Schedule and forms
Hello friends,
I have some quick scheduling updates, and then a bit of background about the Chen taiji forms.
There’s no taiji class this week because it would have fallen on Remembrance Day. After that we’ll have four weeks left in the session before the Christmas / New Year’s break.
The Monday afternoon office qigong series will continue until December 14th, but that will be its last day.
Saving the big news for last: I finally have a venue for the evening qigong workshops! They will be at the Fairfield Gonzales Community Association from January onwards, usually at 6:30pm on the third Thursday of the month. I’ll be sending another newsletter with a lot more about that series in a week or two, but for now consider this a save the date.
In last week’s taiji class I realised that there was some confusion about the different forms, so I just want to give a quick primer on which is which.
The foundational form in Chen Style is Old Frame 1, which is also the form we’re learning in the weekly classes. It’s divided into six sections, and so far we’re only looking at sections 1 & 2. It will probably take another year until this class reaches the end of the form, because I think it’s important to spend more time on the fundamentals than on learning a sequence of moves.
Until this year, I had been teaching a variant: Chen Zhenglei’s 18 Essentials. This is mostly a shortened edit of Old Frame 1, which Chen Zhenglei came up with for demonstrations. I thought it would be a good idea to start people with that because it’s a lot quicker to get through the sequence. But when I started introducing some of the longer-time students to Old Frame 1, a few of you said that the transitions in Old Frame are easier to follow. So this year I switched, and Old Frame 1 is now the form for the classes.
I’m going to do some work on the forms page to make it easier to find the parts actually relevant to current classes. But for now, we have:
Old Frame 1 videos and list of movements at https://taijiwitheldan.ca/forms.html#chenoldframe1
Mirrored versions of the two videos: Steps 1-42; steps 43-end.