Focussing on the details of drunkeness

Just back from today’s Drunken Broadsword class. It was just me today, which was quite beneficial – we were able to go slowly, and repeat a lot of the same steps over and over, and over….  Luckily, Uncle Cheong came along to watch, and was able to act as translator! I’m happy to learn this form slowly, as long as I get the details right. So, while I have them fresh in my mind:

• When ‘drinking’, keep the thumb and forefinger rounded in order to form the ‘cup’; don’t let either straighten out – especially when coming out of the forward rolls;
• When ‘drinking’, step high, with the foot pointing down;
• Also, when ‘drinking’, bend the knees, so that the weight is down low;
• The knees are also bent during the ‘flower sword’ advance and retreat, so it looks almost like chicken-stepping;
• In the ‘Golden Rooster’ and ’splits’ stances, the fingers are together, and the thumb tucked in, much like Yin bagua’s ox-tongue palm
• During the ‘drunken’ side-stepping, as one foot touches down, the sabre snaps down and up, and the other foot simultaneously rises.

I’m sure there was more, but those are the points that stick in my mind just now!

I had an audience today – or, I should say, several. There were a couple of bar girls looking down from a balcony for a lot of the time, and several Chinese ‘aunties’ stopped and talked to my teacher for some time while I practiced. There were also the usual guys, young and old, who stopped to watch the ang moh being ‘drunk’, and wondering what the heck was going on…

One thing that  my teacher mentioned is that this is a northern Shaolin form (actually, he’s mentioned it a few times before, now that I think of it), and the stepping is slightly influenced by Monkey Boxing (which, it turns out, he also knows; he gave a quick demonstration).

Once again , I’m amazed by the depth of martial arts knowledge available in Singapore! But…. the Straits Times today had a spread about Muay Thai, and how that is really taking off in Singapore. Not that I’ve anything against Muay Thai – I studied it a bit myself while I was doing my first Master’s degree – but it’s a shame that traditional Chinese martial arts are being neglected here. The article compared Muay Thai to ‘aunty’ style taijiquan, and to wushu, which I think is contributing to giving the younger generation the impression that Chinese martial arts are ‘boring’ and ‘useless’. Of course, many probably also think that the serious Chinese schools are ‘too hard’, whereas Tae Kwon Do, and Muay Thai, give visible results very quickly…. It’s sad, but I think a lot of the Chinese skills and knowledge are going to vanish from Singapore over the next decade or so.