Well, after three weeks at East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a new work schedule and an illness kept me away for another three weeks, but I finally got back today (Thursday). This was in a week that I also returned to SCA fighter practice on Sunday and working out with G.A. West on Monday and Wednesday. So my body was pre-fatigued and word when I got there, and I did not slack in the class.
There are certain warm-up exercises moving across the floor that I still can't seem to do as fast as the other guys, and it's a little embarrassing. I hate being the last guy, struggling to get those sit-out's across the floor, as the rest of the class is getting ready to do crunches.
We learned a new way to get out of side mount, of which I will post video soon.
When it came to the free rolling portion of the evening, I was first paired with a fellow with great physical mechanics. He pretty much wiped the floor with me, once he was able to get a hold of me.
Next I fought a member of the competition team who rolled with me when I first started coming to ECU, but not much lately. While he was able to beat me several times, he said that I am getting stronger. Where he used to be able to sub,iot me at will, now he has to work at it. He may be right. I did actually feel like I was able to avoid getting trapped in a submission several time. I specifically found moments where I was saying to myself "guard is better than mount! Guard is better than mount!" (meaning that I should try to get om ny knees with him on his back, rather than letting him sit on my chest)Similarly, I fought hard and maintained half-guard and denied a kimura, and was able to avoid several other submissions.
I sat out one round, and in the final round of training I rolled with someone closer to my skill leve. He tried to pass into side mount right away, but left himself open for me to put my leg in front of his neck while seizing his arm for an attempted arm bar. While he was able to get his head out from my leg, I somehow managed to get his other arm with my legs. I had him in a wrestling hold exactly like one I had seen in a Tarzan comic book!
I didn't really know what to do from there. He was unable to escape, so I tried to twist his arm back, but he escaped. I had him in a few advantageous positions, but I lacked the strength, or technique, or killer instinct, or energy, to finish him off, and he submitted me. In the last minute of the round, I was so beat, that I stole a glance at the clock, When I saw there were 17 seconds to go, I decided to see how little I could do and still avoid being submitted, and succeeded.
When I was done, I felt more beat up than I remember feeling. Hopefully, if I keep my training up, I will be able to fight more before getting that feeling again. some things that bother me: I always seem to get my wrists grabbed by the other guy, and I never seem to be strong enough to get out of it. On m y back, a standing opponent seems to be able to grab my ankles and throw me around at will. I need a more effective escape from guard.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Return to ECU
After spending a few months away from East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I returned to classes a few weeks ago. They have a new location in White Plains, which will save a little travel time.
Thursdays are kickboxing and no-gi night now, though. I've never done kickboxing before. I am comfortable with the concept of a stand-up striking game, like SCA combat, but the hazard of getting damaged and the punching and kicking techniques will take a little getting used to.
In the grappling, I am finding that the layoff did me no favors. My endurance is down, and my technique is rusty. Training without the gi is no big deal, I hardly noticed that I could not grab my opponent's clothes or that my belt was coming undone. I did notice that one guy I was training with seems to be more aggressive than he used to be, and he was always aggressive. I seemed to have a better handle on the technique we were learning, but his killer instinct put me in deadly positions anyway. I think I am beginning to get his number, though...
Thursdays are kickboxing and no-gi night now, though. I've never done kickboxing before. I am comfortable with the concept of a stand-up striking game, like SCA combat, but the hazard of getting damaged and the punching and kicking techniques will take a little getting used to.
In the grappling, I am finding that the layoff did me no favors. My endurance is down, and my technique is rusty. Training without the gi is no big deal, I hardly noticed that I could not grab my opponent's clothes or that my belt was coming undone. I did notice that one guy I was training with seems to be more aggressive than he used to be, and he was always aggressive. I seemed to have a better handle on the technique we were learning, but his killer instinct put me in deadly positions anyway. I think I am beginning to get his number, though...
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Latest news
Since my win I have had about as many weeks not going to East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as weeks that I have. Work opportunities, deadlines, and once simply missing the train kept me away. However when I have gone, interesting things have happened.
There are a few new people in the beginner's and white/blue belt classes. I have been able to use this as an opportunity to try moves that I could never execute against anyone better or stronger than me. At times I have come home thinking I am actually getting better. Then the next class I will spend most of the free rolling time with someone sitting on my chest.
I have learned about opportunities to look for pulling guard. I am getting a little better hip movement from the bottom. My strength training with G.A. West must be helping a little, because after three weeks away, I was able to do a sit-out drill a lot better than I ever had. I even got out of a triangle choke and successfully executed a particular takedown more than once.
