I just got back to Boulder from Chicago and I’m headed for Utah for the weekend. Chicago was a blast. While I was gone, Google sent bots to re-read my blog and upgraded its status. Now if you google “What is the Kua” my answer is featured at the top of the search. Try it!
Here are some quick thoughts for the road:
The greatest damage done to the transmission of traditional Chinese martial arts is the idea that the mystical and magical are not real and have noting to do with traditional martial arts. This is a great tragedy, not only because martial artists were murdered over it, but because the world is poorer for it.
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Why don’t we make up a martial art based on a Euro-American God, like Thor? The answer is that we don’t know how they moved because our gods are not connected to the theater the way Chinese gods were. Now of course we can make up movement based on sports. But I don’t think that would be very interesting. They made up a bunch of martial arts for the Lord of the Rings movies. These were based on character types like elves and orcs, but also built on existing martial arts from various cultures. But I don’t think many people find them deep enough to make a regular practice out of them. Historical European martial arts are largely recreations, the real European martial arts can still be found in Dance, but as far as I can tell I’m the only one say they might be the basis for re-inventing a tradition. Perhaps Thor moves like someone doing the Polska?
