Demo time!

So one of my co-workers has asked me to do a Kali demo for a cultural event (That's what I get for wearing my MA sweatshirt to work, LOL). I'm actually pretty excited about it, but I'm also really nervous and don't really now where to start, as I've never done this type of demo before. She asked for about ten minutes, and it will probably be just me and one other FMA friend doing the demo. I know that realistically, after almost ten years of Kali, I know enough information to fill up ten minutes, but it still seems like a really long time...

I'm thinking two important things to find out are how much space we'll have and what kind of floor. If it's a lot of space, we could include some running sets, whereas if it's a tight space, not so much, and if it's carpet I'll include some takedowns, but if it's concrete, probably not.

All thoughts, feedback, and suggestions are appreciated.

btw, the demo's not until May, so I have plenty of prep time, but I want to get started now.

 

Nothing makes people happier than seeing the red stuff, use real knives. (Totally joking, don't do this).

 

I'm doing something similar soon myself. I'm going to bring in different types of stick (rattan of various lengths and widths, kamagong, etc.), a training blade that replicates the bolo used by the Philippines Scouts in WW2, etc. I'm going to demonstrate some of the strategies used in the three ranges (largo, medio, and corto), show the translation from blunt to bladed to empty hand, talk about some of the terminology, do some basic abecedario and footwork drills, etc.

If it's a cultural event, and you're comfortable doing so, try and tie the culture in wherever you can.

 

Time to get serious about this, as it's coming up in just over a month! I've been thinking about it a lot, but last night me and my demo partner (who incidentally is also my Jun Fan teacher) finally got around to start working on the physical part.

I'm thinking we'll start with some double stick stuff, then disarm each other of one stick and each pull a knife so we can go into stick & dagger. Not sure yet how we're going to transition into the other areas I want to show some of: single stick; single dagger; and empty hand.

The unfortunate thing is that we can only demo and not let the audience participate, due to insurance issues with the group putting on the event. I'm still planning to explain a bit of what we're doing & why, but obviously in a slightly different manner than I would for an actual FMA class.

Anyway, I'm excited (and nervous!) to be working on it. My partner and I are going to Guro Inosanto's seminar in Indiana on the 13th & 14th, so I'm sure that will be inspirational. It's been about five years since I've made it to one of his seminars.

 

Angles. Show angles and transitions from stick to knife to hand and what i speaks about in terms of how culturally, filipinos try to be adaptive and adoptive.

 

Thanks for the feedback, Shooto.

I've been somewhat burned out on martial arts for several years, but now that I'm getting down to the brass tacks (or aluminum knives ) of what to show in this demo, it's starting to become fun again. I hope I can sustain this feeling for a while.

 

About five hours until showtime! I would have liked to get a little more practice in, but we're still going to nail it. My demo partner & I had to stop practicing last night, because the part @ the climax, where she rapidly disarms a bunch of daggers that I come at her with, was in danger of disrupting the kids' class that was happening @ the time.

 

Good luck & let us know what you did and how it went!

 

Seconded!

 

Good luck also!

You can try to do a Sinawali or two. And transition to circling and then going onto your back, and during that whole time not stopping. Then you get up and the next person on their back, again not stopping haha. Those never cease to wow a crowd. Uhm, a simple sinawali is fine, like a high sinawali, (like the heaven and earth one in the video in the General section, the one that has the stuff about music, but all the strikes are all to the top. Different names usually per style, like the Heaven and Earth Sinawali is called High Low Sinawali for us. Just to clarify what a high sinawali is, and why I call it that, some styles like to call it differently, just to avoid any confusion incase you call it something else from what we call it). We do this a lot in demos and they're pretty fun to do, and also not too difficult, it's the getting up part that is usually hard. Just pretend to do a sit up, and use the foot formation that most rolls use to get up. Looks hard to an audience, not too hard for practicioner.

 

Short version: it went well!

TL;DR version: My friend Bear and I did a Kali demonstration as part of the opening celebration of Asian Heritage Month at the Chicago Public Library's Beverly Branch. The Beverly area of Chicago is almost as far away from my neighborhood as you can get and still be in Chicago, so Bear and I made sure we had lots of travel time. That worked out fine, and we got there about an hour ahead of time. This was good because it gave us a chance to see the actual space where we would be performing and practice there a little bit. We had a good-sized floor area. The floor itself was thin carpet over concrete, so harder than I'm used to falling on, but I only had to take two falls.

A bit later a guy came in and was setting up a TV camera and lights, which, honestly, freaked me out a little bit. By this point I was pretty confident about performing for the live audience, but I'm unaccustomed to being filmed. Turned out the guy was from the local public access TV station. So the whole event, including our demo, will be on cable TV in a couple weeks, but only in Chicago. Either channel 19 or 22, I think he said.

So it was time for the thing to start and Bear and I went to wait in the green room, which was actually a beige hallway . We were on fourth, after a Korean singer, an Indian dancer, and a few other acts I forgot. At this point I was freaking out a little bit, so I told Bear "I'm here to promote the art and I'm just not going to worry about the unexpected TV camera," which worked. We did some hubud while we waited.

Then I went out and gave a short speech about how Kali, Arnis and Eskrima are general terms and similar to how there are many different dialects of Filipino language, there are many different styles of Kali. I explained how the specific style we do is called Inosanto-Lacoste Kali and why. Told them a little bit about how traditionally Kali is taught weapons-first and why. Thanked our teachers, and then we did thing.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Bear and I made a conscious decision that since we were doing this for the general public and not an audience made up of martial artists, rather than going full-tilt boogie we would go relatively slow so hopefully people with no experience watching martial arts would be able to see what was going on.

