Balinese dance and Stardust

A very pleasant day, spent in very pleasant and interesting company, though I talked too much out of nerves… My Drunken Sabre teacher is still unwell, so we had no class, and I went elsewhere…

After brunch in the World Music cafe, which isn’t particularly vegetarian-friendly, we went to the Esplanade to watch a dance piece based on a fusion of Balinese and Indian dance: Atma. I’m not sure how long that link will last, so here’s the blurb:

ATMA (Sanskrit for Soul), a process-driven contemporary dance theatre production, finally makes its debut in Singapore after performing to full-house audiences in Indonesia for the last two years.

Presented by Maya Dance Theatre, in collaboration with Institut Seni Indonesia-Denpasar, a renowned arts institution in Bali, Indonesia, and music composer Alex Dea, ATMA, is the third and final installation to the End of the Beginningseries that was staged as End of the Beginning in Surakarta, Central Java and Bali in 2004 and End of the Beginning – Ravana, at the 27th Bali Arts Festival in 2005.

The End of the Beginning series explored the birth, emergence and existence of Ravana, the villain of the Hindu Epic Ramayana.The third and final installation of the End of the Beginning series, ATMA, breathes a new life into the story of Ravana, by expounding on the cyclical journey of Man’s soul through transformations, defeat, karmic cycles and the ultimate redemption of Ravana’s soul – Moksha (liberation).

ATMA is created as an amalgamation of Asian dance forms (Bharatha Natyam and Baris Dance from Bali), sound, text and trans-cultural elements and is set within strong contemporary dance theatre design. The body of the dancer is considered sacred and infused with the soul of Ravana; the dancers undergo intense use of their physical self through space, time, and movements to execute the dance of ritual to invoke the ATMA of Ravana, Only entangled in a sudden net of demonic forces……

ATMA will be presented at the 5th International Indonesian Arts Festival in Novemenber in Bali, Indonesia.
For more information and pictures featuring our process, please log onto www.mayadancetheatre.org

At first I wasn’t terribly impressed – a little bit too much modern dance-style writhing around on the floor was in evidence, but it rapidly improved, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was over far too quickly. My companion – as they say in the restaurant reviews – also thought it was excellent. We repaired to the cafe downstairs for a review and further chat, and then sadly had to go different ways.

I headed off to Great World City to catch Stardust, which Suw Charman was raving about recently. I have to say, it was a lovely, lovely film: a great fairy tale. Plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, excellent dialogue, and played straight-faced – apart from the ghosts, of course. Very much a Princess Bride for our time, and definitely, very definitely, a great date movie. I wasn’t there on a date. But I wouldn’t mind seeing it again…

Ankles

 One thing that’s come out of the qigong practice over the last couple of weeks is that I’ve rediscovered my ankles.

Now, you may rightly say: “Look mate, they’re just where they always were. They’re in the same place you left them, viz. between your shins and your feet. You can be fairly sure they didn’t go anywhere, on account of your feet not having fallen off”. These are wise words and true. However: the mind directs the qi, as the classics tell us, and my mind hasn’t been near my ankles for rather a long time – in fact, it had forgotten about them. As a result, they became very stiff and inflexible.

The good news is, that I am now aware of them, and starting to relax them, so that my full weight flows through them and into my feet. This isn’t particularly easy, what with the tendons being very stiff and all that, but it’s happening – and, in consequence, my feet are hurting more than a little as they take my weight for the first time in a while.

“But”, you say, “if your weight wasn’t going through your ankles, into your feet and thence the ground, where was it going?”. The answer, my perceptive friend, is that it was being carried by my knees. “Now hang on”, you say, “does not Bruce Frantzis Kumar, in his most excellent book Opening the Energy Gates of the Body, repeatedly point out that The Knees Are Not For Load-Bearing, and that any violation of this rule will lead to the knees in question ceasing to perform their intended function?”. Alas this is true! Sadly, my knees have already endured a decade or so of carrying heavy packs through steep mountains, not to mention a car crash or two, and so weren’t exactly in pristine condition anyway. Bugger. I hope these qigong exercises are good for Revitalising Knackered Knees…

 Updated:

Good timing – this just appeared on Icanhazcheezburger:

Gun vs axe, axe wins

How amazing: a tiny Turkish woman running a store in New York is held up at gunpoint… Instead of handing over the contents of the till…. she picks up an axe almost as big as she is, and attacks! Who says martial arts training in archaic weapons is useless..? What an inspiration…

Newsday article.

