I’ve had a fair amount of contact/exchange with various people in the Huang style in Europe, who train mostly with Patrick Kelly and/or Wee Kee Jin. I also did a couple of seminars with these teachers (but long ago). I really like some of the basic approaches, solo exercises and pushing hands patterns they use, a couple of which have been stolen and adapted by my main training partner and myself. My core system also has some similar stuff, but inevitably we do things a little differently...
My main doubt about the style as realized in Europe is that most of the practitioners, even if quite skilled at their own thing, tend to be rather inward looking and focus, in practice if not in theory, on tuishou as an end in itself. Not as a means of winning tournaments, but as an ‘end in itself’ within general training. There often seems to be something of a ‘glass wall’ between their tuishou abilities and then letting these flow into more general applications, free play/sparring etc. As soon as the (friendly) action moves outside the boundaries of what is covered by the (very good) fixed patterns they do, their skills and functional softness tend to break down quickly. This also applies to people who have been training the system for many years.
To my mind this may have a lot to do with the overall curriculum and teaching methods of the top teachers.
However, I know a few guys who are exceptions to this tendency. In these cases, they have already seriously trained other martial arts before (judo, karate, ‘kung fu’) and then subsequently begun the Huang system. There’s a very good French guy here in Berlin who, I believe, used to train stuff like hung gar, some bagua and possibly kick boxing. He is someone who nowadays tangibly uses Huang taiji (body structure/mechanics, strategies, some techniques) in free play / sparring, and it works very well for him. At the same time, I’m pretty sure that his abilities in distance, timing, martial focus etc. came from this previous experience and imbue what he does now. But he shows what you can do with Huang material in this context. In contrast to most of the practitioners as described above.
Of course, some would say that this de facto confinement of learned skills to the actual curriculum material is a problem with many taiji schools. Perhaps, but there are enough schools – in various styles – that manage to connect up the dots more comprehensively. And I do think the Huang style has excellent stuff in its box. It’s just that it often doesn’t move out of the box, at least here in Europe.
Cheers,
Giles