Wednesday, August 1, 2012
WARNING - the following video clips include some profanity... might not be suitable for work.
This popped up recently on Rob Redmond's always excellent 24 Fighting Chickens site - watching it gave me some serious flashbacks to the last decade or so of my 27 years of training and teaching in a martial arts school that shall go nameless... the head of the school wasn't quite this bad... but at times it was mighty close...
The previously-mentioned head of the school was also fond of creating school-specific katas (or more often getting his students to create them and then editing them to put his stamp on them.) Initially it was weapons katas (because those traditional katas are so long and boring, after all) but eventually it spread to empty-hand katas too... again, I never saw anything quite to the level of the "Dance of Death"... but...
(A disclaimer - I have no problem with martial artists creating their own katas... but this was in a school that already required 14 katas to test for 1st degree black, and then 4-5 katas per black belt rank... and where the majority of the students and instructors had disturbingly little knowledge of the actual applications of the moves in the katas they were learning. Of course, this is all just my woefully uniformed opinion...)
Anyway, if you find the above as funny as I do - check out the rest of their videos on Youtube. Just don't be watching them when you should be engaged in serious martial arts training...
JMH
