摔跤 SHUAI JIAO Master Li Baoru — Dante Basili

[marvin8]

Dante Basili
Oct 21, 2022

The twelfth and final volume of Master Li Baoru's extraordinary work on Shuaijiao, the traditional Chinese wrestling.
In this latest volume at 11:30 we can see an important cultural aspect of martial arts, the Zhongfan 中 幡, Balancing the Flag, an acrobatic exercise much loved in Beijing schools. "Fan" is a kind of flag and its dimensions vary. Beautifully decorated, it can be used in both honor guard and skill competitions. Zhongfan is composed of a 10m main bamboo pole, with a 0.5m wide and 5.5m long strip hanging from the tip. On the obverse phrases of blessing and auspicious motifs are embroidered while on the reverse the name of the school performing, hence the name "the flag of the signal".
Teaching material provided to me by Master Li Baoru during his stay in Paris, as a guest of my Master Yuan Zumou.
Shooting from the late 1980s.
Complete Tiandihe School Archives on Patreon.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlMtfbZ3L-E

Dante Basili
May 24, 2022

The Tiandihe School Archive on Patreon. Decades of seminars, lectures and travel reports, and also, soon, rare books in Chinese no longer published. Every month, after digitizing it, I also update this archive on Patreon. Here as an example the VII volume of the immense work of Master Li Bao Ru on Shuai Jiao. Shooting from the late 1980s, Beijing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMPPKoT6lvg

[wayne hansen]

Dante never disappoints

[nicklinjm]

This material is golden!

[wushutiger]

Last summer I went to visit Li Baoru, along with two of my training brothers, in Li's community where he lives (very close to the Temple of Heaven) and where they gather on weekends to practice, still, to this day. I had started filming some things and was going to go back and do an interview with him, but the Covid restrictions had a different plan, a nightmare we are still dealing with today unfortunately.....

I guess I will put together a little visual video of what I filmed in the meantime. They were doing some Zhong Fan (flag pole) that day too. As you can see from the older video above, the text on the flag was in Manchu (which is from the Mongol script), but that has changed in more recent years.