and maybe threw a bottle of whisky into the mix… it might look like this Russian dancer…

Joking aside: wow. Talk about fitness!

Updated:
According to one of the comments on YouTube, this guy is called Alexander Medvedev. I Googled the name out of curiosity, and it turns out he’s one of Scott Sonnon’s instructors. Hm, interesting.

I’ve just ordered a couple of Scott Sonnon’s DVDs, as it happens, and I’m waiting for them to arrive. I’ve also been reading up on ROSS, and trying to get my head around the differences between that and the various flavours of Systema if indeed there are any differences beyond internal politics….

As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to learn that double-shashka Cossack swordplay…. if only because it’s so cool The Yang-style taiji sabre I bought is great for its purpose (for which I am using it) but, as it turns out, Tom was right, and it doesn’t handle too well as a substitute shashka. Of course, I could get a couple of short poles and just use those, but that wouldn’t be the same, would it?

So – again, as mentioned before – I’ve been seeing if shashkas can be bought online… There are two options, essentially: a “battle-ready” version from Windlass of India (for some reason, they call it a “shasqua”), that can take an edge:

Alternatively, there’s a display version from Denix of Spain, which supposedly handles like a real weapon, but can’t be sharpened.

The Windlass shashka can be bought from kultofathena.com for a good price, but to be honest it doesn’t get good reviews, either for quality or for handling. I looked into buying the Denix version from gunsandswords.com, but even though their price is really good, the shipping costs bring into not-worth-it territory for me.

Eventually I had my “D’oh” moment. I’m in China, after all, where pretty much everything and anything is made and available. So, let’s see what’s on the market here…

A few moments later, I’d found this on Taobao:

Let’s face it, for less than 30 pounds / 43 US dollars / 60 Singapore dollars, it’s a steal….

I’ll let you know how they handle when they arrive….

I was Googling for more information about the shashka and found this, which I rather like:

It’s from a Systema school in Omsk which, as it happens, is where the Siberian comes from. The school has a website and a Facebook page, but only in Russian; I can read the Cyrillic alphabet, but I don’t speak Russian beyond a few words remembered from my schooldays, so it’s not much use to me. Still, now that I know I’m staying in Beijing, I have been meaning to take the Trans-Siberian railway back to the UK at some point, and Omsk is on the way (and cheaper than Moscow, I suspect!), so if I wanted to get some training in Systema… hmmmm…. watching that clip, I’m intrigued again by the way that ‘Systema’ ie Cossack fighting skills, are intimately bound up with dancing – which teaches relaxation, rhythm, timing, spacial awareness, and lots of other martial arts goodness…

Anyhow, coincidentally, I had a reader request via email today for more news about the Siberian! I’m happy to oblige, and I’ll have to tell her that she’s developing a fan club She’s happy in her new job, working for a very large and important Chinese company in central China, and is about to leave for a week or so to Kazakhstan, on business. However, I think i may need to clarify that the Siberian and S. are different people; I have a feeling there might be some confusion there…. The Siberian is an ex-girlfriend, and still a good friend (I’m lucky, and am still good friends with most of my exes). S. is the most beautiful and accomplished woman I’ve ever met; she’s younger than me but has achieved more than most people (including me) manage in several lifetimes. She’s my good friend and unattainable muse…. (sigh…)…..

So, ahem, moving on to swords: I found that shashkas are being made by Windlass – an Indian firm, suppliers to Her Britannic Majesty’s Armed Forces, not to mention the US Marine Corps, among others… Their shashka looks rather nice, and I am extremely tempted to buy a couple…. They also sell Hungarian sabres, which seem to be the same as a szabla… Plus, as a fan of Serenity, I’m intrigued to see the Operative’s sword….

Tying this up, it seems that Systema RRB, the Omsk-based school, have an offshoot branch in Malaysia, according to this article… Some of my readers from Singapore may be interested in popping up to KL to check it out and, if so, I would love to hear your feedback!

“No balance, no power” – Kong Cheng’s comment on my circle-walking today…

Another early-morning session in Zhongshan Park. It was bitterly cold, with a wind to bring tears to the eyes, but I didn’t feel it so much. I’d like to say that my qi must be getting stronger, but it’s probably got more to do with the long johns.

Once again, I spent most of the two hours working on tang ni bu. I’ll ‘fess up and say that this form of stepping is much harder than what I’ve practiced in the past. I’m forming some opinions about it, but I want to work on them a bit before I write them here.

