salcanzonieri wrote:If Du YuZe "changed"the forms, etc., then WHY is his forms (shown by his students) done much the same way as Chen FaKe's early students (as shown in the 2nd and 3rd videos).
The first 3 videos are essentially the same.
The form becomes different, much different, from Chen ZhaoKui's line in Chen village.
Why did Chen Qingzhou abandon that version and go back to what he first learned?
The fact that Chen FaKe's early students and Du YuZe's students do the forms the same way says a great deal.
If Du YuZe "changed" a great deal of the form, they shouldn't be the same but they are (with minor variations).
You can see how great the postures changed from Chen ZhaoKui's line rather than from Chen FaKe's early students (which as i said is a lot more like Du YuZe's version rather than like Chen ZhaoKui's version).
Your original post stated pre- and post- Chen Fake, so I read it as a sort of continuation of earlier claims you made that Chen Fake changed the form from what Chen Yanxi taught, and was therefore pointing out that if the two forms were indeed significantly different (which I feel they are), then there was nothing to suggest it was one person who changed it, and not the other. Sorry if I misread your post.
As for the Chen Zhaokui line, what they do in the village should not at all be taken as representative of Chen Zhaokui's taiji. For that, you need to look at Chen Yu. What they do in the village is from Chen Zhaopi. Chen Zhoakui did visit to teach some, but the underlying mechanics of that method are different to what they do in the village, so it seems as if what they call xinjia in the village adopted some of the external choreography, but still uses Laojia mechanics. (The fact that the mechanics are different is not in debate-- having trained both, the fundamentals are different, and so what is built atop those fundamentals is also different. If you know, you know. Also, note that I am not saying "better", just different.)
The Chen Qingzhou thing is interesting, because what he ostensibly went "back to" would be what he claimed to learn from Chen Zhaopi, which is who the village guys learned from. However, Zhaopi would have been 78 by the time Qingzhou went to learn from him, so it's likely that whatever Qingzhou had came from his father, and the association with Zhaopi was more about gaining notoriety than actual training. Which, again, is not to say that he wasn't awesome or anything like that, just pointing out where the meat of his gongfu likely came from.