Hat tip: TheCoolerKing at Suicide Girls.

Acting classes @ Substation

I never heard much back from Dreamforest, who don’t seem very proactive in promoting their acting courses, but I’ve just heard from a reader that the Substation is starting a course in acting. I can’t make it, because they clash with the qigong classes I’m taking at Nam Wah Pai, but I post the details here in case anyone else finds it useful. Thanks for the tip, Anil!

Acting Workshop

Introduction to Acting is tailored for anyone who wants to learn the basic skills of acting.

* Venue: Classroom 2
* Fees: $200 (8 Sessions for beginners)
* Dates: 3 Sep – 27 Sep & 1 Nov – 3 Dec, Mondays & Thursdays
* Time: 7pm-8:30pm
* Instructor: Wong Kwan Han

Students will learn the basics of projection, articulation, phrasing, prose and verse readings, physical language, motivation, body awareness, and acting out a scene. Participants should be above 14 years of age. Proper breathing, centering, articulation of consonants and vowels, as well as techniques of reading and acting out loud from a text will be taught.

Wong Kwang Han is a founding member of a multi-disciplinary arts group, Aporia Society. Trained in speech and drama at London College of Music, some of his acting and directing credits include nominations for Best Script and Best Actor Award for Urban Conversation 1 at the Life! Theatre Awards 2001 and Best Staging in the 1993 Drama Competition held at NUS. Throughout the years, Aporia Society has worked with many other theatre companies, performing in the 1990 International Youth Theatre Festival, 1998 Indian Theatre Olympiad and 1998 Shanghai Experimental Theatre Festival. Other productions by the company include Tramps Like Us (1997), Life is An Angel (1998), Vermeidena // A [void] (1999) and City of Men (2001). Kwang Han is presently working on two feature films.

Dazed and confused

It’s been another heavy week and I’m tired. As in, really tired. However… I’m not working tomorrow and, with nothing in particular to do in the morning, I’ll be sleeping a lot. Yay me!

My site traffic is going through the roof, and I’m not able to tell why – WordPress’ s statistics isn’t giving me any clues – why has the number of visitors trebled recently?

Anyway, events in the last week…

- Back to class with Madam Ge, where I also started a revision class in the sword form.

- My Drunken Sabre teacher was unwell, so no class last Sunday.

- Qigong class on Monday night, and this evening were very interesting. The Nam Wah Association is participating in the Singapore Sun Festival. As a result, this week’s classes have been held in the Colonial District, outside the Asian Civilisations Museum, looking across the river to the towers of the CBD, and Boat Quay. It’s been very cool We’ve moved on to more focused qi movements, and to the ‘vibration’ exercises to soften and relax the internal organs. I have a very long way to go here before I even get back to where I was before. Nevertheless, I know I’m on the right path because I’m getting flashbacks to times and places I haven’t thought about for years: an emotionally charged visit to Welshpool; a happily melancholic day at Portmeirion; galettes and mead in Rennes. I’ve already written about how I think these qigong exercises have many similarities with Vipassana meditation, and for me this week’s lesson have only reinforced that. Very encouraging…

So, tomorrow, sleep and random stuff, before heading for class with Master Zhou in the evening…

Perception

Do you see the woman spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise? I see it one of the two; it seems so obvious to me that I can hardly believe anyone can see it going the other way. Decide for yourself – I’ll say which way I see it in a comment – make up your mind before you read it!

I found this in Mr Wang’s blog; he in turn found it in the Australian Herald Sun – where you can also read about what the direction you chose says about you. I wish they’d said something about the origin of this, and whether it has any scientific validity…

Anyway, leave a comment about this if you want; I really would be interested to hear whether other people really do perceive it differently…

Belts, forms, longevity

It’s been an incredibly busy week, but I’ve taken a day’s leave today, sleeping most of the afternoon. Yay!

I went again to the qigong classes at Lorong 7 on Monday and Thursday, and am getting more and more into it – things are coming back to me, in terms of moving my qi around, and working with the body’s energy. Still a long way to go, of course. The stake-standing element of the practice is really beneficial – I’ve had a couple of moments where I’ve made a change to the way I’m standing, and felt an immediate improvement. I think a few very bad habits have developed over the last few years; as I’ve mentioned before, during my MBA, I fell and badly hurt my foot and Achilles Tendon, and by way of compensating for the weakness there, I got into some bad positioning. It’s going to take quite a while to clear these habits, which is why going back to the basics in this qigong course is a good move, I think.

