I went in to Chicago on Sunday to participate in Tony Wolf's Bartitsu seminar at the new venue for the Chicago Bartitsu Club.. He had an excellent turn out with just over 30 students. It was an interesting mix of participants with experienced martial artists such as members of the Chicago Swordplay Guild (CSG) to steampunkers who knew little or nothing about the Arts of Mars.
Tony related the history of Barton-Wrights founding of the club in London and where Bartisu has gone from there. He then had everyone do warm ups with the synergy games he uses to get folks used to working and feeling how they move.
We then worked on some pugilism strikes and concepts and segued into some of the jujutsu set plays. Tony included a number of what I call "Failure drills" where the opponent is able to block part of the set play so you have to move to more strikes or other types of take downs from the one that is originally called for.
After lunch we worked on the Vigny stick set plays. Again, Tony had failure drills in almost all cases to show how pugilism and jujutsu still form part of the Vigny techniques. By the end of the afternoon pretty much everyone had the idea of flowing through the set plays and failure drills with out really having to think about how to use them.
Tony, as usual, did an excellent job of imparting this material so both the experienced martial arts folks and those who had never swung a stick before could participate and learn along the way. It certainly looked like he was going to be able to fill up his six week class just from those who were there .
The venue for the seminar is the new home of the Forteza Fitness, Physical Culture and Martial Arts studio, fortezafitness.com. It is in an industrial space and very bare bones at this point. However, they worked very hard to get a raised dance floor built in three days so we weren't falling on cement all day. I look forward to seeing how Forteza develops with CSG, Tony and others teaching classes there.
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