts, theatricality, and Daoist ritual emptiness. Original martial arts ideas and Daoist education with a sense of humor and intelligence.
New Eastover Workshop, in Eastern Massachusetts, Italy, and France are in the works.
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A great artist has passed. I never studied directly with him but I trained intensely for two years with his student of 30 years, Zhang Xuexin. His movement is in me.
I keep a notebook with me all the time because ideas come and go, often times if you don't catch them they're gone. I was looking through my notes of blog topics for today and a lot of them are kind of negative. I just don't feel like working with that right now. So I'm pulling something out of thin air for your reading pleasure. I'm in the midst of a move. The limbic system of our brains are deeply resistant to change, they desperately try to hold on to stability and predictability. After living out of boxes for a couple of weeks my life is an emotional roller coaster ride. The future is still up in the air but we are going to be staying on a farm with goats, chickens and bees for at least a few weeks. Wish me luck.
I've self identified as an improviser and a spontaneity artist for almost 30 years. It has profoundly framed my understanding of aesthetics, action and perception. So my thought for the day is a very simple one, one that, because of this basic framing of my own experience, is so obvious to me I could easily neglect to say it. That thought is that both fighting and teaching fighting are forms of pure improvisation.
My basic philosophy is that we have lists of social fighting expectations. Everyone has them, 'though they are not the same for everyone. The lists are made up of largely unconscious actions, responses, and ways of being. Here is an example of a partial list:
communicate, "I'm your equal"
bounce on your toes
control the opponents arms
face off, eye to eye
Here is another one:
communicate, "I'm not a threat"
shrink
position your head so that your eyes are looking up
show your personal-space-boundary with your palms facing outward
My job is to point out how these lists work, how they function normally, what triggers them-- and then get the student to stop doing them. Sometimes my methods take the from of 'try this" or "what if you turned the other way here." Sometimes they involve exploring an intrinsic body or space awareness, like "spin around without letting your eyes catch on anything and then try that again," or "now try that on all fours and notice how your dantian naturally responds to gravity." Even when I'm teaching an exact sequence like Bagua single palm change, I'm constantly trying to get the student to "stop trying to control the future." The relationship between ones elbow and ones knee must remain spontaneous --spatially active and responsive-- even when the sequence is a known form.
Lately I've been instigating this game: "You are in a bad position, now improve it with out going directly against me and with out using momentum or retreating. Just change your position. Don't think. Don't think of me as human. Feel the spaces and act on them at the same time. No techniques."
At times I'm giving intense direct physical feed back, slapping, tapping, poking, spinning, scratching, swiping, tripping, creating targets and moving them around. At times I'm intensely verbal, "do this," "now this," "over here" "backwards," "now with him," "now with her," "now with an imaginary ape," "now on the ground." This kind of teaching unhooks people from their resistance to acting spontaneously. The more fun you have improvising, the less you will fear failure, and the more you will love fighting.
A student that has been studying with me for about three months, paid me an unexpected complement the other day. She said, "I've had a lot of movement training, and taken a lot of classes, but nothing quite like this before. What your are doing is Total Immersion."
Just saw an awesome new movie at the San Francisco International Film Festival by Peter Ho-Sun Chan, starring Donnie Yen titled Wuxia. A wuxia is a man or woman of extraordinary martial prowess. "Kungfu Hero" could have worked as a translation in a simpler time, but wuxia are generally capable of transcending conventional morality and their prowess can come from darker sources than just character and hard work. They tend to wander the lands of "rivers and lakes," the edges of society, the "bad lands," the wilds. And they often seem to take up a new name, wear a disguise, or impersonate an official. Sometimes they are loyal, sometimes they are cruel. They are chaos unleashed on civilization, at times tipping it out of balance, at other times putting things right. Their alliances, service, sworn brotherhoods, gangs, and grudges are of supreme consequence, the world teeters on their actions. Wuxia is actually a literary genre. So now that we understand what wuxia is all about I can reveal the plot. No, no, that would spoil everything! All you need to know is that it takes place in 1917 and the lead bad guy has all the powers of one of the founders of the Boxer Rebellion. He is a super qijock, even metal blades can not puncture his qi egg! there is also a crazy smart guy who fights using acupuncture techniques! The film has great costumes, sets, and props. That's important in a visceral movie like this one because you feel yourself inside their clothes, your grip on the handle of their swords, sweat on your brow, and acupuncture needle in your foot!
