Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
In the distant past I dated a woman who is a trained, professional dancer. Her main venue was modern dance in its various iterations, but she was solidly trained in ballet and jazz and other stuff I donāt remember.It interest me to and I see parallels between kata and dance so I invested in this to explore the ideas further
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She was also very much interested in martial arts, and I met her when she walked for the first time into the capoeira school where I was training. She joined the school for a while but also had some background and interest in Hung Ga.
She was a talented dancer and could move in some amazing ways, did some beautiful performances. However, there was definitely something of a gap when it came to her capoeira (I was in no position to judge her Hung Ga as I had no background in it). Her capoeira was both stiff and unrooted. She did the āshapeā of the movement/technique essentially correctly, but there was a āqualityā to the movement that was very different and was never quite right in the context of capoeira. Granted, she did not train capoeira for long and perhaps with more training she would have cleaned that up. But it was clear to me that she was moving like a dancer when she was doing capoeira. On a superficial level, it is tempting to see parallels and similarities between martial arts and dance, especially when considering kata. From my observations (I recognize that this is an anecdotal sample of one) there is no clear and obvious connection between dance and martial arts even an art like capoeira that has a rhythmic and musical aspect to it. Comparing kata with dance completely misunderstands both of them, including that āqualityā of movement that I always notice.
I would not look to dance as an avenue to understanding kata.