Appledog wrote:wayne hansen wrote:I already pointed out she did not invent it
It is factory tai chi that has been around for at least 30 years that I know of
Oh, I thought you meant water style tai chi.
Yeah of course, it's the presentation and branding I am referring to. Doing Tai Chi as single movements is a tradition that has certainly been passed down before Men Huifeng, for sure.
It's the packaging, the steps behind it, to go from A to D vs B and C instead of requiring a giant leap, which seem more important to me.
I'm close to formulating the style and naming it. There's just one problem, organization of the material.
There is so much basic physical conditioning in the system due to the modern lifestyle, that people might not start learning the form for over a year. Right now I am working on chin to toe, splits, and the bridge as being core requirements at the white belt level. Do you think this is too extreme? It may be easier to break the progression across belts; i.e. splits progression for white belt, chin to toe for yellow belt, and bridge progression for orange. I've also been taking a hard look at DuanWei form 1 from Chen style, and Yang style, since these forms have basically the same purpose as the forms I am creating. I am actually really impressed with the Yang style duanwei 1, moreso than the chen version (which would seem odd if you know me because I love Chen style the most, even though I was always a Yang guy). Anyways, although I have great respect for the Chen family today I like to do the movements, perhaps, more like Yang style than I should in that I like them to be big, open, round and continuous. I am sure I will come up with something interesting.
The thing that has been bugging me most is that Tai Chi is a complete art -- everything is really in the long form (more or less) -- i mean, in terms of things like qigong sets, applications, etc -- really there is just so much there. And it's a blessing to be sure but also something of a curse, because the beginner may find it difficult to work on anything in particular. Even YCF's 10 points are a jumbled mess unless broken down into some sort of logical, stepwise method of application. The difficult is of course creating a form which illustrates just a small handful of concepts without being incorrect tai chi. It's actually such a problem, because the limitation being intentional, itself almost breaks the tai-chi-ness of the form. I also don't want to create a form which is "really" just a series of qigong movements. What I want to do is create a shortcut idea to doing the form properly (lets just assume you know what I mean by that for now) with a minimum of preparation work.
Zhu TianCai tells a story about how he visited another school of Wushu in China, he was invited, and taught them some tai chi. He spent more than six hours with them going over what amounts to Opening of tai chi (raise hands and grasp bird's tail, essentially). The movement is a small number of basic circles, three, four or five at most I think, depending on how you count them. But they just couldn't get the movement because they were unaware or unable to do the taiji circle movements. Thus they conceptualized every part of the motion and tried to come up with a number of steps to perform it i.e. 1. raise hands up, 2. turn to the left and turn palms to the left, etc. and a whole list of requirements for each posture. So in the end they could not get it, but it's such a simple foundational movement, just front circle left and right, then then stereo circle then split circle (i.e. just three or four foundational movements). What I want to do is reduce back to those foundational movements and expand the set out to a short 10 or 20 moves which can be done in 2 or 3 minutes. This is snack-sized Tai chi, for beginners, and it requires the utmost care to get it right. Here getting it right does not necessarily mean it is a difficult form. it is supposed to be exceedingly easy. Anyways I've rambled long enough, thanks for the clarification and letting me bounce that question off you.