Saturday Evening at the Dojo 5/20

I arrived at the dojo before everyone arrived back from dinner (another meal with the group that I missed because of the scuba shop stuff) and sat out in the car listening to Garrison Keillor until Keith and John showed up with a key.

We sat around stretching and cussin' and discussin' until the rest of the crew arrived back. I think we had around 10 - 13 folks there, but I'm not certain.

The session started with Carla commenting on some of the stuff she noticed in the demos: getting up from a fall and the exchanging of positions between techniques.

Getting up from a fall, in a demonstration, we try to not point our butts in the direction of joseki. That has led us to roll over and, sometimes, rotate on the ground prior to getting up. Carla had a better approach to getting up: get up on one knee and, if necessary, rotate on it while kneeling to prevent showing joseki disrespect.

Exchanging positions during a demonstration: our process has been that once the techniques have started, tori is always vulnerable to attack from uke, so tori never shows his back to uke. This leads to interesting dances when folks change positions. Carla's frame of reference is that the demonstration is a demonstration of the techniques. Once a technique is done, uke and tori are just friends rearranging themselves for the next technique, so there is no need to worry about presenting your back to uke after uke gets up from his fall. This allows uke and tori to walk normally from one side to the other without having to, simultaneously, have tori behind uke (wrt joseki) and not show joseki your butt. This also allows tori to be closer to joseki and, since the demonstration is a demonstration of tori's knowledge of the principles and therefore more important, this is a good thing.

This discussion went on for a while. Since the bigwigs of my style were on the matt during this time, I'm guessing that we're going to change to this new approach to demonstrations.

We also did some sitting techniques. Since I have not picked up knee-walking yet, I mainly watched and absorbed. There was one technique that was static that I was able to attempt and it worked on the first try. I'm not going to attempt to describe it, unfortunately.

I had to depart a little early to taking the shelving units to the dive shop (at 10 p.m.), so I said my goodbyes to the visiting akidokas and headed off into the great black yonder.

tag : Aikido