Ok, this time I've really gone way too long without writing something, especially considering how cool this stuff I'm doing is. So what have I been doing?
Well since September 6th I've been taking kung fu classes twice a week, each class two hours long. On October 4th I began my corporeal mime classes, which are also twice a week, for three hours each class. This past Monday the 18th my clown classes started--five days a week, four hours each class yes it's intense and awesome--but those will get their own separate entry. They truly must.
I began studying kung fu this summer at Calvin Chin's Martial Arts Academy in Newton, which teaches the Hung Gar style. I only did it one hour a week so it was hard to really absorb a lot of it, but I got acquainted with some of the basic ideas and some of the basic techniques of the style and its forms (a piece of "choreography" or "movement" that mimics your contribution to a real, albeit beautiful fight if you were very good at fighting). I started studying corporeal mime last year at school, and when a friend of mine from my improv group sent me a piece Bruce Lee wrote about his philosophy of kung fu, relating it back to improv, I thought it seemed to apply to what I was learning in my mime class too, and so I thought it would be cool to study for that reason and also as just another random skill that would be good to have and fun and interesting to pursue. As the summer progressed I got very busy with my friends making a theatre piece, and though I kept going to kung fu it really wasn't a big priority for me. However, I was still really drawn to the internal focus and physical agility it cultivates, and I really liked the idea of working on this discipline that could give me a lifelong bodily goal, so I decided I'd find a place to continue studying in Paris.
What I found was the Orthodox Pei Mei Nam Anh Kung Fu School of Paris. The school was founded by Grand Master Nam Anh, a Vietnamese man born into a family of practitioners of the martial arts. The school teaches the Pei Mei style of kung fu, which was developed in southern Shaolin in the 18th century, and as it is an "orthodox school," its style of instruction is traditional and rigorous. We begin each class by saluting the shrine to the ancestors and then commence an hour of exercises designed to strengthen and loosen the muscles as well as drill correct form. We hold stances for extended periods of time, practice punching and kicking techniques, and focus extensively on the most efficient and effective ways of generating force with the body--collapsing the torso, rotating it, and unwinding a punch, all at the same time, is the Pei Mei technique of punching, and it is hard. Doing it for twenty minutes makes you sweat. That seems to be the goal of the first hour of the class, to make you sweat. We also do planks for three minutes every class, which were excruciating and impossible at first and now are becoming manageable, but are still far from enjoyable. Although there is a certain pleasure from that kind of pain you get from forcing yourself to do something your body will benefit from in the long run.
A big part of this conditioning which is necessary to achieve a body capable of sustaining the practice and performance of kung fu forms is learning to deal with pain. You either figure out a way to lessen it through certain physical methods and the practiced execution of correct technique, or you simply learn to perceive levels of pain as lesser than you once did, effectively creating a higher threshold for your own physical suffering. Both the former and the latter seem to be reasons that our teacher walks around and punches us all in the stomach three times each class. Yep. You read that right. Each class, part way through the first hour, she makes her way around the room punching everyone in the stomach.
Now, when I first saw this, I was surprised. Calvin Chin never punched me in the stomach. Maybe it was because I used to have playdates with his son Drew at their house in elementary school and so he just couldn't bring himself to hit me. But probably not. The Calvin Chin school is not an "orthodox" school, and Calvin and the other instructors would say themselves in class that when they studied when they were young, their instructors would do things like make them hold stances until they sweat and practice punches and kicks for half an hour, just crazy stuff! At Calvin Chin's Martial Arts Academy, they prefer to keep classes to an hour and devote them mostly to working on the forms with the understanding that serious students will practice the techniques more extensively on their own time, and will also show up for several classes at the school each week to round out their program of study, ultimately learning proper technique through correct practice of forms. Well at the Orthodox Pei Mei Nam Anh Kung Fu School of Paris, the teacher punches you in the stomach. Three times.
Having spent the last summer studying the Hung Gar style lightly, I was surprised to see this. The teacher, Yseult--pronounced "ee-suhl"--is smaller than probably all of the students in the class, but is quite skilled and thus very powerful. She would walk up to an experienced student, who would hold his stance but open his arms, and quickly deliver one loud punch, which the student would accept with a sharp exhalation and sometimes a very slight lurch as he flexed his abs in defense. Then another punch, and then one more. The punches are delivered while we hold the en garde stance; right leg back (it switches up too), knees bent, fists out in front of the body with elbows close together, and a very slightly collapsed torso. When she started punching the beginning students a few weeks ago, we got three pretty decent slaps on the tummy. I look forward to the day when I'm considered harmful enough to punch.
The second hour of the class is devoted partly to sustained, fluid application of kicking and punching technique through various exercises that bring us across the room and back many times, and partly to the practice of forms, or for the beginning students, the practice of the salute. In the last few minutes of the class we sit in a circle and discuss technique and philosophy. We end with a few minutes of silent meditation and then a salute to the shrine. And all this is in French, unless I don't understand it in which case Yseult says it to me in French accented English, which I prefer to American accented English anyway.
Pei Mei and Hung Gar are quite different, and the style of instruction at the two kung fu schools I've studied at thus far is also clearly very very different. It's hard to say which I "prefer" because I didn't study long enough at Calvin Chin's school nor frequently enough, and his school does offer conditioning classes anyway, which is just what we spend the first hour of our classes at the Pei Mei school doing, but man, I like kung fu. I'll write a separate entry for my mime class too and I'll compare kung fu and mime in that one, but I'll just say here that the crossover between the two disciplines is huge and very interesting, and that in my mime school in Paris we study with a dojo mentality similar to the Pei Mei school. In just the last week alone, my body has done things I'd thought were impossible for me to do, and they only happened because the instructors absolutely insisted that I did them whether or not I thought it was possible. For me, that kind of persistence in a teacher, which may be perceived more as insensitivity in America, is invaluable.
Oh, I almost forgot: I recently told someone in the class my name and got the following response: "Avery...you mean like 'Avery day?'"
It's not just you, Clemente.
