Martial arts as theatre, theatre as martial arts

[GrahamB]

This week I blogged about meeting Scott P. Phillips:

https://taichinotebook.wordpress.com/20 ... -phillips/

[Patrick]

Interesting for sure! Thanks for writing and posting it.

My experience with martial artists is that each person has their ‘thing’

For sure

[Michael Babin]

I met Scott Phillips in Ottawa recently while he was visiting a friend of his who is a martial arts colleague and friend of mine. The three of us spent an enjoyable couple of hours in my training room and, despite the way he sometimes comes across in his youtube videos, I found him quite personable, funny and with real push-hands skills. Yes, I know push-hands skills aren't always everything... but they are something.

He also obviously has done a great deal of research into the topics dear to him and can spontaneously demonstrate quite a variety of forms, techniques and dance moves. I didn't always agree with him but I definitely enjoyed both that meeting and the man.

[Bhassler]

Interesting. A couple of things that struck me are that Chen style doesn't really ascribe to the whole Zhang San Feng as creator ideology, and the raising hands movement was something added to Chen style only recently as teachers started to go public and do demonstrations-- the older forms don't have it. In general, I think the notion that CMA are closely related to theater has a lot of merit. If Scott is willing and able to post on RSF, it would be interesting to hear more on that, and how he reconciles his interpretation of Yilu with the fact that it's changed greatly since it's inception.

[I-mon]

Awesome Graham! Nicely written blog. Scott is a cool dude, I remember he copped a lot of flak on this forum back in the day with his claims of being "ahead of the evidence curve", and his general zaniness - "Afrikan Bagua", and so on. I for one always found his theories about the ritual theatre aspect of CMA to be quite feasible and generally more-likely-than-not.

[yeniseri]

This is reality from my limited experience!

Martial arts as part of folk culture (village, town, etc) and the various opera group serving as transmission (of said art) through dynastic turmoil escaping the vehicles of oppression. It doesn't help that folk novels accelerated the often illusory tales of martial ability of practitioners where many even believed the tall tales of 'gung-fu' that were presented as fact/reality. The travelling troupes of various CMA within operatic circles often alowed the more skilled acrobatic leads who had some level of CMA experience and exposure.

Interesting
Authentic Chen style has its own origin while it is interesting that non Chenjiagou folks attribute their origin to the Zhang fellow when in fact Chen/Li (of yore) was/is the background!.

[wushutiger]

I have read and discussed online a few of Scott's theories, which I personally feel he has connected backwards.

There are a few things to take into consideration.

We can see a special period in time when martial "systems" started to boom and really flourish. Before this we see martial practices, but not styles or systems. Mainly we see techniques directly used for combat being taught and practiced as such. When we see martial systems start to flourish, they incorporated many aspects, not just straight up combat techniques, and their purpose of practice also expanded to be multifaceted. In most cases these systems incorporated elements of combat, health improvement (which includes chinese medicinal theory to a degree), culture and tradition (which incorporated popular concepts from Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism), and of course elements of entertainment. When I say entertainment I mean that people practiced it to make the time pass, not necessarily to entertain others. This is how martial arts entered folk life and became a part of it.

Chinese classical opera was a representative of LIFE. It portrayed many aspects of life in a stylized way, and focused on topics that were popular in folk culture. So it is natural that martial aspects were incorporated into Chinese opera and plays, and martial characters portrayed of course would incorporate martial practices in the performance. Naturally, certain martial practices became popular as public performances, and certain elements of dramatic performance were borrowed (ie tempo and posing), but that isnt universal, and really isnt the original root of the martial art.

To draw a conclusion that the mobilization of the waist and knees is stemming from teaching the portrayal of opera characters and not the other way around to me is quite backwards.

[taiwandeutscher]

WT, totally agreed!
MA were integrated into theatric fields of entertainment, but not the other way round. There is no proof what so ever!
On SP, I did follow his internet presence some time, with some interest.
But more and more, he drifted off into "not-my-cup-of-tea", and ASAIK, his research is based an secondary literature only, not on primary sources in clasical Chinese.
On his gongfu, I have no personal experience to say anything, but his dispute with the other Scott didn't make him/them look well.
And RSF shows again it's very specialty; when personally unknown, ppl get critizised immediately in a thread; when personal meetings come into play, it is quite different.

[GrahamB]

I think Scott got banned from the forum back in the day - not entirely sure why now. I'm pretty sure he could just join again now though? I'll point him to this thread, but would understand if he doesn't want to get involved again.

Further clarification from the man himself:

..."for clarity's sake, my position is that any movement can be effective martial arts. Or put another way, the dichotomy between form and function is Western and not well suited to movement traditions that have been around long enough to develop countless affordances. The proper dichotomy is "form and emptiness" (xing and xu). All technique is both form and empty. --best."

[taiwandeutscher]

Ok, here we go again.
He has no idea of Chinese scripture, form and function in Chinese philosophical writing goes way back to the Zhouyi.

