Forms background, and summer plans
Hello friends,
Today I have some schedule updates and a little background information about the Chen style form I'm teaching.
Scheduling:
Qigong continues on Thursday afternoons, and will until the end of June, except that I plan to skip May 16th. I will remind about this nearer the time, don't worry.
The current taiji session will finish this coming Tuesday, April 2nd, as planned. I had been confused about the venue's Spring Break closure but was able to confirm with them that they will be open as normal. After that, there are two more sessions for which registration is open at the Centre:
April 9th - May 7th, 5 consecutive weeks starting immediately after the current one.
May 21st - June 18th, skipping June 11th.
After those, the Centre usually closes for the summer school holidays, reopening with the new school year in September. I am hoping to come back in September, but that's a long break! If you would be interested in meeting outdoors over the summer, please drop me an email. I'll do a more organised survey about this during that May-June session, for now I'm just trying to get a general sense of interest.
About Chen style and the form I'm teaching:
There are many family styles of taiji, of which Chen Style seems to be the oldest. There are also several branches within Chen Style. I study and teach in Chen Zhenglei's tradition. Several of his cousins are also recognised Chen family lineage holders, so while their variations can look quite different, they are just as valid and authentic Chen Style as Chen Zhenglei's.
The core Chen Style form is known as "Old Frame Part 1", it takes about 15 minutes to do at typical practice speed, and the classic training method is to practice this form over and over again. Chen Zhenglei's biography talks about the many hours a day he spent doing that under his uncle's supervision. When we meet for multi-day workshops we usually start each day with one or two repeats of this.
But it's hard to fit this into a one-hour weekly class! So the form that I'm teaching on Tuesdays is a shorter one devised by Chen Zhenglei, which he calls the "18 Essentials". The first 5 steps are shared with Old Frame 1 and repeated again in Old Frame 2, and the rest is a sort of 'highlights tour' of the rest of Old Frame 1. It was originally devised for a demonstration, and I like teaching it because it gives a good introduction to Chen Style without needing so much time to learn the sequence. I often use it myself as a warm-up before a practice session that focuses on one of the longer forms.
At the end of the day, forms are a training method, but not in themselves the goal of taiji. It's easy, especially as a beginner, to get so anxious about learning the steps that they become a distraction from practicing how we stand and move. So I find the short form useful for making the memorisation part more approachable, so it's easier to get past it and focus more on the how.
I look forward to teaching Old Frame some day, and if you find that the 18 Essentials form whets your appetite I encourage you to move on to Old Frame in due course. When it's time, any practice with the 18 Essentials will transfer well, because it will give you familiar reference points throughout Old Frame.