day 213: a very long form

concepts:

• translation
• prior forms
  

lessons:

• bagua fist

i missed the kyudo class this Saturday because of a performance i wanted to see of a visiting dance company from Israel (yes, art & cultural events are important to me, so there, bleah). i just stayed with the kung fu lessons this morning.

bagua fist

this is a long form. a very long form. not as long as the yang tai chi long form (which is about the longest i've learned so far), and perhaps about the length of the chen tai chi long form (although it depends on how slow or fast you are moving), but the bagua fist form seems to go on forever.

Sifu brought a sheet of all the techniques in the bagua fist form, and said we needed to make it a group project to translate. apparently, no one has ever translated all the technique names from Chinese into English. we took a number of minutes to familiarize ourselves with the sheet, and where we were in the form (according to the sheet, we're about 2/3 of the way through).

Sifu left to work with the baji people, and left us to review the bagua fist form while we made an initial pass with the translations. i ended up working with Art and Ching-chieh to go through the techniques we've learned to date and figuring out their English equivalents. i use the word "equivalents" because the translations are not literal, nor can they really be--Ching-chieh noted that a lot of the Chinese terms are poetic, and hence involve evocations and invocations to concepts, images, metaphors, and analogies unique to Chinese culture, and which therefore get lost in a literal translation. we ended up struggling a bit, but got through most of the terms.

Sifu eventually returned, and spent the remainder of class taking us further into the form. we're at a point right now where certain movements seem to come from prior bagua forms (particularly stances, the 5th palm change, and the leg form). but Sifu pointed out that here the physics are a little different, and so involve different concepts and applications. we took some time going through these, and practicing the applications.

class ended a little after 1, but we ended up staying longer since some of the other students wanted to work on jian shu.