My training and grappling competitions are taking a bit of a break, though, as I prepare for the Pennsic War, an event of my other martial art: armored swordfighting. I am shooting a video there.
There are a few new people in the beginner's and white/blue belt classes. I have been able to use this as an opportunity to try moves that I could never execute against anyone better or stronger than me. At times I have come home thinking I am actually getting better. Then the next class I will spend most of the free rolling time with someone sitting on my chest.
I have learned about opportunities to look for pulling guard. I am getting a little better hip movement from the bottom. My strength training with G.A. West must be helping a little, because after three weeks away, I was able to do a sit-out drill a lot better than I ever had. I even got out of a triangle choke and successfully executed a particular takedown more than once.
My training and grappling competitions are taking a bit of a break, though, as I prepare for the Pennsic War, an event of my other martial art: armored swordfighting. I am shooting a video there.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Captain Zorikh wins!
I finally got around to posting the video of the first grappling victory I got on camera!
I will be at the Acom Sports Prestige Grappling Tournament this Saturday in Fishkill, NY, competing and promoting "Hit the Mat" and "Redemption." http://www.acom-sports.net
I will be at the Acom Sports Prestige Grappling Tournament this Saturday in Fishkill, NY, competing and promoting "Hit the Mat" and "Redemption." http://www.acom-sports.net
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Some thoughts on the workshop for "Hit the Mat"
So the day of the workshop arrived and what had been looking promising was beginning to look bleak. Two people who had promised to be there (including one with his girlfriend) got called for work, one got sick, several others, it turned out, had decided to go to Santa Con.
Fortunately two friends came through, and I called on another originally to hold the camera, but he wound up participating in the workshop as well. Then, while we were waiting for the workshop to begin, two separate people literally walked in off the street to find out more about East Coast United BJJ. Jojo Guarin, the owner, was not present, so after I gave them what little info I had about it and told them that he would be back later, I decided to tell them about the workshop and invited them to participate. They both agreed. And while Jojo wound up getting called away on family duty, he was good enough to call in Walter, one of the ECU black belts, to lead the BJJ instruction portion of the workshop.
Walter led the six of us, a group diverse in age, size, and experience, in basic instruction in forward and backward rolls, breakfalls to the front, back and side, and the basic positions of BJJ, as well as how to do a rear naked choke. We then took a short break and I asked him to show us the proper way to do a leg-sweep takedown. We adjusted the takedown to allow the “victims” to control their own fall by executing a breakfall.
After the group had gained familiarity with that move, I spoke a few words about what we were doing here. To me, theater is like BJJ in at least one way: it is about “position to submission.” In both you are trying to get your opponent or partner into a position to submit them to your will. Everything in a play is designed to set the audience up for the emotional climax. If they laugh when they are supposed to, cry when you want them to, and give you a standing ovation at the end, you know you have made them tap out.
So we got started. I began with an exercise known as the “grid.” It involves the performers walking in straight lines and right angles as if on a grid. When two people are about to bump into each other, they must make a choice to engage or avoid engagement my moving on the grid. With these directions, the workshoppers seemed to avoid contact. I then told them to make a choice of an attitude. They could be confident, insecure, aggressive, or even a dick, if they wanted to.
With this new direction, they began moving with more purpose, seeking out engagement. Then I said that when two people came in contact, they could choose to engage in a takedown, and that they would have the option of deciding between themselves as to who would be taken down.
Here is where things started getting interesting. The people’s individual personalities began to come out, frequently influenced by their level of skill. Some people were more aggressive, some were more passive. Some avoided contact. One of them made a point of using as many different modes of ambulation as possible. One of the fellows allowed himself to be taken down each time. I told him to take down the next person he saw, which he did. Then he turned around and someone else took him down.
In a later episode, that same guy got trapped against a wall by three others and went down without anyone touching him.
Next I said that everyone who was taken down would stay down. Soon all of those down ganged up on the one person left standing and took him down.
One of the attendees happened to have their grandfather with them. I placed him in the exercise as a “force of nature.” He was allowed to roam in any manner he wanted, while the others had to avoid him. When once again the scenario led to all but one on the ground against one standing, he was quite effective in interfering with the pursuit.
After all this was done and we took a short break, I lined everyone up and explored some very brief, very simple choreography.
This whole workshop helped me blow through some preconceptions. I had been thinking that the grid would be an exercise in exploring the relationships of bodies in time and space like a modern dance or movement study, and that any stories told with it would be silent and subtly dramatic. I discovered that watching people’s personalities, people simply being themselves, is incredibly entertaining and fun. It gave me the idea that the performers should let their individual personalities shine forth in this show far more than I had originally conceived. Exploring the relationships of the personalities may be even more interesting than simply exploring bodies in motion. In fact, the motion of the bodies can be the tool by which we discover the personalities.
