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…

Cultivation and compassion

An interesting post from Scott Phillips showed up in my RSS feeds overnight: Pretense. Tongue firmly in cheek, he suggests that the real reason we study martial arts is simply because we want to look good. Well, hehehe, that might work for some, but my waistline is proof that taijiquan is not the way for those who want to look buff! Still, there’s something to what he says, though not perhaps in the way he intended.

For me, the study of martial arts is a part of my attempt to “cultivate my person”, in the Confucian sense:

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy”.

Kong Fu Zi

Through the practice of martial arts, and the internal forms in particular, we learn to govern our bodies as well as our minds. Having learned to govern ourselves, we can treat others with openness and respect since, if we truly can understand and control our own selves, we need not waste  our energy on negative emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and so on. Having no negative elements in our behaviour towards others, we automatically  become more likeable and attractive: we are, in fact, cultivating “inner beauty”. So Scott’s got it right!

This attitude reminds me of the answer many Buddhist masters give when they are asked how, if they claim to desire to free the world from the chains of attachment, they can justify going on long meditation retreats in which they don’t interact with any other people at all! Their answer is that to help others become free, they must  have compassion for them. To have compassion for others, you must first have compassion for yourself. How can you help others to free themselves if you cannot free yourself? Therefore, being able to understand, and regulate, your own mind and feelings through meditation is the key first step to liberation for yourself and others.

This takes us back to martial arts. As my Chinese tutor explained to me, the term “wu shu“ is derived from the ancient characters meaning “no spear”, and has the sense of “the absence of conflict”. This is very interesting: why is that?

The most obvious interpretation is that if everyone  is trained in martial arts then there will be no conflict; no-one would start a fight because they would know that their opponent could defend themselves. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the martial arts world, of course, will know that this theory simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny! There seems to be an endless supply of meatheads who just love to fight for its own sake…

I think that the answer lies with the aim of the role of martial arts in self-cultivation. Using martial skills to beat up your opponent, to overcome them with strength and leave them crushed, is a very primitive application of martial arts learning, and really is only the beginners. Don’t get me wrong here: I know from my own learning that it’s far from easy even to master this level of skill, to be able to beat someone in a fight. I’m nowhere near even this level of achievement.

I think, though, that we need to aim higher. We need to use the self-cultivation aspects of our martial arts training to reach the  point where, through our skill, our  understanding of ourselves, and thereby our understanding  of our opponent, we can not just defeat them but also transform them – that is, to defeat them but not harm them, thus demonstrating the futility of violence and the value of self-cultivation. Thus, a world “wu shu”, of the absence of war, is one person closer.

I know that we’ve all seen this idea a thousand times in cheesy kung fu movies, and that it  risks losing its force because it becomes a cliche, but it’s a pretty good reason for studying  martial arts all the same!

As the hero of the “Eight Diagram Pole Fighter” puts it:  “Brothers! We monks should not kill – but we must also defeat evil!”.

The Dragon Must Sleep?

According to the person who uploaded this to YouTube, it’s from a kung fu movie called “The Dragon Must Sleep”. Anyone out there familiar with it?

Everything is transient

Pirates redeemed

At a bit of a loose end last night, with Madam Ge still in China meaning no class, I decided to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

I was really unsure about this… I loved the first film’s irreverence and wit – and I absolutely loathed  the second in the series. I’d heard bad reviews of the latest installment, and so really wasn’t keen on wasting another three hours of my life. Still, in the end, I figured if I went in with rock-bottom expectations I couldn’t be disappointed.

And you know what? I quite liked it. There’s no end to the number of things I could complain about, but ultimately, it had much darker elements than I expected, and the plotlines eventually resolved in ways that – in some cases at least – were emotionally quite strong. I don’t want to give anything away, though! I’m quite glad I stayed to the end of the credits, too.

So, nowhere near as good as the first film, but far better than the second, and with elements of darkness and loss, just as a good fairytale should.

Film Review: Summer Palace

Yiheyuan, 2006. Dir: Ye Lou

I can see why this film was received well at Cannes: it has a Gallic approach to questioning love, life, and what’s it all about, in drawn-out sequences of talking, lovemaking, or both.