Warning: The acupuncture points used in this film are not only real, they are officially recognized legal causes of death!*
Seen as historical narrative, the film gives us a good sense of how a weak central government negotiated its position in relationship to gangs of toughs out in the provinces-- and by implication how important martial arts really were.
There are glimmers of religion visible here, obviously in the notions of chaos and order mentioned above, but also by showing the importance of lineage, decisions by family heads, the cult of scholarship, hints of ghostly presence, a seasonal martial display of opera generals, medicinal herbs, and the subtle image of hell on earth as a torture chamber where human flesh is consumed (and happens to be quite tasty, ha, ha, ha).
Total enjoyability aside, the film left me wondering about censorship. It is not horror, that is clearly an illegal genre. It is mostly a violent epic comedy, and as such fits well into the old Shaw Brothers Hong Kong legacy. Perhaps it is a test of Hong Kong's right to make movies the way it used to?
Uggg! IMBD is telling me that they plan to distribute this film in the USA under the title "Dragon." Why not just title it "Lame?" it makes about as much sense.
*note: (the wordpress plug-in Explanation Point Blocker tells me I've gone over my limit!!!)
On April 22, 2012, I gave this talk at East Bay Yoga Shala:
Daoism and the Martial Arts, is there a missing link?
This is my first attempt at podcasting, and this talk is completely improvised, but I think it came out pretty good. Free free to hit the donate button in the side bar and send me $5 so I can buy a beer...
Feel free to ask for references in the comments below if there is anything particularly shocking in there. And also to carry on the discussion, challenge me to a duel, or suggest a topic/direction for the next talk.
Are you okay with this people? My first thought was, "Well, that's the end of tai chi then."
(also see here, here and...you can watch a coregasm video here, and here, and oh what the heck.)
If women are doing core strengthening and boot camps because they are having orgasms during training, it's going to be pretty hard to convince them that weakness is better. I frequently get questions about core strengthening and I simply had no idea what was really behind them. Duh! Farewell innocence. I will never think of boot camps the same way again. As I'm doing my 6 am standing meditation (Yiquan) in the park and over the sounds of chirping birds I hear the characteristic boot camp sounds of panting and grunting ("Push it ladies!") -- I will long for the days of simple vanity.
Of course tai chi-gasms™ happen in every cell of your body, and your mind! Meaning that they happen from your fingers all the way to your toes and even outside your body. Coregasms are merely abdominal. Yawn.
That's why it is so important to find a qualified master. North Star Martial Arts is the first organization in the world to offer a full certification in tai chi-gasms™. There is no substitute for the real thing. We deliver.
I just won an award for this post! I submitted it to a blogging carnival, where you can read other great offerings on the topic of Bullying!
___________________
I have been doing much thinking about teaching and the nature of teaching and the purpose of teaching. My ideas are incomplete but I thought I'd do some sharing anyhow. I got the great pleasure of hanging out with Rory Miller the other day. We took a long walk. It is rare (for me) to be in the presence of someone I can talk about anything with. So unusual. It made me reflect; am I like that? Most of the time people are exerting a enormous amount of effort to hide their true nature. We also spend tons of energy pretending to ourselves that we don't see what is happening socially. What a relief to meet someone who is truly unpretentious.
I got Rory to read Impro by Keith Johnstone, and now he is running around telling people that Martial Arts is to Fighting, as Acting is to Improvising. A significant part of Johnstone's book is about teaching, and we talked a lot about it. How much of teaching is just failure of the teacher to deeply understand the subject? How much of teaching is un-conditioning negative behavior learned from loving parents who care so much they can not see what they have done? How easy it is to be unaware of what behaviors we are reinforcing and what behaviors we are suppressing. When I woke up the next day after talking to Rory it occurred to me that I may love teaching because I lack confidence. I may even intentionally put myself in difficult teaching situations because I get a physiological thrill from the see-saw effect of the fear that I will fail miserably followed immediately by elation when things go well. How would my teaching change if I actually felt confident? or indifferent?