[Bhassler]

I think the theatrical aspects of CMA can be examined without having to make exact correlations or saying that one comes directly from the other. One teacher I had said that certain types of movements were included in form demonstrations because anyone with the goods could see if the performer had the goods or not-- it saved having to cross hands, and thus injuries. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's an interesting notion to me, and speaks to the theme of forms as communication, either directly to an audience or to students through time. Given that theater, and Chinese Opera in particular, uses movement as storytelling and that both evolved in the same cultural background, it's not a big jump to think that a look at one might inform the other.

[Bao]

. One teacher I had said that certain types of movements were included in form demonstrations because anyone with the goods could see if the performer had the goods or not-- it saved having to cross hands, and thus injuries. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's an interesting notion to me, and speaks to the theme of forms as communication, either directly to an audience or to students through time.

Yang Luchan changed things to look beautiful to attract the upper class. Yang Chengfu made the form even larger to teach very large groups. IMHO, this is a way of performance as well. Teachers are like lecturers or seminar holders. They need to capture the attention of the class and keep it. They also need to know what kind of group they teach.

Given that theater, and Chinese Opera in particular, uses movement as storytelling and that both evolved in the same cultural background, it's not a big jump to think that a look at one might inform the other.

There are a few old authentic clips on the tubes from the 20s and 30s that can be interesting to watch. Street performers, kids from the beijing opera performing on the streets, monkey and drunken styles. These and other similar styles actually developed from street performance.

[D_Glenn]

My teacher was giving a lecture on why Baguazhang doesn't have long forms (except for the weapons), and he said some things that I thought to myself "Scott would love hearing this.".

The important thing to note is that they didn't have television, they only had singing, dancing, and acting out plays.

So the bodyguard companies (of the 1800s, possibly before than) borrowed from the everyday environment and made up long forms to be performed at town festivals in order to attract young kids and their parents to send them to the school to practice. They needed a lot of potentials and through the process the wheat is separated from the chaff, and good students emerge and then they were taught the real skills and secrets /tradecraft of the Bodyguard School.

The real skill comes from Dan Cao (drilling single strikes) but through the practice of long forms and the strive to perform it better and have a whole choreography memorized to the point of being ingrained, where like a good dancer who first learns other people's choreography can then go on to to make up choreographed dances in their mind, on the fly, is how they realized that the choreographed forms had a martial benefit. Which is being able to change and adapt (Bianhua). So this ability to make up one's own choreography (Bianhua) skill comes about through having to memorize a certain number of different moves, and the number of movements done in a row. So in Xin-Yi and similar arts of the time, they figured out that this could shortened down to around 5-9 movements, which would make it easier to ingrain the form into memory, hence speeding up that part of the process.

So there just may be an opera connection in some of the Long Forms that are public knowledge, as they may have structured them in a manner that entertains. But learning the internal body-mechanics comes from strike drilling. Once you learn the mechanics of Zhedie and Zhuanhuan you want to challenge yourself by learning all the different martial movements you can but have the internal power inside of the movements. It is also a way to entertain yourself and your teacher can watch you do a form and help you learn the mechanics better, which is what BHassler mentioned, but it also helps to continually increase your 'changing/adapting skills'.

.

[Andy_S]

I think that a lot of what he said back in the days when he posted made good sense, but as with so many people who develop their own theories, he took it to an extreme.

Yes, there are theatrical elements to CMA - solo forms, lion dancing, breaking displays, "qi" tricks, Chinese opera, tumbling, acrobatics, etc. These elements were all part of the recruiting process during the Boxer Rebellion, and these are the elements of TCMA that modern performance wushu (ta lu - not sanda) most obviously references.

But to insist that theatricality was the primary purpose of most/all TCMA is nonsensical. We know enough about the masters of even the most flowery and least practical of TCMA, Taijiquan, to know that there were hardcore badasses in the lineages: warriors, escorts, bodyguards, fighters.

And as noted above, his theory on the Taiji solo form being a mini-dramatization of the Zhang San-feng story is a bit silly given that the Chen tradition (which Scott practices) does not even admit Zhang's role in Chen MA's lineage. I would also ask how widely known among the general Chinese public the Zhang theory actually was: Would it have made sense to perform a mini opera about an obscure, legendary Taoist that few peasants would ever have heard of, when there were so many more fierce, colorful and famous figures from Chinese legend who could have been appended to Taiji? And is there any evidence - anything empirical at all, in terms of written sources or even oral history - to back up this theory?

When it comes to practice, he may have a point - ie that many people mistake the theatrical elements of CMA for the combative.

One of the tricky things about CMA is sorting the what from the chaff - ie sorting the dramatic from the pragmatic.

[Finny]

I would also ask how widely known among the general Chinese public the Zhang theory actually was: Would it have made sense to perform a mini opera about an obscure, legendary Taoist that few peasants would ever have heard of, when there were so many more fierce, colorful and famous figures from Chinese legend who could have been appended to Taiji?

Nothing but some anecdotal BS, but FWIW... I mentioned to my gf (who is from Nanjing, and has NO interest in anything fisticuffs) that I was a member here, and it's a forum for discussing neijia. When she was able to understand what I meant by Neijia, through my horrible attempts at Chinese, she chuckled, and the first thing she said was "aaah... Zhang San Feng?"