wayne hansen wrote:The TT Liang form I was referring to is the one in the book
Two person dance by Jonathan Russell
It is as I said San shou,Ta Lu and various pushing exercises
I learnt to do San shou in a way that if the partner does not do a move correctly you go into Ta Lu or pushing and come back to the form in the same place it broke down
Okay, I confess that I do not know the details of the San shou form but I have seen it many times. I do know the Ta Lu and that is definitely part of it.
What I am saying is that what is commonly referred to as his 150 posture form is
not that. It is the single person Yang family 108 form numbered slightly differently, with a few moves added, each movement broken into an even number of beats. If you were to take an active step with each movement in every GST you would need a very long practice space.
It's documented in Gordon Muir's book "Yang Style Traditional Long Form T'ai Chi Ch'uan As Taught by Master T. T. Liang". Also in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIdU5ZBwLAkALTHOUGH, I do own that book and checked and the none of the GST are described as using active steps. Only the "step forward to ward off right" that starts it is present in the final GST. In Gordon's introduction he says he learned the form in Liang's basement in Minnesota. What I learned from Liang's students was to adapt the footwork to the space available. Perhaps he didn't learn the active step GST due to space constraints?
Or it could also be that he didn't teach it with the active step and that is an innovation of my teacher to include the practice at that point in the form. Also, he doesn't use it in any of the film I have access to currently. Liang was CMC's disciple and I have never seen anyone else claiming that lineage use the active step. As I mentioned we were encouraged to experiment with footwork at a certain level of progress.