First of all, I'm really blown away by the sharpness of the MA understanding revealed in this thread—this is one of the shrewdest series of posts I can recall since I started MT. Everyone is coming at some basic (and all too often overlooked) truths about kata from different angles.
I know what you're referring to -- or at least think I do. But what I'm meaning when I say "drawn into" is that I want to see something, quickly, that's going to hook my attention into that form, and that makes me think that the person doing it is really fighting someone that I just can't see. I've seen way too many flashy forms, with dazzling movements and acrobatics... but the performer was just going through motions. They lacked that essential element of focus. Varying rythm definitely helps... but there's more to it. I've seen forms done very slowly, but so clearly that you couldn't help but visualize the victim in the performer's hands. That focus pulls you into and along the form as you're watching and judging. Without it -- especially if it's the 8th or 9th time that day you've seen someone do that form! -- it's hard to really maintain your focus and judge on more than the first and last couple of movements... Or at least I think so!
It's very interesting that you put it like this, because it captures something I've long believed: that when you perform katas/hyungs as part of your workout, you should be performing them according to their combat applications. That is, you should be doing not just the movements but the
moves—seeing the down block you're doing as say a hammerfist strike to the trapped assailant's forcibly lowered head, or that pivot not just as a 180º turn, but as the crucial rotation of a well-executed
throw. And what you're saying, jks, is that as a judge you're looking for some signs of combat understanding from the contestant. Not ballet-perfect fluidity and balance, but evidence that the movements being carried out are being visualized as parts of a realistically imagined combat event that the defender is engaged in. If this were more generally the case with tournament judges, it would I think have a tremendously beneficial effect on the MAs in general: people would
have to think about forms as guides to strategic and tactical aspects of actual combat. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of tournament judging, you're very much in the minority here. Most judging seems to look for technical competence plus dramatic effect, rather than martial insight into the way forms can be insightfully applied for CQ self-defense. That may change up the line; I hope so...
That comes through especially in open karate competitions that feature freestyle "forms". There's little of martial value being presented in these kinds of demonstrations. The only idea is to look like Jet Li. You end up with a bunch of kids floundering around to the strains of Mortal Kombat's soundtrack while they do wildly impractical stuff.
That's great and all, but some times substance is a better thing to have under your belt.
The problem is that these kinds of forms have essentially no relation to the practical realities of close-range fighting—the problems that the kata were originally constructed as solutions for. When kids aren't taught the bunkai for kata, or even told that there
is such a thing, it's pretty natural that they figure that kata are just skill demos, and pretty tame ones at that—they can come up with
way cooler looking movements. So stuff that belongs in skateboard competition gets hauled into the kind of pseudo-kata you're talking about, promoters look at what's happening, see there's an audience and a clientele that they can market to, and presto, you get do-it-yourself kata in XMA-type competitions all over the place. By now, we're so far from self-defense
substance, to use your term, that we might as well be looking at a martial ice-dancing event...
My 26 years of MA experience is heavy in the combat aspect. However, my 10 year old daughter currently is attending a school that generally de-emphasizes combat in favor of tournament competition. When she and I work out together I try to focus more on the defensive applications of her art. I expect that at some point (when she tires of the rush of tournament competition) the combat/self defense aspect will be all we focus on.
It's great that you can give her the kind of insight about the SD content of the MAs. It's depressingly true that a lot of TKD schools, and probably an increasing number of karate schools, take tournament sparring and forms choreography as the
First, understand that kata was never meant to be a performance art or competition vehicle. Many people today seem to look at it that way, but that's definitely NOT was it was originally intended to be. Kata was sort of the repository of real fighting techniques found within a system's curriculum. Learn the kata, and you have learned the curriculum of the system. And as Exile points out, these fighting techniques are often brutal, and seldom beautiful. I would go so far as to suggest that in past generations, kata was probably held as something of a secret. After all, it is the textbook of your fighting method. If you go around showing off your kata, your enemies might figure out what you know, and figure out how to defeat you.
I think the secrecy aspect was
extremely important, to an extent that we have a hard time imagining these days. Kata weren't just compressed knowledge, but
privileged knowledge, that only masters and their most trusted students fully understood; take a look at Gennosuke Higaki's new book
Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi for some eye-opening historical observations on this point. Higaki's own master, Shozan Kubota, was exposed to bunkai by Funakoshi that the latter was not supposed to share with any of his Japanese students. He seems to have deviated from this `gentlemen's agreement' with his fellow Okinawan karateka in a few cases, but mostly what Higaki calls `the secret pact', an understanding shared by the Okinawan expats with their own masters back on the island, was honored.