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Anti-bullying is one of the latest fads in education, and it is being used by a lot of martial arts teachers to market their programs. When I think of bullying I think of my experience with Johnstone. Bullying is a social game. It can be taught as a game. The idea that --a person being bullied is not in control-- is an illusion. Talking about this is stupid. You can either play a bullying game and experience it for yourself or you can talk about it for the rest of your life. Such games can raise fascinating questions about whether or not we are in conscious control of our actions. I had a kid claim he absolutely could not stand still, and that I could ask his mother about this for verification. At that moment I was really wishing that a tiger would wander into the dojo and test his thesis for him.
As Rory pointed out, one of the consequences of "zero tolerance for violence" in schools is that now there are bullies who are physically smaller than the people they are bullying. I had verification of this from some students who came to me a few months ago asking about how they could deal with this kid who constantly hits them, usually on the head. He is smaller than all of them and they were claiming powerlessness. Joss Whedon made a film about "zero tolerance" policies. It's called Serenity. In the film, as in real life, such policies have horrifying unintended consequences. No doubt we are training a generation of super-bullies. I responded to my students by having them play insult and complement games. It's pretty simple, you face off and insult your partner (keep it personal, keep about him), he thanks you and insults you back, you thank him and then you complement him, then he complements you back, then back to insults, over and over. The faster the better. At first most students will make weak offers like "your shirt is messy," and they will forget to thank their partner. As they get better at it, the insults are more and more real like, "your bald spot is a crusty white puke." Then we add self-complements and self-insults.
This leads to my 'Rules for Bullies' number one, which is also my rule of self-defense number one: accept all offers. If someone hits you with a baseball bat, keep playing the scene. Never pretend it didn't happen. If you get killed come back as a ghost and haunt that #%$@# right away! Keep the action moving. If you are trying to bully someone stay focuses on it being their fault! That annoying twerp (with "zero tolerance" it could be--a handsome jock) is just taking up space, time and air that rightfully belongs to you! You are the bully, exercise your birth right! Make them pay! If you are being bullied, for God's sake man, accept all offers! Confess to all accusations immediately and admit to all wrong doing, it's even OK to make up bad things you did and confess to them as well. But to play this game you must understand that the space belongs to the bully and you are only there to have fun at their expense. There are two ways to play, if the bully gets closer take up more space, get languid, put your feet up on the cafeteria table, better yet, lay back on the table with your legs spread if necessary reach out in all direction, yawn, drool, as they move away, get smaller. You will control them like an insect with a chip in it's head. The game also works just as well if you shrink and whimper as they get closer and you get bigger as they move away.
Our perception of space is plastic. It is only when we think it is fixed that we get into problems. Bullies are not predators. They are purely social animals. Social animals are constantly trying to maintain and manage their identities, belongings, and status. Non-attachment to those things is social freedom. Knowing this intellectually means nothing. Knowing it kinesthetically is total social freedom. But knowledge of this sort is also expertise in trance. The ability to go in and out of a trance is a skill. But it is also a risk. The traditional Chinese way to think about this is that there are ghosts and demons lurking about all the time, attracted by passion, and fear, and when you go into a trance they start eating your kidneys. Go there too passionately or for too long and you will get stuck in the trance, you may even acquire a ghost body that stays with you...because you are it's food supply.
This is the essence of what I teach: How you live in your body is determined by the rituals you use to inhabit animated space.
Rory had an interesting rule of thumb; it is to the extent that you really care about something that you are likely to make poor decisions about it. That's because our sense of caring is the limbic system of our brain, not the rational part. There are strategies one can use to get around this, like actually taking other people's advice, or externalizing the decision by giving it to another person or using an astrological calculation. The Sunzi has a good story about this: One general sent the opposing general a jar of wine that actually contained his piss. Having tasted the piss, the general got so angry that the next day he made a bad decision on the battle field which exposed his vulnerabilities and that was his final battle.
What is the lesson? if you get a jar of piss sent to you--keep playing the scene! Drink a few glasses and wonder why you aren't getting drunk. Or send a return jar filled with peach schnapps!
Rory talked about his teaching as giving people permission to act on what they already know to be true from their own experience. A potent idea. I believe I'm doing that in the kinesthetic realm too, but I wonder sometimes how deep or far away that experience might be. For example, can people go straight to remembering how they moved before the first time they got frustrated trying to put two tiny Legos together? Can they remember all that wasted effort? Can they return to that effortlessness without the shame of clumsiness or the shame of being too damn cute?
