Continuing Steps in Karate

 Kata is not literal; it is indicative. Kata is not comprehensive in its details; it contains the essence. Kata is not linear; but it is cohesive - the different parts of the kata are all inter-related. Kata is not a drill - a drill is not kata; but drills can be incorporated within kata. The trick is knowing which bits of the kata are a drill and which are not.

Last year, in preparation for a unit on Indigenous Knowledge Systems I was to teach to Year 11 students, I read a book by the Australian academic Lynne Kelly called The Memory Code . While I had already known of the concept of orality and how it relates to the transmission and retention of knowledge in pre-literate/non-literate societies, Lynne Kelly's book thrust it right to the forefront of my consciousness. Every chapter I read, I would stop and think (and sometimes say out loud) "but that's what we do/why we do it in karate!"  From reading it, I am now in the midst of a personal paradigm shift in how I view certain aspects of karate, what it is and what it is for; and this blog post is my first attempt at trying to create some order from my thoughts, so I apologise for its disjointed nature.  I think this may be the first of several attempts I make to make sense of how I now view karate, and kata in particular. If you have read many of my other posts, you might ha...

How close to the original is your kata, and how would you know? It is a cliche now that when anyone asks a question about altering/varying a part of a kata they are learning, at least some of the responses will be along the lines of "you should do it the way your sensei teaches you", or "kata are the legacy of past masters' combat experiences - to change them is to lose those experiences", or "you need to do it the same way it has always been done".  All of those responses pre-suppose that the kata you are currently learning is unchanged.  As I've discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on why the kata we are doing are probably not the same as when they first began, this may not be the case. So how can we determine how close to the original our kata is?  I have a number of ideas (be aware this is mostly supposition, although I should be able to rationally justify most of my points - bear with me). I will use the kata Sanseiru and Jitte as ex...

Years ago (30 years ago, now I think about it), I started my martial arts journey in Shotokan karate.  And in that, we did a lot of stance work.  Static stances, moving into stances, kihon-waza while holding or moving into stances, and focus on the stances in kata. I'm not alone - it has been a continual feature of my online interaction with the greater karate community that stances are an important thing to get right and are something that all too often our karate gets judged by.  And there's a lot to be said for a focus on our stances, at least in the initial stages of our development.  How someone stands can tell you a lot about how integrated their skeletal and muscular systems are, whether their core is switched on, how well they understand how to hold their body.  But, the more advanced and competent they become, the less important stances as objects  become. That is because a stance is not an isolated entity (or shouldn't be).  Stances exist as ...