First Day of Training at WWW

Today was my first day of training at the Winter Wonderland Workshop sponsored by the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) and the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat (BASSC). It's being hosted at a resort about an hour outside of Chicago, so it took a bit of logistic finagling to get myself here, but thus far it has been totally worth it.

The workshop is 3 days in total, and you have 4 classes a day, with each one being an hour and a half. This morning's class focused on the art of intimate killing (i.e. choking someone to death, maiming them with a knife, stabbing them and/or pulling the blade out so you leave a gaping wound).

After that, the next class was elemental combat which focused on choosing and interpreting one of the four basic elements (earth, wind, fire, water) within yourself, and then adapting it to fencing / swashbuckling style fight choreography.


In the afternoon, the first class was an introduction to further knife work (i.e. cutting angles, targets, etc). And the last class was short staff, but the instructor (who seriously dislikes the way short staffs are commonly 'cheapened' in contemporary stage combat choreography chose to focus on martial techniques instead, drawing heavily from Aikido. Cool sh--.

Unquestionably the highlight of my day was during the knife class. Near the end, instead of just giving us choreography to do, in order to make it more real and really get us into the mentality, the instructor put all of us in a circle, and made us chant 'Two men enter, one man leaves!' then two at a time we entered the 'ring' as combatants in white T-shirts. Instead of a knife, we were armed with a marker. As such, 'cuts' show up on your shirt, and a deep one means you lose. As a martial artist with 17 years of highly diversified ring fighting experience, I know how to move. And as a function of it, I was fairly confident that I would do well, if not win. In the end, out of the 20 or so people in the class, it came down to myself and one other guy (who I found out after was a martial artist of 30 years). Although I had the advantage of reach because I was a lot taller, he was really quick, and he got a stab in on my stomach. With that, he (and everyone else) thought he had won the match, until he stood up straight, and the long black mark starting from the Karotid artery and running across his trachea showed that I had slit his throat in the process.