I ran across this today and I’m a little sorry that I’m unable to attend. It’s exactly the sort of event that I’d like to participate in, and if it were happening a few weeks later, I’d probably go to this instead of going to Taiji Legacy 2005 at the end of July. It’s about the same distance and it’s a whole lot cheaper.

I’d be missing out on several seminars that I’m looking forward to, including Jin Cai Cheng’s Chin Na and Counter Chin Na, Al-Waalee Muhammad’s Tai Chi Chuan San Shou, and two Combat Shuai Chiao classes by John Wang. On the other hand, I’d get some extensive experience sparring against players from a lot of other styles and seeing how my Dragon Claw stacks up. I also like the interesting variation on sparring that they use and I’d like to try it sometime soon. I can think of some other scenario variants that I’d be interested in doing as well, stuff like protecting a victim from an attacker or fighting among obstacles (like wavemasters) scattered randomly around.

It’s not worth pining about, though. I’ve got other plans that are too close to this weekend to make it possible to attend. Maybe they’ll do another one of these sometime more convenient. For a few moments, I considered attempting to arrange something like this locally, but then I came to my senses. For one thing, as far as I know there’s no other kung fu styles with schools within a hundred miles of here. For another, I have virtually no contacts in the local martial arts community (aside from my own school) and so have no way to drum up interest.

I passed. I’m not sure if everybody did, but I know that I had no real trouble with any of the material and I think I showed it pretty well. There are some pictures that start here and run for the next few pages. We also got some video clips, but I’m not certain whether I’ll be posting those because of the size. If I can cut them down some to interesting segments and compress the video somewhat, I may put some bits up.