Four main characters drive the story: a woman who can’t show affection except through sex, a guy who can’t stay faithful, a woman who won’t let anyone show love for her, and a disengaged man who doesn’t show his emotions. Although there is potentially lots to work with here, the film rushes through events too quickly, without really letting us get to know the characters well enough; the result is that we don’t really engage with them, to the extent that a ‘shock’ death late in the film doesn’t really move the audience.

The action of the film takes place in two broad chapters, with a short preamble that introduces us to the character who is the film’s prime focus. In the first section, the four are all young students at one of China’s top two universities, Beijing University [my own university, Tsinghua, is the other, and plainly the better of the two ]. Here, they cope with freedom, new experiences, and exploration of themselves and their own development. This process of growth takes place against the backdrop of a period of debate and political engagement, that eventually ends with the massacre in the summer of 1989.

Graduating that same summer, the foursome split up. The female lead begins a slow downward slide into poverty and emotional isolation; the others go to newly post-Wall Berlin, where they spend most of the next decade in arty, bohemian circles (what exactly they were doing wasn’t clear). Eventually, the male lead decides to return to China in order to seek some stability in his life. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a death, and to a new encounter with his unhappy ex-lover.

The film was shot on a small budget, and it shows in several ways. In an effort to keep out anachronisms, many of the outdoor scenes in the Beijing sequences are shot close-up; this has the unfortunate effect of giving us hardly any sense of the city – even the Summer Palace isn’t really shown, except for the lake. The budget issue also shows up in some of the sequences during the clampdown on the student protests; some sections here – such as the burning truck – do look a bit cheap. (To be fair, this may not have been a budget issue: obviously, a film touching on a topic which is still officially taboo would have to be shot quickly and without drawing too much attention).

The biggest problem with the film was the pacing, though; it was a bit too draggy, and spread over too long a time period. The repeated use of subtitles to summarize what happened during several years between scenes was a bit clunky, and not particularly engaging. Even so, the film dragged on rather too long; quite a few people walked out of the viewing I went to, and despite my best efforts, my attention wandered quite a few times.

So was there anything good about this film? In fact, quite a lot. The acting was natural, and I certainly know quite a lot of people just like these characters. Each of the two ‘chapters’ was strong. The university period had a very, very strong sense of place and period when the action moved into the crowded university dormitories, and to the student bars where political talk and activism rubbed shoulders with pool games, 80s disco, and folk music. There was a real feeling of idealistic youth discovering themselves and groping to discover the world. The second, more mature, segment, also had strong settings, and the melancholic feeling of getting a bit older, realizing that life hasn’t turned out as we imagined, and wondering what to do about it.

Unfortunately, neither segment was really given time to develop or breathe, and that’s the real failing of the film. The characters, settings and themes are strong enough to work; ideally, this would be two films – a Chinese version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (and I love those films, so the comparison is a vote of confidence in Ye Lou’s basic material).

Overall: a good concept, that doesn’t quite work. I think I would like to see it again, as fragments of the music, of the conversation, and faces (especially actress Hu Ling!) keep on resurfacing. Don’t go to see it with too-high expectations, but do see it if – like me – you’re an angsty thirty-something with an interest in China!

Meeting Master Zhou

I’ve got a cold again; well, more of an itchy cough that’s migrating down to my chest and is probably going to get worse over the next few days. Last time I went out to practice with a cold, it just made things worse and I was sick for a week, so I decided to skip my usual Friday night practice session.

I didn’t want to stay at home though, so I headed up to Orchard Road in the hope of catching Summer Palace, a new Chinese film set in the Beijing of 1989. That was on my mind anyway, because I’d been discussing a video of the Tiananmen massacre earlier that day, and was feeling a bit melancholy about it all. In the event, when I got to the cinema the film was sold out. Here’s a trailer for it from when it was shown at Cannes last year (warning: mature content):

I hope to catch it some other time; if not, I’m sure I’ll get to see it in Beijing when I go in June. Even watching the trailer makes me feel a bit old, and bittersweet about looking back to 1989 which in so many ways was such an idealistic time. A few weeks after the Tiananmen massacre, I took a solo train journey across Europe, arriving in Poland days after the first Solidarity government captured power from the Communists, and missing my only chance to see the Berlin wall, which fell shortly afterwards… Even more, it makes me miss Beijing’s energy and that mix of arty bohemianism and intellectual buzz… sigh…

