A taiji demonstration

The children at my school (CIS Hangzhou - a newly established year abroad programme for the Year 10 students of the Chinese International School of Hong Kong) have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons for the last few weeks with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which has just opened a centre here in Hangzhou.

Part of the purpose of our programme is to help our students develop a fuller appreciation of Chinese history and culture, and taking taiji as a whole-school activity seems ideally suited to that end, as it brings together the spirituality of the ancient Chinese philosophical traditions, the conceptual framework of traditional Chinese medicine, and the physical cultivation required by the 'martial' arts (and our two teachers like to remind us of the fighting applications of the taiji forms, vigorously demonstrating how some of the seemingly pointless postures we have practised can be deployed to deflect a blow or to sweep an assailant off balance).

Many of the students were sceptical or unenthusiastic at first - largely, I think, because the activity has been made compulsory, at least for the introductory course running through the first half of the semester. However, I would say that the majority of them have warmed to it quite quickly, and are often heard to remark positively on the meditative aspects of the practice, on how relaxed it helps you to feel - while yet providing a surprisingly demanding physical workout. 
[In fact, this impression of mine was borne out by the great pride and enjoyment that a team of 12 of our students displayed when taking part in a local taiji competition in downtown Hangzhou a week later, on the last morning before our mid-term break. And also by a couple of vox pop interviews in this video segment on our CIS Hangzhou activities, prepared by one of our students, Jasmine Topp, for inclusion in the weekly news bulletin of our parent school.]

Last weekend, I asked two of the students in my Film class, Nick Berry and Hannah Hui, to film Zhang shifu giving a complete demonstration of the basic sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which we have been trying to learn. We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. You can see the raw takes of these four views on my YouTube channel; (and there's also a sequence of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine a couple of weeks earlier, but in failing light). However, the sequence is more readily digestible in this single clip which Nick Berry edited together.

I am trying to go through this routine at least a few times each day - but I haven't quite got it all down yet. It is challengingly intricate in places. And neither my limbs nor my memory are as strong as they once were....