nicklinjm wrote:Really interesting Andrzej. Any comments on what you learned from Zhou Yi / Wang Fengming? Was the focus more on forms or was there push hands / application work?
Also if you were studying with Wang Yufang's students, was Zhang Shuxin around at that time?
Hi, I'm replying late, because have been on a very active vacation last 2 weeks.
I learned from Zhou Yi for quite short time, but managed to learn long form in the dingshijia定式架 variant. In other 吴 schools they call it square frame. We didn't do any tui shou at that time.
Zhou showed us also next stages: the lianshijia连式架 (aka round frame) and kuaijia 快架 (yongjia 用架), which Wu Tunan learned from Yang Shaohou.
The main classes were in the afternoons. But there were also qigong sessions at 6 a.m. every day. Zhou Yi developed various qigong sets based on qigong which he learned from Wu Tunan. What we were practicing was the most basic of those sets. I got some more idea about those qigong sets only a few years ago, when I got a book in Russian co-authored by Zhou Yi and Andrey Milenyuk. Actually I remember Andrey Milenyuk from those old times. He later became the main disciple of Zhou Yi and organized his workshop in Russia many times. I received the mentioned book via Andrey's student who visited me in Poland
One more thing I learned from Zhou was a sword form, but not from Wu Taiji, but created by his friend from Beijing opera. It involved a lot of flowery movements with the tassel, which had to be longer than the sword itself.
With Feng Zhiqiang and Wang Fengming my main focus was Feng's 48 form. I did some tui shou there, but not much. There was a group of young guys who used to spend a lot of time practicing competitive tui shou though. It was mostly fixed step. At that time Feng started teaching his Hunyuan Qigong, but it was at different place, different time. It was never practiced in the Tiantan group.
As for Zhang Shuxin (张树新), I don't remember him being around at that time. According to info which I just have found, he started learning from Wang Yufang in 1996.