And in the category of “well, duh,” having a group of people do unified precision choreography requires a group of people with skill and precision in the movement vocabulary of the choreography.
There have been further developments in the concept of “Hit the Mat” since the workshop. I will elaborate on them in my next post.
Video coming sooon.
Fortunately two friends came through, and I called on another originally to hold the camera, but he wound up participating in the workshop as well. Then, while we were waiting for the workshop to begin, two separate people literally walked in off the street to find out more about East Coast United BJJ. Jojo Guarin, the owner, was not present, so after I gave them what little info I had about it and told them that he would be back later, I decided to tell them about the workshop and invited them to participate. They both agreed. And while Jojo wound up getting called away on family duty, he was good enough to call in Walter, one of the ECU black belts, to lead the BJJ instruction portion of the workshop.
Walter led the six of us, a group diverse in age, size, and experience, in basic instruction in forward and backward rolls, breakfalls to the front, back and side, and the basic positions of BJJ, as well as how to do a rear naked choke. We then took a short break and I asked him to show us the proper way to do a leg-sweep takedown. We adjusted the takedown to allow the “victims” to control their own fall by executing a breakfall.
After the group had gained familiarity with that move, I spoke a few words about what we were doing here. To me, theater is like BJJ in at least one way: it is about “position to submission.” In both you are trying to get your opponent or partner into a position to submit them to your will. Everything in a play is designed to set the audience up for the emotional climax. If they laugh when they are supposed to, cry when you want them to, and give you a standing ovation at the end, you know you have made them tap out.
So we got started. I began with an exercise known as the “grid.” It involves the performers walking in straight lines and right angles as if on a grid. When two people are about to bump into each other, they must make a choice to engage or avoid engagement my moving on the grid. With these directions, the workshoppers seemed to avoid contact. I then told them to make a choice of an attitude. They could be confident, insecure, aggressive, or even a dick, if they wanted to.
With this new direction, they began moving with more purpose, seeking out engagement. Then I said that when two people came in contact, they could choose to engage in a takedown, and that they would have the option of deciding between themselves as to who would be taken down.
Here is where things started getting interesting. The people’s individual personalities began to come out, frequently influenced by their level of skill. Some people were more aggressive, some were more passive. Some avoided contact. One of them made a point of using as many different modes of ambulation as possible. One of the fellows allowed himself to be taken down each time. I told him to take down the next person he saw, which he did. Then he turned around and someone else took him down.
In a later episode, that same guy got trapped against a wall by three others and went down without anyone touching him.
Next I said that everyone who was taken down would stay down. Soon all of those down ganged up on the one person left standing and took him down.
One of the attendees happened to have their grandfather with them. I placed him in the exercise as a “force of nature.” He was allowed to roam in any manner he wanted, while the others had to avoid him. When once again the scenario led to all but one on the ground against one standing, he was quite effective in interfering with the pursuit.
After all this was done and we took a short break, I lined everyone up and explored some very brief, very simple choreography.
This whole workshop helped me blow through some preconceptions. I had been thinking that the grid would be an exercise in exploring the relationships of bodies in time and space like a modern dance or movement study, and that any stories told with it would be silent and subtly dramatic. I discovered that watching people’s personalities, people simply being themselves, is incredibly entertaining and fun. It gave me the idea that the performers should let their individual personalities shine forth in this show far more than I had originally conceived. Exploring the relationships of the personalities may be even more interesting than simply exploring bodies in motion. In fact, the motion of the bodies can be the tool by which we discover the personalities.
And in the category of “well, duh,” having a group of people do unified precision choreography requires a group of people with skill and precision in the movement vocabulary of the choreography.
There have been further developments in the concept of “Hit the Mat” since the workshop. I will elaborate on them in my next post.
Video coming sooon.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Some background to the Grappling as a Theater Art workshop:
I first got into grappling because I wound up managing a female wrestling team. It started with my girlfriend and I going to fetish clubs and wrestling on the floor. At the time I was also building her up as a model to create action hero for comic books, trading cards, and a website. Soon one or two people had contacted her asking if she did wrestling sessions (where a man pays a woman for an hour or half-hour of wrestling). One of our early clients happened to train in Brazilian jiu jitsu and offered to train us. By this time we had recruited a few other young women we had met at various places into the team to also be characters and do sessions.
We basically made wrestling the “next big thing” in the fetish scene in 2006. We were booked for a few party performance gigs, which I directed. The most notable was something I called “Sadism and Socialism” in which Rudy the Red Rabble-Rousing Radical Reindeer rallied Happy, the Proletarian Worker Elf in rebellion against Mrs. Claus. We even did a skit at the Chinese New Year Celebration at Fighthouse, the martial arts studio where we trained, called “The Perils of Women’s Self Defense.”
