The Ring of Steel - Ann Arbor

Whew! It was a full house with only one practice room available to us. I couldn't even find an angle to fit the 17 people attending Tuesday night's practice! Time for a wide-angle lens!

While Sam and Ken manged to concentrate on practice around the edge of the room, folks lost in the center were on-the-lookout for furiously practicing pairs! I let them work it out to improve their sensitivity to space and other combatants, uh, filling that space!

Tonight's excercise involved memorizing two 5-6 move blocks with intermediate level footwork and fairly advanced stroke production, rehersing for about 30 minutes, then performing the piece. Combatants were to pay attention to focus, intention and acting beats. We videotaped each performance and we'll review the tapes at Thursday night's practice.

Pete Fletcher and Dave Dragun put on a hell of a show essentially reaching full performance level with safety and control.

Blast! We tell people, "No Red Shirts!" Ahh, old trekkies just can't explain anything to this new generation. No, we really didn't loose Michael Gray that night, but unfortunately Mike is headed back to Ohio after Thursday's practice.

Part of the difficulty in training the way we do is that all different skill levels are mixed together. We try to match folk together to in a fashion that will allow both individuals to learn and grow, but we loose a fairly substantial number of folk to the fact that they simply don't get the personalized attention that would maximize their development. Everyone responded well to the performance pressure and we'll be seeing more similiar excercises to improve performance readiness.

Aaron "I can dance" Zollweg demonstrates, um, creative form with the Boken.