There are two basic ways to deal with bullies. Make it too much trouble for the bully to bother with you, or get a group of friends together and beat the bully up. It sounds simple, but these are important and newanced social skills. However, and this is a big however, a lot of what passes for education is actually bullying. To teach these skills to kids means that they will have a choice. Have no doubt, kids able to make choices for themselves will bring down the education system as we know it.
- Daoism and The Martial Arts: Is there a missing link?
Sunday, April 22nd, at 10:30 AM. At East Bay Hatha Yoga Shala 2050 4th Street, Berkeley, CA.
Here is the flier (pdf) if you can think of a place good to posted it (your refrigerator is ok.)
How could notions of softness,
gentleness, ?uidity and even
weakness have gotten tangled up
with martial arts?
What exactly is the link between
ritual trance, meditation and tai
chi super hero skills?
Were ancient Daoists some kind
of elite ?ghting group?
Or did they just play that role on
the stage?
Could these ideas and practices
have just melted into each other
over centuries?
Does qigong or yogic daoyin
have anything to do with all this
stuff or is that a different road all
together?
This talk will cover the latest
research into these questions
and more.
How could notions of softness, gentleness, fluidity and even weakness have gotten tangled up with martial arts?
What exactly is the link between ritual trance, meditation and tai chi super hero skills?
Were ancient Daoists some kind of elite fighting group?
Or did they just play that role on the stage?
Could these ideas and practices have just melted into each other over centuries?
Does qigong or yogic daoyin have anything to do with all this stuff or is that a different road all together?
This talk will cover the latest research into these questions and more.
_______________________
Also I'm participating in a "Pop-Up" for a new organization calledWe Are = Movement. On April 21st @ 1 PM I'm going to be doing solo practice in a storefront with windows at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco. There are lots of other solo practices to watch over the week and some cool looking evening talks. Check it out!
This mountain retreat is an informal backpacking experience in the Stanislaus Mountains just north of Yosemite. We will practice Zhan zhuang and internal martial arts every morning. Nothing else will be planned! Eat when you want to eat, swim when you want to swim, fight when you want to fight, wander off at will. If there are too many mosquitos we will move our practice to after 10 PM in the moonlight.
Meet at the Crab-tree Trailhead on Monday, July 30th at 12 Noon and we will head-out! Each person is responsible for their own food and gear. Before we leave you will receive a list of basic gear to bring and ideas about how to pack food for 7 days. I will supply topographical maps and experience of the area. Beginning backpackers are welcome! Also, there are many ways to borrow or buy cheap gear - if you need something, talk too me. I will help coordinate car pooling as well.
Cost: 7 days of training - $200
To reserve your spot, send a check to:
Scott P. Phillips
953 Dewing Ave., Lafayette, CA 94549
Feel free to email gongfuguy@gmail.com or call 415.200.8201 to discuss details.
Basic Chinese Internal Martial Arts 5-Day Training
Lafayette, CA
Session 1 - JUNE 11th-15th Session 2 - JUNE 18th-22th
The internal martial arts are famous for the cultivation of qi and effortless power; however, the qi levels and spirit levels can only develop from a physical base. Without a solid base of practice the higher levels are in accessible. This class will focus on physical prowess and high-level body mechanics. We will use spiraling, lengthening, shrinking, and expanding to connect the whole body into a powerful platform for spontaneous freedom.
Zhanzhuang - The practice of standing meditation also called yiquan or wuji. No one ever got good by skipping this step.
Neigong - Internal power stretch and whole-body shrinking and expanding. This is all the soft stuff! It develops the four corners of martial fitness - Unliftable, Unsqueezable, Unmoveable, and Unstoppable.
Jibengong - Basic training for internal martial arts, which includes individual exercises to develop irreversible body art (shenfa), exquisite structure (xing), and refined power (jin). Taiji, xinyi, or bagua focus, depending on your experience.
Lecture-encounters will include a Daoist text studies introduction and history, along with group exploration of the experimental links between theater and meditation. All instruction will be given in the classical one-to-one naturally disheveled style in order to meet and match each person?s unique experience and insights.