Anyway, having missed the film, I headed back towards home. On the way, I realized that the Chin Woo people would be finishing their training about that time, so I popped in to say hi to my friend there. Most people had actually already left, but Master Zhou happened to be there. Apparently (I’m told) he is now here long-term to teach with Chin Woo. This was the first opportunity I’ve had to talk to him, so I asked him about the Wuji baguazhang. He is teaching it, and has a slot available to give me classes… As per usual with my martial arts teachers, he doesn’t speak English, and his Mandarin accent is quite different from the Beijing and Singapore versions that I’m used to! So, we chatted for a while; I asked him if wuji was in fact a Yinfu derivative – but, in truth, I couldn’t follow his answer! Anyway, there are still a lot of things I need to clarify – but the opportunity is certainly there to start learning this style… Heheh, he mentioned that I’m certainly going to have to improve my Chinese, but he doesn’t think my low level is necessarily going to be too much of a problem. Nevertheless, it’s probably just as well I’m already talking to a couple of private tutors about Mandarin lessons…

A rare find: Pa Kua Chang Vol 2

There was no bagua class last night, so I had a rare chance to just chill out in the afternoon without carrying around my gear and trekking up to the East Coast. Late afternoon, I popped up to Orchard Road to visit the bookshops. In fact, I wanted to check out a book on software development that I’d read about online, but of course I also -as always – checked out the martial arts sections as well. And boy, was I glad that I did: in Kinokuniya, I found a single copy of Park Bok Nam’s Fundamentals of Pa Kua Chang, Volume 2. This is quite a big deal, I think – Vol 1 is often on the shelves, but I’ve never seen volume 2 before. I did try to order it through Borders once before, and was told that it was no longer available. Even eBay only had a couple of copies, from people who didn’t ship outside the US.

Anyway, no way was I going to let the opportunity pass, so of course I bought it immediately! I speed-read it last night, and it’s great; I’ve already gained a lot of insights, and I definitely need to read it again more slowly. Excellent!

Also on the shelf was a copy of Classical Northern Wu Style Tai Ji Quan: The Fighting Art of the Manchurian Palace Guard by Frank Allen and Tina Zhang of the New York Wu-Tang Physical Culture Association – from whom I recently bought that bagua DVD. I don’t see myself buying this book, as Wu style taiji isn’t something I practice, but it does seem pretty well written – and that makes me more inclined to buy their bagua book Whirling Circles when it eventually comes out…

Some of my bagua classmates went to see the sanshou competition at Ngee Ann City, but it’s not really my scene. Instead, I went to the cinema: I had hoped to see either The Wind that Blows the Barley, or Summer Palace, but the first was sold out and the second wasn’t showing due to technical difficulties. So, I wound up going to see Spiderman 3, which was OK – better than some of the reviews I’d read, but ultimately just mind candy.

Week’s roundup

Phew, well, that was the first week of the new job. As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy – lots of people to meet, things to learn, new sleep patterns, etc etc, so I’ve not had much energy for blogging! I like the new job; it’s really interesting, and so are the people.

On the topics that concern this blog, the most important consequence was that I was too tired to attend the bagua spear class. That was the second in the sequence, and I’d missed the first because I was ill. That means I’ve missed too much, so I’ll wait for the next time Madam Ge runs this.

That reminds me, I lent Madam Ge my copy of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; I must remember to ask her what she thought of it…

It’s been a wet week – an unusual amount of rain for this time of year. I took a tumble while I was walking down a steep slope; the concrete was wet and greasy, and I landed quite hard. For a while I was worried that it was a rerun of two years ago, when I slipped on wet tiles on Orchard Road, and screwed up my achilles tendon. On this occasion, quite a few joints were wrenched, including a knee, but luckily nothing was serious. I’ve been out to practice my taijiquan and bagua in Duxton Plain Park a couple of times, but taking it a little easy while my joints still ache.

On Friday night I was practicing the bagua qigong set when some European (judging by his accent) guy came out onto the back stairs of one of the shophouses overlooking the spot where Ialways go; he was shouting “oi”, “hey you” and so on, trying to get me to move into a spot more convenient for him to take a photo. A**h**e. I’m not performing for your entertainment, and in any case is it so hard to ask politely?

