My teacher Mark Raudva will begin teaching the Yang Style two person fighting set known as 'San Shou', '88 posture two person set', 'The Dance', 'the Dance of Vitality', etc shortly. This class will be open to my students as well as his students and to sincere T'ai Chi players from other schools. To enquire whether you have the correct experience and to find out more details such as cost, please go to http://www.thetaichicentre.co.uk/dance.html/ and email from there. The classes are likely to be for about 1 hour from 8.45pm on Thursday nights at Derinton Road Community Centre, Tooting, London starting on 29th May 2008.
Relatively few players teach or study The Dance, and what I have encountered has often been very rigid, staccato and blocky or highly gymnastic. The study of this wonderful interlocking partner form is a continuation of our lifetime's exploration of (to paraphrase from the 40 Yang Chapters in the T'ai chi Classics) meeting hardness with softness, yielding, sticking, adhering, connecting, joining, following... rather than an attempt to bully or control the partner or opponent, which innevitably leads one to disaster.
Mark learned The Dance from John Kells, who was taught by Gin Soon Chu.
The Dance is a joy to study with my teacher, and to practise both solo form or with a partner. In studying it during the last 8 months it has helped shed light on all other aspects of my T'ai Chi. Far from being 'another form to collect', the mindset of which is no use to anyone, the Dance shows me very staightforwardly when I am not yielding, in essence, when I am not practising T'ai Chi principles. When we are not practising principles, we may well be moving about very vigourously, but we are not practising T'ai Chi...
There is a great clip on the resources section of http://www.thetaichicentre.co.uk/ of Mark and his top student Duncan doing The Dance (with gentle intent, as it is Duncan's first ever run all the way through that got caught on film that night).
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