We started with the short version (four-step rather than twelve-step) of the Inosanto-Lacoste salutation. First we did double stick: I fed her I-L angles 1-5 right-handed and she guntinged, then she fed me those angles alternating hands & I guntinged. Incidentally we each hit the other in the hand during this exchange, but neither of knew we'd hit the other until afterwards. Then we did a series of walking sinawali patterns. At each end of the pattern we'd exchange overhead hits & roof blocks. We did the first four patterns on our feet and the last two from our knees. Then we rose, did a little hi-lo-hi, and then she fed an angle 1, which I was supposed to inside deflect, which I half-did, but somehow my right stick ended up on the outside or her stick, rather than inside. I managed to get my stick back to position to deflect the incoming blow with her other stick. Then I did a strike and she disarmed my right stick. Did a little more hi-lo-hi, me left-stick-only vs. Bear's double stick. Then I switched my stick to right hand and disarmed her left stick. We both pulled the (training) knives from our waistbands so we were in stick & dagger mode. We did a few variations of the weave, then she disarmed my dagger and tied up my stick. I pulled another dagger from behind my back and she tied me up into the "pool cue" position. Then I tied up her stick & dagger into the "matador" position, disarmed her stick, and set the sticks aside.

We switched our knives to our right hands (yes, ideally we should be ambidextrous with Kali techniques, but bluntly we're not), and did a very brief bit of knife sparring mainly to get us into knife-tussling position. Did a few techniques there, then Bear broke free, we switched to pikal/ ice pick grip and did a few rotations of knife hubud. With the cool stuff, of course, not just the basic structure. She then fed 1-5 which I guntinged and then disarmed her, and then she did the same to me, but she was empty-hand vs. knife.

Knifeless at that point, we went into Panantukan, doing a few techniques showing off the body manipulations, "extra" hits, etc. At the end she did a (please excuse my phonetic spelling) puter kepala on me, then once I was down, she stomped (thankfully not actually stomping my face), and went to Kali arm-bar and transferred to Kali ooma palata (I have no idea what the Kali term for "ooma palata is). At this point, I crawled off into the corner, Bear did some tiger walks to keep the attention on her while I loaded my waistband with all the training daggers I have, which is about a dozen. I loudly flicked the balisong around so she'd know I was coming and then it was (relatively) rapid-fire disarm time. As she was disarming one dagger I was already pulling the next one. She took my last knife and did a wrist lock takedown, and that was that. We both felt it looked better to have the five-foot-two woman best the five-foot-ten man than vice verse. We did our salutation again and picked up the knives we'd scattered all over the place. We got a lot of applause, so I think people enjoyed it.

What I was really happy about was that afterwards, several people told me that my speech was interesting and informative. When prepping, I was worried that people would be bored with that part. I realized afterwards that I'd left out a couple points I wanted to make, such as the difference between rattan sticks and kamagong or bahi sticks, and that we have some exotic weapons like the sarong. But people still probably came away knowing more about Kali than they did before the program.

And this has taken WAY longer to type up than I expected, so I'm signing off for now.

 

Ooh, but two more things:

At one point Bear ran me into the piano bench that was there for the singer's accompanist, but we managed to not mess up because of it.

Also, based on the comments we got, as we suspected it did still look fast to the audience even though we weren't really going fast.

 

Congratulations! Sounds like it went really well, and you kept calm despite the audience and tv crew...

I know what you mean about the Kali "ooma palata", we call it "face down chicken wing with the leg", or Chieftain Series number 12 (I think)... Either way, I bet you made it look good!

 

That's excellent E-Rocker! Congratulations!

 

Hoorah! Gumagalang!

 

Thank you all! I don't have access to the video that was taken, but I do have one picture. I'll try to post it when I get home.

 

Well, the event is on Youtube now, so I'm about to attempt to embed it. Our part starts around the 39 minute mark and ends around the 46 minute mark.

I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms that may come up, so let me go ahead and address some:

Like I said up-thread, we were going deliberately slow for the audience's sake.

I know not everyone agrees with the history of the art as taught in Inosanto-Lacoste Kali, but that's the history I'm familiar with and was confident passing on.

I know the sinawali section is really sloppy-- I think there's an entire six-count where our sticks don't hit at all. That's my fault for not practicing enough and for being nervous. I also know I'm not doing it right when I go backwards on my knees- shouldn't have both knees down @ same time.

I know in Bear's solo section that some of what she does is more Silat than Kali, but in the empty hand part of Inosanto-Lacoste Kali it's often unclear where Kali ends and Silat starts, so we decided to just not worry about it. She was really just killing time while I gathered training daggers.

I'm not sure why Bear did the pseudo-Japanese bow to me after we did our Kali salutation at the end, but since she did it, I did it back, and since I bowed to her, I bowed to the audience as well. It seemed appropriate in the moment. I'm guessing she did it because that's what we do in our mixed-arts classes.

And finally, yes, I know I need a haircut .

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9mYB-VjLu4"]Celebrating Diversity: Asian/ Pacific American Heritage - YouTube[/ame]

 

I don't have any experience in kali, so I can't critique the finer points. However, it looked quite well executed and didn't have as much of the stiff "scripted" feel that many demonstrations do. Is that improvised or was it planned out beforehand?