Two Person Practices develop spacial awareness and technical spontaneity while systematically testing every part of our physical and emotional bodies. This includes everything to do with resistance, light contact, throws, rough footwork, tui shou, and roshou. How can we discard our social need to dominate or submit, and embody nonaggression without giving up marital prowess?
Schedule Begin in the parks around Lafayette, CA 6 AM Zhan Zhuang 7 AM Neigong 8 AM Jibengong *9 AM Breakfast (Optional: rice porridge made from bone stock with pickled foods) 10 AM Two Person Practices Training 12 PM Lunch - bring your own or eat locally. Take a nap, drink tea... 2 PM Lecture/Encounter 4 PM End
*Breakfast will be based on Traditional Chinese Nutritional Theory.
Sleeping There is camping in the area, hotels, youth hostels, and many other options. We will be walking distance from a BART train stop which means you can stay pretty much anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Cost per session - $350
To reserve your spot send a check made out to: Scott P. Phillips 953 Dewing Ave., Lafayette, CA 94549
Feel free to email gongfuguy@gmail.com or call 415.200.8201 to discuss details.
Honestly, I did not think I would make it through this book, but it kept surprising right to the end. It is well written, well organized, and has copious footnotes. But the subject matter is a form of physical-musical-theater that is only accessible to me through translations of scripts and my imagination. Since my primary interest in the subject is in finding answers to questions about the origins and development of martial arts and possible insights into the theatricality of the arts I practice, I was constantly filtering the author's ideas through that lens. Here is some of what I got:
Just how socially degraded were actors? Very. They were in a permanent caste that made them morally available for sex with either gender. Most actors appear to have been male and judging from the literature, most sex was with men. The book is full of innuendo and subtle slang, men who practice love of "the southern mode," or "the cut sleeve" (a reference to cutting one's own sleeve in order to not wake up a sleeping boyfriend.) Individual actors were role specialists, meaning that at a certain age their stage gender and style of movement was set. It remains an unanswered question whether livelong fidelity to a role was necessary to develop a high standard of skill or because they used those skills in other contexts such as fighting or sexual entertainment? A troop could be bought and owned as could individual actors, and they could be loaned out on a short term or long term basis. One could pay an additional fee to have a role played by a woman. Bonded house servants were higher status than actors, as they could marry out. Bonded servants were sometimes given training in acting. Owning an actor in those days must have been something like owning a large flat screen tv in your home is today.
Despite the strong lines of social degradation, there was a lot of line crossing which takes some time to get one's head around. Theater was everywhere. In the villages there were temple theaters and public performance spaces everywhere. Performances happening every day for a month were common several times a year in all sorts of concurrent locations. It is hard to get a sense of how common theater was or how much amateur theater there was, masked exorcism, or performance rituals, but I get the sense it was happening all the time. They had lots of stages, but all they needed to perform was a large square of red felt, and many types of performance involved the audience.
In the south around Hangzhou and Suzhou the norm was to perform on boats or barges! Readers may recall previous discussions about the origins of Taijiquan in which we posited that the technique developed from people who spent a lot of time on boats. This is a very strong explanation for the origins of Taijiquan's distinctive movement. Why it survived in and around Chen village is another question, but we are moving here from possible explanations to probable ones.
Among the literati, home theater was very common. These were big families and they would invite their friends over for shows. The actors would often double as servants, and most likely end up in peoples laps as the night progressed. The literati were obsessed with theater and theater framed all other social phenomena. The big back drop to the existence of the literati is that way more people were taking and passing the national exams than were getting appointments. To be able and capable of taking the exams and re-taking them to stay current, one had to be dedicated to the written word.
Surrounding literati culture was a constant muddle over authenticity and the theater was the obvious place to work that out. Who was really qualified? And how would you recognized such a person? Who got their position through money or connections? It was a total obsession that broke along certain lines that permeated the theater and real life. An actor could at least play a government official on stage, the vast numbers of 'qualified' literati who never even got an appointment could look on with envy.
