The magic in the interstices

Interstices is a cool word! Tonight we worked on different ways to glimpse the magic in the interstices. First of all, uke and tori have to be relaxed in order to feel the magic. We warmed up then worked on tegatana with an emphasis on relaxing and allowing the motion of the body to throw the arms into the right position. This also had the effect of synching tori's arms with his body in terms of rise and fall. This tends to make the interstices larger and more prominent. We played with hanasu, only getting through about 2 of the techniques.

From thence we moved into the introductory randori drill where uke holds both of tori's hands and tori gets one free move to offbalance uke then tori moves step-for-step with uke to maintain or exaggerate the offbalance. It was interesting for me to see that different people fell into different techniques but it was the same for each person over and over. Andy, for instance, perpetually fell into tenchinage or sumiotoshi. This turned out to be apropriate because the chain ofthe night was #2 with the different variants of tenchinage and sumiotoshi and ushiroate. It was a cool class, in which we actually did get to glimpse the magic within the interstices. Not only does nothing work, but nothing really does work!!!