Using the body - it isn't simple!

[Dale Knepp]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bill Glasheen:
On the other hand, what I find when I vary and mix the movements so much in the drills is that their choices of "style" tend to be quite mature (less stilted).
- Bill[/B]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


When Taika does this type of analysis, he generally has something specific in mind but gets the same results.


<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bill Glasheen:
Sometimes in an attempt to copy what they think is right, the students do things in ways that are a kind of caricature of yourself (pretty scary...). These caricatures get even more bizarre from generation to generation, until the movements get totally meaningless.
- Bill[/B]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


This is what Taika refers to as picking up bad habits from one's instructor. He's said not to learn "my bad habits" before but then he's always had good reason for his bad habits as we find out. But he also mentioned that when he was young, as some instructors got older and developed bad posture from old age that their students would copy these habits and teach them to their students. Something to careful of in the future as we get older.


<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bill Glasheen:
The sooner students get that inner sense of what they are doing, the sooner you get something reasonable that you can work with. With this approach I find that (every once in a rare while) the really good athlete ends up doing something better than me, or in a totally unique way that makes perfect sense. In my mind that's the ultimate complement, and a perfect example of what your instructor calls "the living art."
- Bill[/B]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Taika has always been on the look out for that one student that has the same type of potential that his teachers found in him. They waited most of their life looking for a student like him and then drilled him until he had most of the essential pieces to put together later. They didn't give it all to him "piece by piece." They left some things for him to discover on his own. He told us once that one of his instructors show him something that he could only poorly describe to us because he said that he still hadn't found out how he did it.

Dale