New sankyu

Today in class we warmed up slowly because of the frigid mats, skipped ukemi practice, and moved into tegatana. We focussed on small displacements, weight bearing on the medial two knuckles of the balls of the feet, and on falling offline. We got to play with an interesting phenomenon - it isn't possible to fall straight forward without getting off the line. Because our legs are hanging off the sides of our hips, any time we lift one in order to fall forward we get at least a little bit of sideward motion. This hearkens back to my earlier post on some of Rudolf von Laban's and Lisa Ullmann's ideas about three-dimensional motion. It's interesting that it shows up so prominently in tegatana no kata.

We spun through hanasu and played for a while with #2, emphasizing not premeditating the technique - starting off as in #1 and letting uke force you into #2. From there we got to experiment with shihonage and sumiotoshi as uke responses to the motion of #2.

Andy's uke was unable to attend today, so we did his sankyu demonstration by way of each of us doing about a million repetitions of oshitaoshi, udegaeshi, hikitaoshi, udehineri, and both flavors of wakigatame. These we did in kata mode with the pins on the end. Andy has perfectionist tendencies, so I was concerned that he would feel cheated or inferior for not having done a formal rank demo with folks watching and etc... But, talking to him afterwards, he seemed to handle it well. He has the proper amount of time in grade, is improving (dramatically) on his gokyu and yonkyu requirements, and is able to reproduce the sankyu techniques without much trouble - and those are the requirements for the rank. The formal rank demo is mostly gravy. The things that Andy especially needs more work on are the same things that plague me these days - gedanate and udehineri. But, we're going forward together!