Eventually Kong Cheng decided I could progress from straight-line walking to a circle-walking… and, basically, I couldn’t do it. This is getting embarrassing. I am fighting not just a long period of inactivity, but ingrained habits. For example, I appear to have settled into the practice of swinging into bai bu and kou bu from the hip, with the leg moving in an arc, whereas Kong Cheng insists on the leg moving forward in a straight line, and only the last moment turning at the ankle. From what I remember of reading up on bagua theory, this is probably the traditional way, in which case where did those old habits come from?

We chatted a lot about the differences between Liu Jing Ru’s style and Sun Zhi Jun’s, but I’m not going to repeat that here – this being the internet, someone would inevitably use it to start a flame war, and I’m not interested in that.

Kong Cheng is off to Japan tomorrow, so it’ll be a week before our next meeting – I’ll need to train hard! We finished up once more with some tui shou, and once again a bit of tui na on my injured wrist.

Yesterday I splashed out on a fairly-good quality Yang-style taiji dao, which makes an approximation of a shashka; just for the heck of it, I’m going to work on some cossack-style swordplay.

I hesitate to write yet again about this, since I have had precisely zero personal contact with anybody connected with Asgarda or the Ukrainian Boyovyi Hopak movement. However, I still get a lot of traffic about it, probably because I seem one of very few people who have made any real effort to do a bit of research (in English, anyway), rather than just copy-and-paste the original article.

So, I just want to add one more post. One of the things that really seems to exercise people’s minds is the suggestion that Asgards is an all-female movement seeking autonomy from men. In my last post about Asgarda, I pointed out that this has been pretty much debunked, and noted that I’d seen her training in a mixed group on YouTube – although at that time, the clip had been taken down. Now it seems to have been re-posted by someone else…

First of all, from the picture set, here is Katerina Tarnouska.

Now here’s the video (which uses a few clips over and over again). Ms. Tarnouska can be seen clearly at several points – and is pretty good with the double shashka!

The original English-language website for Asgarda isn’t online any more. I wonder – was this a joke that took on a life of its own? Was it a university group that didn’t survive the graduation of the original members? (Most of the women featured were undergraduates).

If Ms Tarnouska or anyone who was involved with Asgarda (or anyone who knows them) should happen to read this – get in touch! I’d love to run an interview on ‘the real Asgarda story’.

Don’t run with scissors, my mum always told me….

Seriously… strength, endurance, softness, kicking to horse rider’s height, attacking under someone’s guard, going to ground against a strong attack and bouncing back… I’m beginning to see what the Systema guys are talking about wrt Cossack dancing…

An Amazon. In the Ukraine.

I enjoy reading the photostories from English Russia, and I thought I would share this one with you! Apparently “a French explorer discovered a tribe of Amazons”, living together and training martial arts in the Ukraine….. I have no idea what the real back-story of this is… Perhaps it’s better not to know. I’m not sure that there’s any good excuse for dressing up like Xena.

Here’s the full story.

Update:

Ah, a bit of Googling sheds more light. These ladies belong to something called the Asgarda Movement, founded by 30-year old Katerina Tarnouska, and there are about 150 of them. More pictures and background can be found here.
It seems that they are connected with the movement to rediscover traditional Ukrainian/Cossack dance/fighting which I mentioned a couple of posts ago.

I haven’t had any reply from the supposedly Beijing-based systema instructor; further Googling suggests that he’s actually in Hong Kong. Let’s wait and see. Anyway, the first time I ever heard anything about systema – like many people, I suspect – was in William Gibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition: a character, referring to a Russian oligarch’s bodyguards, mentions that they are trained in systema, a martial art based on Cossack dancing. This sounded unlikely to me at the time, and nothing that I subsequently read about systema referred to it, so I assumed this was a little bit of artistic license from Gibson!

However… last night I stumbled across an American martial arts TV show that someone’s put on YouTube. I don’t know how long it will be there before it gets a takedown notice, so let’s enjoy it while we can. Overall, it’s enjoyable popcorn TV. The second section is particularly interesting, though, because it shows a little of the relationship between systema and dancing! Intriguing… The third section has embedding disabled; you’ll have to go to YouTube for that.

This would make systema only the second dance-based martial art I know of, after capoeira. Anybody know of any others? Also, if I can’t find a systema instructor in Beijing, maybe I should find someone to teach me Cossack dancing. There’s lots of Russians here, there must be someone who could