I’ve made it to two systema classes in the last month. In the first, there were three of us there, and we worked mostly on ground techniques. In the second, I was the only student there; Mark took me through some groundwork, but we finished early. Mark works as a doorman in Swansea, and the preceding Saturday evening had, by all accounts, been a bit of a warzone; Wales had beaten England in the rugby, and the town boys were running wild. Marl had been caught up in it all, and he was feeling a bit weary….

In fact, he announced the next day via Facebook that he won’t be running the Cardiff classes any more. It costs him a lot of money to drive up from the west of Wales where he lives, and if there are only a few students then he actually loses money. It’s a big pity, but I can’t blame him at all.

So… Fortunately, there’s another systema class in the same location but on Thursday evenings rather than Mondays. These are run by Jeff Faris, whom I’ve met at one of Mark’s classes. It should be interesting; whereas Mark is very much of the Ryabko, and more particularly Vasiliev, school, Jeff has apparently trained with a number of systema people from different backgrounds.

On the topic of shashkas, there was a TV series a few years ago called “Go Warrior”. The host, a young American martial artist called Roland Osborne went around the world investigating different martial arts: Korean Taekwondo, Brazilian Jiujitsu… and Russian Systema.

At some point, someone uploaded the systema programme to YouTube in three parts, which is where I first saw it. I had only recently heard about systema and was trying to find out more about it. I had read in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition that systema had roots in Cossack dance, and these clips online showed me what that was all about. It was from the same segment that I learned that those cool Cossack swords were called shashkas.

There was a lot of really interesting material in those three clips; I would like to have embedded them here, but they appear to have vanished recently. They showed Roland training with Mikhail Ryabko and Vladimir Vasiliev in Moscow – a very interesting session because Tabby Cat is there in the background, and because I hear that Alexei Kadochnikov came to visit; a meeting that I see described on some sites as being the only time that Ryabko and Kadochnikov have met, though with all the factionalism that afflicts systema, I have no idea how true that is. It shows cossack dance-fights, a relaxation exercise with a dropped knife, a fight involving a knout… Lots of really good stuff.

It is in fact still available from someone else as one long clip:

Anyway, I do like to see people rewarded for their efforts so, having enjoyed what I saw on YouTube and learned a lot from it, I decided to buy the original DVD from budovideos.com (especially given that it was on sale!). It took three weeks to arrive, but when I eventually got time I put it into my Macbook, got ready to watch… and was very disappointed indeed. It’s almost entirely a different program – plainly from the same filming sessions, but incredibly lightweight, with almost none of the interesting material.

I simply don’t understand – how could the DVD be so different from what showed up on YouTube?

I don’t know which group or school it is, only that they’re in St. Petersburg, but I recently came across this clip of systema training:

I thought it was interesting because it reminded me of something mentioned on the Martial Development blog a while back: “Legends say that Taijiquan founder Zhang Sanfeng resembled a sloppy, dim-witted turtle“. Watch the clip and you’ll see an example….

Speaking of systema, I find myself wondering about the upcoming summer holiday…. I want to do another, more intensive tui na course here in Beijing, and also go back to Wales for a while. I may have time to go overland, on the Trans-Siberian… Don’t know if I can afford it, though…. Still, if I were to do that, ten lessons at Mikhail Ryabko’s school would cost 270 Euros… approximately 2.4K renminbi… That’s over the course of a week. A very reasonable price but hmmm, expensive place, Moscow. Probably won’t happen. Worth thinking about, though….