day 194: even more packed full!

concepts:

• editing
• extrapolating
  

lessons:

• chen short form
• kuen wu jian erlu
  

today was a busy day. since we had a higher turnout of students, Sifu decided to see if we could fit the chen short form in before he left for Hawaii. in addition, Lance showed up later in class, replete with a Taiwanese manual showing Liu Yun Qiao doing kuen wu jian erlu, and Sifu decided to see about reconstructing the erlu form shown in the book.

chen short form

Sifu's plan was to try and cover the chen short form in 2 days--this Sunday and the next. however, we went so far today that the class figured we might as well cover the entire form today. we ended up spending more time than usual, since we were so close to finishing.

Sifu noted that historically there was short form in chen, at least not in the lineage we're learning from Du Yu Ze. however, at some point in time Adam Hsu decided to construct a short form. apparently, he kept finding that audiences weren't comfortable sitting through the entire chen long form in demonstrations and students weren't patient enough to stay with the long form in class curriculums. to deal with this, he created the short form, which was meant to be more digestible to both populations.

the short form is essentially an edited version of the long form, at least from what i can tell. almost all the techniques come from the long form, with only a few differences. the main issue is remembering the sequence--and this is where i'm struggling. it was a lot of pack the short form into a single class, and i remember a fair amount, but i think i'm going to need some more practice to really get it down...particularly to remember it but still distinguish it from the long form in my memory.

you can see the chen short form in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncY8GhjwFpM


incidentally, i should note Sifu did a customized performance of the chen short form for the Pau Hana end-of-quarter celebration at UCLA. you can see it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V73CH1x_cM8


kuen wu erlu

following the chen short form we picked up with kuen wu erlu. Lance showed Sifu his book showing Liu Yun Qiao doing the form, which was in Chinese and from Taiwan (apparently there's no English translation sold). Lance noted that there were major steps missing in the sequence of photos, and wanted to try and reconstruct the form so that we could learn the original as practiced by Liu Yun Qiao. Sifu said he'd have to extrapolate from his memory, but he'd have to go through the photos step-by-step to figure things out.

Sifu took us through the form up to the point that we knew, and then he began referencing the book, trying to fill in the missing movements using his memory from what he had learned. this ended up taking the remainder of class, with Sifu and Lance trying to sort out 1) what was missing from the photos, and 2) what was supposed to fill in the missing gaps.

we finished the day with Sifu saying he'd try to come up with a final version this coming week, so that we could finish learning the form next Sunday. Lance also noted we should make a video, since there is no video anywhere on Youtube of anyone doing kuen wu erlu. hopefully i'll be able to do this next Sunday.