The less said about how that wrestling team and I parted ways in this venue the better, but it did lead to me starting to make a short film I would call “The Redemption fo Captain Zorikh.” Before that film was finished, though, two of the featured performers quit the project. So I re-envisioned the work, found a whole new cast and started over. WE trained and rehearsed for 11 weeks, and by the time I was through, the movie now known as “Redemption: Find Out What You’re Worth” was a reality.
One of the things I discovered as a result of that movie was that grappling is a movement vocabulary that, like dance, can be used to tell a story, just like dance. And yet though martial arts have been adapted into dance for decades now, grappling has yet to break though. Also in the stage combat world, grappling is almost unknown (unless you count its uses in Pro Wrestling).
This led me to thinking of putting together a stage show using the grappling arts as a performance medium. We would perform skits using grappling to tell stories or as integral parts of the stories. I thought this might be a good fundraiser for the movie as well as raising the profile of the grappling arts. Life intervened, delaying the completion of “Redemption” and other things. Now however, several things are converging that is making the realization of this dream a possibility.
For over a decade I have been performing with the Faux-Real Theater Company. For the past few years I have been running the wrestling room at the Wicked Faire. I have been working with East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, making videos or them and getting training. Putting all this together, I have decided that I am going to have some sort of performance at the Wicked Faire in February, and with that in mind, held a workshop at ECU BJJ last Saturday to explore a few ideas for this show.
To be continued…
We basically made wrestling the “next big thing” in the fetish scene in 2006. We were booked for a few party performance gigs, which I directed. The most notable was something I called “Sadism and Socialism” in which Rudy the Red Rabble-Rousing Radical Reindeer rallied Happy, the Proletarian Worker Elf in rebellion against Mrs. Claus. We even did a skit at the Chinese New Year Celebration at Fighthouse, the martial arts studio where we trained, called “The Perils of Women’s Self Defense.”
The less said about how that wrestling team and I parted ways in this venue the better, but it did lead to me starting to make a short film I would call “The Redemption fo Captain Zorikh.” Before that film was finished, though, two of the featured performers quit the project. So I re-envisioned the work, found a whole new cast and started over. WE trained and rehearsed for 11 weeks, and by the time I was through, the movie now known as “Redemption: Find Out What You’re Worth” was a reality.
One of the things I discovered as a result of that movie was that grappling is a movement vocabulary that, like dance, can be used to tell a story, just like dance. And yet though martial arts have been adapted into dance for decades now, grappling has yet to break though. Also in the stage combat world, grappling is almost unknown (unless you count its uses in Pro Wrestling).
This led me to thinking of putting together a stage show using the grappling arts as a performance medium. We would perform skits using grappling to tell stories or as integral parts of the stories. I thought this might be a good fundraiser for the movie as well as raising the profile of the grappling arts. Life intervened, delaying the completion of “Redemption” and other things. Now however, several things are converging that is making the realization of this dream a possibility.
For over a decade I have been performing with the Faux-Real Theater Company. For the past few years I have been running the wrestling room at the Wicked Faire. I have been working with East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, making videos or them and getting training. Putting all this together, I have decided that I am going to have some sort of performance at the Wicked Faire in February, and with that in mind, held a workshop at ECU BJJ last Saturday to explore a few ideas for this show.
To be continued…
And finally, I faced "Superman" in the Open Division
Here's my final match at the Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships. I got paired up with a guy wearing a Superman shirt, so I decided to wear my Captain Marvel shirt. For all the good it did me...
In this video, I review my day's performance and say a few final words.
Thank you to all my sponsors for supporting me. Though my score total was lower than I had hoped, it was a learning experience and enabled me to make 5 videos.
The upshot of this is, however, that I have decided that this kind of casual, recreational training is not advancing my skills enough for the months that I have been doing this. If I ever want to be more than a genial goof, I have to get real training from a real academy. Fortunately, East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has recruited me to make videos for them, and in exchange, will be training me. Watch this soace for the results!
In this video, I review my day's performance and say a few final words.
Thank you to all my sponsors for supporting me. Though my score total was lower than I had hoped, it was a learning experience and enabled me to make 5 videos.
The upshot of this is, however, that I have decided that this kind of casual, recreational training is not advancing my skills enough for the months that I have been doing this. If I ever want to be more than a genial goof, I have to get real training from a real academy. Fortunately, East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has recruited me to make videos for them, and in exchange, will be training me. Watch this soace for the results!
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