I created this video and wrote the book because my own experience
convinced me that martial arts, dance/theater, and religion were not only
compatible, but were often part of an integrated whole. The deeper I looked into Chinese history and
Chinese religion, the more obvious it was to me that Chinese culture had
integrated martial skills with theatricality in a fully religious
environment.
This has not been a short journey. I’ve been doing Chinese martial arts for 38
years. I was a professional dancer,
dancing many hours a day every day of the week.
In the early 1990s when I was deep into dance training, male teachers
were dying of HIV/AIDS in alarming numbers.
Those still living were dancing about death a lot. This gave me
countless opportunities to perform in front of audiences; paradoxically, it was
a great time to be a dancer. On the other hand, I wanted more training from
male teachers so I started looking at other other types of movement arts. I became a disciple of Chitresh Das, a master
of Kathak (North Indian Classical Dance), and improvisation. I also studied intensively with Malonga
Casquelourd from the Congo. My studies
of martial arts deepened too. I was
doing movement training 6-10 hours a day.
Doing these three types of advanced training at the same time opened my
eyes to things other people were not seeing.
It became self-evident to me that Congolese dance, and Kathak dance were
martial arts, and that Chinese martial arts were a form of dance-theater. All
three contained the major elements of martial skills, martial religion, and
theatricality.
By age 30 my interest in performing diminished, but my interest
in practice and training did not. That is when I met a Daoist priest named Liu
Ming in Santa Cruz California. I began
doing the five orthodox Daoist practices: sitting still, the golden-elixir,
liturgy and text studies, daoyin (opening and getting on track), and dream
practice (called: day and night the same). With me, Liu Ming emphasized huge
amounts of reading. After each full weekend of training, he would send me home
with a stack of books and a reading list. This went on for ten years.
I continued to practice and teach gongfu, becoming well
known around San Francisco for teaching kids performance skills and
improvisational life skills inside of the martial arts. I also taught adults at the American College
of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Finally, I returned to one of my teachers from years before,
George Xu. In the old days, training with George had been about being as tough
as possible. 3 to 4 hours a day 6 days a week, plus the practice he expected us
to do outside of class. Now, 15 years later, George Xu had mellowed. He had
been going to China every year to find new teachers to study with, and now all
of his training revolved around emptiness. Amazingly, he had reverse engineered the
golden-elixir practice inside of gongfu training. Since I had been doing
the golden-elixir for more than ten years at that point, I recognized it
immediately.
It quickly occurred to me that if the golden-elixir could be put
into marital skills, it must also have been put into theater training. And all the pieces of the big picture started
to fall into place.
Since I would love people to read the book, I’m just going to
address a single issue here. The biggest
obstacle most people have to comprehending the relationship between martial
arts and theater, is this: People falsely believe that theatrical expressivity
is an obstacle to martial prowess.
Violence professionals must be efficient. Inefficiency is a
luxury only amateurs can afford. Martial skill has to function independently of
expressivity. Even crappy expressivity skills would diminish one’s movement
efficiency if the two were not independent.
But most violence professions (I’m talking here about people who break
legs and capture criminals for a living), consider high quality expressivity
and communication skills part of the job description. That’s why expressivity and martial skill
have to be well integrated.
However much theatricality a violence professional happens to
have, it will be fully integrated with their martial skills, and the more
theatricality the better.
As part of that same argument, I often hear, “But that doesn’t
look like the street fights, or bar fights, or the MMA I’ve seen.” That’s
right, every type of violence looks different. Social, asocial, and
environmental contexts determine what fighting looks like. Kidnapping was a big problem in 18th and 19th
Century China. If the biggest danger you
are dealing with is kidnappers who capture by throwing a bag over your head
from behind, your martial art is not going to look like a duel. But it is likely to have high momentum
techniques like butterfly kicks, flips, and long extensions for pushing off of
walls. It is going to have a lot of
simple techniques for breaking legs. If you can understand the context the art
was created for, you can understand the efficiency of the movement.
Here is me doing a movement form Chinese opera call “Butterfly
Breaks Out of his Cocoon.” It is training for some unconventional
chokeholds.
Thanks to Cook Ding’s Kitchen for hosting my guest blog post!
Weakness with a Twist blog
Classes
Scott Park Phillips lives in Boulder, Colorado. He regularly travels for workshops, his next
one is in Oakland, California, August 26, 27, 28th at Soja Martial Arts (click
on Adult Workshops)
1 comment:
Fantastic video Scott! One of the best I have ever seen on these topics.
Thanks for sharing Rick!
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