Interesting to see that for the European launch of 300, they held the press conference in Second Life. That’s a little bit of synchronicity; I’ve just joined Second Life myself, as I think I’ll be using it a lot for the new job. I see that the film is stirring up controversy as people (try to) draw contemporary parallels…

300 Spartans

Up to Plaza Singapura last night to watch 300. I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first saw an article about it way back in 2005, before I went to China!

First thing up: Golden Village suck (that’s the cinema chain, for non-Singaporean readers). I actually didn’t have much cash on me when I went to buy my ticket. No problem, right, because I’ve got my card, right? I couldn’t believe it when the girl on the ticket counter said “I’m sorry sir, your card is Mastercard. The ticket costs nine dollars, and we only accept Mastercard when you spend over fifty dollars“. The understanding I got was that Visa would be quite acceptable. In other words, she was quite prepared to refuse to sell me a ticket because my card comes from the wrong international banking consortium. Astonishing.

Anyway, fortunately for me, there was a manager nearby who saw me standing there stupefied, and gave the girl the nod to sell the ticket anyway. I made sure to thank him, but still – if he hadn’t been there, I would have had to walk away and miss the show, because that girl wouldn’t have sold me a ticket. Absolutely unbelievable.

Anyway, the film… Great. Loved it. Heroics, carnage, wonderful atmosphere, tremendous visual style… I’ll probably go to see it again!

However, let’s bear in mind that it’s just entertainment! It’s not the truth. Of course, we admire the courage,discipline, and sacrifice of the 300 Spartans, but the message of the film is a lie, and it makes me a little worried. It’s a fact that some people, in the US and elsewhere, are using this film as a metaphor for events in today’s world, which means that lies have power.

The Spartans talk about freedom a lot. They mock Xerxes for driving slaves into battle with whips, while they themselves are free men. This is a lie; a subtle one, but a lie. They were free only in the way that Xerxes himself was free. The Persian whips and slaves were on the field of battle; the Spartans had whips and slaves of their own, on the fields of grain that we see depicted so lovingly. Spartan society couldn’t have existed without the suffering of slaves. They had no moral advantage over the Persians.

And what was the Spartan society? An infanticidal master race, with no tolerance for softness or weakness, no space for dissent or diversity, no interest in the arts or entertainment, or speculative thought. I wouldn’t want to live there; neither would you, reader.

The film presents the Spartans as the protectors of free thought, resisting mysticism and tyranny, and as the roots of what became Western Civilization. This is also a lie. That role lay with the Athenians – who the Spartans dismiss as “philosophers and boy-lovers”. It was the Athenians who ultimately defeated Xerxes, though, at Salamis. Later, the Spartans, in their quest for power, conquered Athens themselves – so much for “Greek freedom”. Athenian culture, with its philosophy and mercantile focus, survived though – and became the source of Western culture. I rather think that if Leonidas hadn’t gone to Thermopylae, and Xerxes had added Greece to his empire, Athenian thought would still have prospered and, who knows, may have spread throughout, and come to influence, the largest empire of the ancient world…. Xerxes in the film actually speaks truth when he says”he is kind”: the Persian empire was (as I understand it) pretty tolerant of, and curious about, different religions, cultures, and ethnic groups.

I know that this is all very serious, and over the top for what’s just a film. But hey, among my other interests, I’m a history geek, and these ancient stories have fascinated me since I was a boy. Also, when anybody tries to stir up a call to war with appeals to ‘freedom’ and high ideals, I get suspicious.

It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if Xerxes had won, though. Here’s one example: Buddhism wouldn’t exist in the forms we know it today.

Siddhārtha Gautama actually died just a few years before the events depicted in 300. The movement he founded would have continued as it did in the early days, with no change, throughout India, into south-east Asia, China, and so on. However, the first century or so after the Buddha’s death, Buddhists didn’t build statues of him. Historically, that only began when Alexander the Great’s army brought Greek culture, including statue-building, to Afghanistan and Northern India. If Xerxes had conquered Greece, Alexander’s empire wouldn’t have existed, so Buddhism would never have adopted statues – hard to imagine today!