30th anniversary festival: Academy of Traditional Fighting Arts


I was honoured and privileged to attend and participate in the 30th anniversary festival for our school yesterday.  What a blast!  Over two hours of martial arts demonstrations by all the students of the Academy covering almost our entire syllabus - ranging from karate kata and bunkai (applications), embu (our two person forms), tuide (grappling), throwing, jo and bokken, sai (tie chi in Chinese), jian (Chinese straight sword), xingyiquan (single and two person forms) and taijiquan.

Having not seen many of the students for a while, I was flabbergasted by the improvement in their skill, timing, knowledge, creativity and toughness. They know so much more than I did at their levels - and can execute it under pressure, with power and efficiency and without flinching. I suppose that goes to show that the old saying is true: "Poor is the student who does not surpass his or her teacher"!

Those who want to see more pictures of the event can do so here.

Speaking of improvement, we also screened the video below as  a retrospective of the last 30 years.  You can see me as a white belt in my first grading, all the way through my early black belt years, my more physical youth up to the present.




I want to congratulate all of the students of the Academy of Traditional Fighting Arts in Perth on their achievement at this festival.  In particular I want to thank my brother Nenad, our school's headmaster, and our friend and senior student Sensei Jeff Cosgrove who organised the event so professionally and efficiently.

Hopefully I'll have a video of the demonstrations sometime in the near future.  Stay tuned!


Copyright © 2015 Dejan Djurdjevic

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding the internal arts

Image
More about the “soft” arts of China and the nature of “qi” In my article “ Internal vs. external martial arts ” I explain that the term “internal” is a reference to neijiaquan ("internal method fist") – a group of martial arts in China comprising taijiquan, baguazhang and xingyiquan, as well as some related arts and offshoots (eg. liu he ba fa and yi quan). These are easily identifiable arts with a very specific set of techniques based on common principles. The internal arts are commonly distinguished from other arts (named waijiaquan or “external method fist”). Many argue that this distinction arises because the former rely on “qi” (“ki” in Japanese) – a term literally meaning “breath” and often used to describe a metaphysical “energy”. Accordingly the term “internal” is often mistakenly seen as a reference to the “cultivation of qi internally”. In fact the word is just a reference to “inner family” in much the same way as some schools use the term “inner circle”: so ne
Read more

"Combat tai chi"? Seriously?

Image
Back in about 2009 I was talking to a friend of mine who does krav maga, telling him I was off to Taiwan to train in combat taijiquan (tai chi). He laughed. "Combat tai chi? Isn't that an oxymoron?" I can see why he thought that. Because when you look at the soft, slow art of taijiquan, adding the descriptor "combat" does seem to be a contradiction in terms. In fact, the idea of it being used for fighting can appear  ludicrously funny . And to be frank, in the case of most taiji practitioners - including many who profess "fighting skill" on the interwebs   - it almost certainly is. [In the case of the preceding link, note the string attacks against zombie opponents - more on that later!] By now, I doubt there is anyone in the martial arts who hasn't heard of the debacle that constituted the recent fight between MMA fighter Xu Xiadong and self-described Yang style taijiquan "master" Wei Lei. Xu beat Wei senseless in under 10
Read more

The importance of basics

Image
Over the years, I have often written about basics but I don't think I've ever talked about them more broadly - in particular about their importance. Recently I have been watching excerpts of David Carradine in the television series "Kung Fu" (my YouTube feed has assumed I'm a huge fan and this is inevitably reinforced every time I watch another video). One thing I notice is just how bad Carradine's technique is. It's downright awful. In a way, it reminds me of young Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid: as the movie series progressed I kept expecting him to get better. I thought: "Surely he's been training in the meantime?" Only he didn't get better. Ditto Carradine. With the latter in mind, rather than show you a bit of the series, I thought it would be more illustrative to show you David Carradine demonstrating martial arts  after  he finished the series and had (apparently) undergone much, much more training. It's hard to explain exact
Read more