Illusion vs. disillusion was the dominant dichotomy. Is this my authentic identity or am I acting? Is this play more ethically or emotionally real than the people I interact with socially or career-wise? You get the idea. These kinds of questions are quite modern, and are an endless source for art and debate. Anyone who has spent an hour looking at martial arts videos on Youtube knows that the dominant dichotomy there is Real vs. Fake. Is this real? Would it work in a street fight? Is it an authentic lineage? etc. etc. etc..ad nauseum. The difference between our modern notions and those of the 17th Century is that those guys were not so arrogant as to think they could actually get to some place called "real." They thought the best they could do was to oscillate between illusion and disillusion. Disillusion in the martial arts is like, "whoa dude, that technique looks so powerful but it like totally failed against a non-compliant opponent." Illusion is like, "l guess I'll have to buy that video of totally awesome street tested combat techniques after all...that'll make me top dog for sure." It's just my opinion, but I believe photos and video have played a huge role in changing our relationship to what is "real," in all realms, but especially in martial arts where even though it is still easy to fake or "throw" a fight, slow motion instant replay of Mixed Martial Artists "grounding and pounding" each other is a potent illusion.
It's fascinating, the debates we are having today about martial arts have a lot of similarities to the debates they were having about theater. Is spontaneity better than precise instruction? Does authentic passion make us better fighters, or better teachers? Does vernacular language have something to teach formalism? Think of this one in terms of the constant tension between rough experience and refined lineage. Is refinement better than vulgarity? And this one I love, is the spectator's ability to see, recognize and appreciate great art the true measure of a life worth living?
If the physical training for martial arts is a super set, or a subset, of training for the theater then naturally we would want to compare martial arts training manuals with theater training manuals. As readers are no doubt aware, there aren't a whole lot of martial arts training texts, or even poetic martial texts, before the 20th Century. (By the way, I would like to see a complete list if anyone has such a thing.) But at least martial training manuals do exist, even if they are mixed up with talisman, chanting, and images of god/heroes from the theater. As for theatrical training manuals, they do not exist at all.
We have all heard reasons why martial arts training was secret, but we are unprepared to explain why theater training would be even more secret. Is it because if you know how to act you can impersonate anyone? Including gods, demons and government officials? A good skill set must have had promising commercial value given adoring literati and the widespread use of "opera" as a part of village ritual calenders, but the complexity of the social contract also makes the commercial value of those skills hard to assess.
As far as martial skills among actors, the book gives us no direct insights. But it is interesting to speculate that if they were debating illusion vs. disillusion as much as they were, was the same debate happening among people of the fist? I believe Douglas Wile has commented on this to the effect that generals didn't want troops with martial arts training because it interfered with infantry skills. These debates could well have been taking place. How often have we though, "I've been practicing these great skills but since I never get in fights, what use are they?" Even in the military, a great fighter could be picked off with a cheap crossbow. Who is going to respect true skill? Where would it be recognised or even criticized if not on the stage? (Susan Naquin has described numerous types of staged fighting as entertainment in her book on pilgrims.) It seems probable that in some places there were regular festivals where people could share, test and display their amateur arts and get recognition for their skills.
Other thoughts:
It is pretty common for a play to start with a martial display or a fight. Even "civil" plays about gender bending love things, like the one translated in the appendix, start with soldiers and troops marching around.
The wine shop was a very popular place to see theater, it seems particularly informal such that on a whim you could hire someone to perform at your table. I've written about the role of martial arts and banquets elsewhere, it's just worth noting that wine shops were a focal point for theater.
She discusses the dichotomy, familiar to most martial artists, between xing and shen. That is form vs. spirit. Interestingly, in the aesthetics of the time, things alike in spirit were considered "internal likenesses," while things alike in form were considered "external likenesses."
She discusses xu (fake/empty) as a key concept in the theater.
There is a category of plays which posits that, if most of our experience is an illusion, then can cultivating a strong relationship to theatrical illusion be a deeper form of authenticity?
How shall we morn falsely acquired merit?
Scott Park Phillips
A place to train and learn about traditional Chinese martial arts, which are a form of religious theater combined with martial skills.
In depth discussions of internal martial arts, theatricality, and Daoist ritual emptiness. Original martial arts ideas and Daoist education with a sense of humor and intelligence.
A great artist has passed. I never studied directly with him but I trained intensely for two years with his student of 30 years, Zhang Xuexin. His movement is in me.