It is a more recent phenomenon, along with the advent of tournaments where people compete for a plastic trophy painted to look like gold, where kata became a focus of performance and competition. People started showing off their kata, in hopes of earning the praise of the judges, so they can take the trophy home. It soon escalated into a "One-Upmanship" competition. Many traditional kata are not very pretty, or interesting to watch, if you don't happen to already understand it thoroughly. Again, the old masters who developed them never intended them to take center stage in a performance or competition. They didn't give a rat's butt about impressing a judge with "performance". They only cared that the kata contained a log of their effective techniques.
Very nice way to put it! That's exactly what kata were, and still are.
... In about the early 1980s, a phenomenon began to develop wherein people developed their own "creative" kata. The purpose of these kata was only for competition, impress the judges and the spectators. Fighting technique was freely compromised in favor of flash, glamour, and outlandish nonsense that would actually get you killed if you tried to do it in a real self-defense situation. This is where the arts have become purely performance, and have actually split from the traditional fighting arts. Some of these competitors are amazing athletes, but like I stated earlier, they are most definitely NOT doing a real fighting art. They are champions of showboating.
So you can still go to a tournament and compete in the traditional kata. But there are a lot of influences in competition that want to twist and buckle and change kata into something that it was never meant to be. So if your son wants to compete, that is certainly a legitimate avenue within martial arts that he can travel down, but he may be abandoning all practice of the real fighting arts. It's a road often laden with land mines, and you gotta make sure that is what you want, if you go in that direction.
Some people like to believe that competition is somehow the Grand Ultimate Pinnacle of your training. I personally don't believe that in the least. Competition can be fun. It's a chance to meet other people, and see what they are doing and it can be interesting to see things that are different from what you are doing. Just understand what it is, and don't lose perspective.
Excellent advice and a very good perspective on competition. The problem with competition is, I think, our built-in inclination to think that it weeds out lesser quality and leaves only the best. Not so: what competition elevates depends pretty much entirely on the preconceptions built into the rules of the competition in the first place. MA competitions very clearly exclude practical utility, the very reason these arts came into being in the first place, and elevate a kind of aritificial stylized competition criterion which has no organic connection to the kind of thing kata actually are—records, or `logs', as you say, of effective combat technique. This kind of case shows that competition doesn't reward superior quality, but rather those performances which most reflect the assumptions behind the competition scoring system.
I have to agree with both FC & exile, here...there are 2 ways of doing forms. A traditional way: keeping in mind SD boon hae (bunkai for our Japanese-minded friends) & a flashy way designed to "one up" the next competitor. They have certainly come a long way with the later in the last 15 years. I can't say it's all bad: it certainly draws out the incredible athleticism of the performers.
I was not impressed at all with these folks as MA-ists until I met Daniel Sterling. Daniel is a young (28, I think) multi-world title holding champion in "open-style" forms. I met him at the ational conference of the TKD organization he & I belong to. We are a traditional TKD organization, but are branching out into the XMA-type styles. In his seminar, Daniel impressed over & over that if our fundamentals aren't good, neither would our "flash-style" forms. For Daniel, anyway, good technique & good boon hae are essential to this type of forms competition. I wish it were true for everyone.
Again, this seems quite rare, along the lines of jks' judging criteria. Mostly the robustness of the applications associated with a kata are not what competition rewards. If this becomes a common view among XMAists, then it could ultimately have a beneficial effect...
... but as things stand now, it's pretty clear that something is seriously lacking in the way kata are treated in current MA practice. If you look over the threads about the utility or value of kata during the past year on MT, what's striking—to me anyway—is how many folk have just got the basic idea of kata plain wrong, and have no inkling of what they're there for. And to me that means that the fault is in the dojos, dojangs and the rest of the MA educational system. People are inevitably going to knock something that they don't understand, especially given it tends to be presented, packaged and marketed as a kind of artificial choreographed folk dance with vaguely violent movements. Unfortunately, a good deal of the way forms competition works tends to reinforce that impression...
