As for how practical the style is, I think it will need more time to really see, it is more a sport/game than a combat art, but I was watching the teacher doing some trips and sweeps on some students and the crispness and sudden power did impress me.
Besides..... let's take this one step further.... how much of Taekkyon do you think Song Duk Ki really knew? I mean he learnt it what.... before the Japanese occupation, for how long, I can't imagine it was that long... then he didn't teach anybody for most of his life.... did he learn everything? What was his level? Living through so much political turmoil and war, did he have time to train that much? Had he forgotten stuff in that huge gap where he didn't teach?
GrahamB wrote:By co-incidenence my friend is currently in Korea and has just had a lesson at the "World Taekkyon Headquarters"
He posted a video of the teacher doing an impromptu demonstration at lecture he was giving at Taekwondowon and it looked not too bad to me. Apparently this guy had invented a new dance thing based on Taekkyon footwork and taiji principles.
I can also tell you WiDae Taekkyun looks more similar to Kyokushin Karate, ITF TKD (some of the kicks), Muay Thai, Jujitsu (standing mainly), and Taichi.
The man in question was Master Kim, the same person whose poster display I had more or less refused to look at the day before. He demonstrated something of the footwork of taekkyon, and then with an uke, he showed how taekkyon moves in with hand and feet techniques. The hands smother the opponent's strikes and then the range moves into grappling and kicking. The kicks can be percussive or trapping, wrapping, sweeping and locking. They move smoothly from floor level to head height with astonishing speed. I liked the look of it.
I switched from filming and went to tell him that I thought it looked great. He asked me to square off against him and throw some slow punches, which I did. We moved then into very familiar territory, and I was liking it even more. Incoming attacks are smothered, sort of doused, and the Taekkyon adept uses some incredibly nimble footwork and the bouncing of weight up and down, combined with forward and backward circles to generate all kinds of energies for attacks. In some ways it feels like taiji. In others it feels like wing chun. But then these kicks come out of nowhere, and they are like hands grabbing at you, manipulating your joints, kicking you away or sweeping you down.
Master Kim warmed us up: footwork, stepping, using one foot to pat different areas of one's own body - ankles, shins, thighs, front, side and back. Then warm ups for the upper body - warm ups that were clearly also viable techniques. Two hands high, palms forward (think Muay Thai), then stepping and circles, stepping and strikes, straight strikes, upward strikes, downward strikes. At every stage Master Kim came over and corrected my movement. My steps were too big. They were not coordinated with my hip movements, etc.
Perhaps because of this, we moved swiftly into partner work. The elderly gentlemen did their own thing. Master Kim took me. The American was left to fend for himself.
First things first: two punches come in. These must be parried, in downward circular motions. Not hit, not slapped, but caught on the forearms and pulled down and away by the circular movement. At the same time, a floor-sweeping circular kick comes in. Bang. Perhaps I should have told him about my ankle injury? It's too late now. Bang. I keep doing it wrong. My kicks are too high. They are not circles. He shows me, at length, smacking circular kicks into the screws in my ankle. Finally we switch to the other side. That's better: at least there are metal plates around there, not screws. I'm a bit better on this side, but still I'm slapping rather than making circles.
Of course, for every technique there is a counter. I guess Master Kim has established pretty quickly that it will be better to use me as an uki and just show me the kinds of things that competent Taekkyon players can and will do. So I do the drills: pat-pat the punches, swing in the leg for the first kick (sometimes 'not good!', sometimes 'better!'), and he shows me a range of counters. And so the lesson passes pleasantly: Hana! Tul! Set! Wallop, I'm on the floor. Hana! Tul! Set! Whoosh, my leg has been kicked so far away from me that I feel like Penelope Pitstop or Olive Oil on ice.
In one exercise, I go up for a knee, or to raise my knee before a thrust kick, and he thrusts his foot into the top of my thigh so forcefully that it both folds me in half and sends me flat onto my backside.
There is plenty of this. It is great. Taekkyon goes in close and has all the hand-range competencies and propensities of all the best arts I've experienced - a good strong structure and strong and plausible basic principles. But then, below all of this, you have got feet moving so fast and so fluidly to make more mischief than you can imagine. Sometimes it's just whack-whack-whack. Many arts have this. But at other times it's like you are being folded up to be packed into a box - or when you flatten an oversize cardboard box in order to fit it into the bin: first one leg is taken out, then the other is folded down, then the first leg gets some more treatment - during which you have been sent spinning and crashing away from the possibility of even thinking about a counter. As I say, it's great.
Master Kim was critical of many aspects of my performance. My stepping, primarily. Too big, too slow. I kept saying 'it's my escrima'. But I'm not entirely convinced of that. I get criticised by my escrima instructors for my stepping too. So, of course, responsibility for my footwork starts and ends with me. But anyway, there was one an aspect of the class that I felt I could legitimately be critical of - and that was the admittedly short period of time we spend on grappling and take downs. This was really an addendum to other things. But I wasn't entirely convinced that this part of the package was all it could be. After years of doing taiji pushhands with a small handful of people who were prepared to up the ante and always search for real combative moves, I felt that, rusty as I am, I would fare ok at that level. Of course, in taiji pushhands, there's not always the great threat that your partner could in a flash do a straight thrust kick up to your chin as soon as look at you, or simply remove your feet from beneath you and deposit them six feet away from where you needed them to be.
So that was my lesson, and that was my few days in Korea. Obviously, I've missed out all the stuff about food and drink, kimchi and soju. But that's for another time and place. I am not surprised to have come away with 'taekwondo fatigue'. It was so relentless and inescapable in Muju. The whole place is an advert for itself. And it's playing on a loop. But I am surprised to have discovered how interesting and exciting Taekkyon is. I honestly always thought it was really just a bi-product of the invention of taekwondo: I really thought that because they needed to say taekwondo emerged from a continuous indigenous martial tradition, therefore they needed to reinvent Taekkyon as that indigenous tradition.
I don't know about any of this. I don't honestly know if current Taekkyon is a true-ish continuation of a longish tradition, or if it is a reconstituted object carrying the same name as something that once existed. In either case, in terms of martial arts (but not martial arts studies) it doesn't matter. Taekkyon has something unique and valuable to offer to martial arts. Interested readers should make contact with Master Kim at the World Taekkyon Headquarters in Seoul. Let me know if you want to. I have his email address.
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