The video and the book are finally here!  This is so exciting!  And the positive reviews are so positive I might explode.  Where are all the haters?  Will it be rainbows and unicorns from here on out?  Click to see everything!

A Free Public Lecture-Slideshow in Boulder

Hosted by:  

WEST GATE KUNG FU SCHOOL

3005 Sterling Circle, Suite 150, Boulder, CO 

Friday, June 24th 6pm-9pm

"The Cultural History of Baguazhang, Dance of an Angry Baby God."

Here is my travel schedule:

Berlin from July 6th-13th.

London from July 14th-25th

Cardiff, Wales from July 19-21st (check out the conference)

San Francisco from August 18th-29th (open "adults" and scroll down x3)

Chicago from Sept 15-20th (Daoyin Seminar)

A picture is worth a thousand words!  The first image is from the 1920s. The one below it is from a tour of Germany around 1900 I think.   What have I been saying?  Asian martial arts have been presented and conceptualized as performance from the beginning.  

Two and a half years ago I wrote about Snake Daoyin and its likely connections to Monkey Kung Fu.  Check it out. I'm reposting this amazing video below of a female Snake Master.

Now compare that to this new video, also from Vietnam, of Snake Kung Fu.

I'm been thinking about a powerful idea; marketing has become storytelling with images.  When I started to think about explicitly telling stories with images using webpages and videos I realized that storytelling is at the very heart of what I do.  

This brings to mind a conversation I had with Rory Miller

I'm putting the finishing touches on the sound for my video "Cracking the Code: Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater."  And I'm headed to Portland to give a talk on the History of Baguazhang, to teach Dance as Self-Defense, and to teach Unlocking Internal Martial Arts.  So here are some interesting videos, the first one I call Heavy Metal Chinese Opera.  (If you have adblock, it takes 40 seconds to open, and it doesn't want to embed so click here.)

And this one is the latest attempt at Shaolin Monks crossing the line into pure dance.  Pretty good!  But put on some different music, this is the "Let if Go" of martial arts performances.  (This one won't embed either, click here).  

...We really do not know the ultimate causes of things, much less the ultimate causes of our own behavior. We do, as a habit of mind, tend to ascribe agency. And, of course, we can use rational processes like deductive or inductive reasoning to walk back, or walk around, discrete causation. Within the boundaries of a closed system of logic, these processes can become praxis.  That is, they become a "way of seeing, doing and testing," like engineering, or ballet. The dominant versions of this are

More and more often I see people making the connections between expressive arts (like theater and dance) and martial arts.  That's great!  But I still hear the argument that stage combat is not real because it makes no effort to be real.

There are two mistakes here.  The first is that violence takes a lot of effort.  By far the most difficult thing is

I am delighted with Dave Tilley's website/blog Shift Movement Science .  It is exciting to be learning from people who are a lot younger than I am.  He was a competitive gymnast, and he teaches gymnastics to children at beginning and advanced levels.  

Dave has detailed explanations with videos, photos, and academic references.  He isn't using this format to teach tricks or gymnastics skills.  What he does is pick a problem, and show you how to fix it.