Since I had the day off, I also had a morning lesson with Pern Yiau, instructor at the Nam Wah Pai Association. We started to review my taiji-24 form. This is a modified version of the usual Yang-24 set, and was developed by Wu Tu Nan and Sim Pooh Ho during the latter’s training. It breaks down each move into smaller components, with the intention of highlighting the learner’s awareness and understanding of body alignment and energy movement. Pern Yiau showed me how, in each move that we looked at, the exact positioning would be important during application. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot – it makes such a difference to finally have an English-speaking teacher who really understands the principles and applications Here’s an example:

I took the opportunity to ask Pern Yiau about something I’ve been curious about ever since I first encountered Nam Wah Pai in 2003. This is about Grandmaster Sim Pooh Ho who is apparently the holder of “Gold Belt 10th Dan”. I’d never heard of a Gold Belt, so – as a sceptic – this had always been ringing an alarm bell in the back of my mind, as there are so many frauds in the martial arts field. I was curious – who had awarded this gold belt? Apparently it was an honorary award presented by combined martial arts bodies of Singapore, in recognition of his skills. Actually, as I write this, I just checked their web site, and the explanation is there, but I’d missed it before:

In 1986, the Singapore Karate Federation, Judo Federation, Malay Silat Federation, Indian Martial Arts Federation and Tae Kwon Do Federation jointly awarded the Gold Belt 10th Dan to Grandmaster Sim Pooh Ho, for his mastery and contributions to the world of Martial Arts.

In that same year, the President of Singapore, the late Mr Wee Kim Wee, awarded Grandmaster Sim the Public Service Medal PBM (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat), for his contributions to Martial Arts in Singapore.

So there we are, now I know! He didn’t award it to himself

Somewhere in the conversation, the topic of longevity came up, and it reminded me of something else I’ve been meaning to blog for some time (totally unrelated to Nam Wah Pai).

Back in July I mentioned that a classmate from Madam Ge’s bagua class, and a friend of his, had been discussing martial arts with Master Zhou. They reported back to me that, according to Master Zhou, bagua practitioners tended not to live as long as taiji and xingyi people. Some weeks ago, I happened to ask him about this, via another of his pupils who was translating, and he said no, he’d said the exact opposite – that, all things being equal, bagua people tend to live longer than the others. I don’t remember the explanation he gave, but I wanted to note that what I’d been told, and reported before, was not correct…

Taijigong public lecture

Another event that may be of interest:

Public Master Lecture by Grandmaster Sim Poo Ho: The Complete Art of Taiji Gong – From Physical Health to Spiritual Health

This is the first public talk by Grandmaster Sim on an important topic in Taiji. Many people know Taiji as either Health or Self-Defense, but do not know that Taiji is also Spiritual Cultivation, and that Taiji aims to give one both Physical Health and Mental Health. All these are based on Chinese Philosophical Observations of Nature, the World and Human, and the Balance of the 3. Grandmaster Sim, who very rarely gives public talks, aims to re-introduce these fading concepts back into Taiji, and reinvigorate its practice in the modern context.

Date: Friday 16 Nov 2007
Time: 7.15pm – 9:00pm
Venue: YMS Arts Centre, 54 Waterloo Street

Admission is free.

Registration: 9338 4830, taijigong at gmail dot com, or sharonmtan at gmail dot com.

Taijigong showcase & dinner

This may be of interest – all are welcome to attend:

World Nam Wah 43rd Anniversary Taiji Showcase (with Chinese Dinner)

Graced by Founding Grandmaster Sim Poo Ho, who is based in Kunming, China, but makes a rare special appearance for the event.

Performance of Advanced Taiji by Master Sim Poh Kok, Master Zheng Jia Chun (Taiwan/Kunming), Senior Instructor Desmond Tan and others from World Nam Wah Taiji Gong Association.

Includes Slow forms, Fast forms, as well as advanced defense techniques. Very rare performances.

S$60 including Dinner. Nov 11 2007. Futsing Association, No. 2 Allenby Road (opp. Jalan Besar Stadium).

9338 4830 / taijigong at gmail dot com / sharonmtan at gmail dot com

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Thanks!