Tai Chi With Attitude

A modernistic americanized approach to a meditative traditional Martial Art. Holistic, but without the New Age mysticism, Taoist, yet pragmatic. A completely different, real-world approach to an esoteric and difficult art.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

YOUTUBE - BE A VOYEUR!

One major necessity for the Tai Chi player, is to watch other players, especially high-level practitioners. Sometimes, a question gets answered, sometimes a nuanced mechanism opens a door or a window in the mind, or sometimes, you (or I) are simply doing a movement/posture wrong, and a correction is needed. Or just sometimes, the flow is too fast, or too slow.

I have recently become a fan of www.youtube.com, as it has a lot of great Tai Chi clips.
This first one (as well as the second) is a very old clip of Chen Xiaowang demonstrating a nine minute demo of form one (yilu). It's Laojia (I do Xinjia, I kinda skipped the Laojia phase). When I saw how long it was, I thought maybe I was going way too slow, but the practiced eye will note that some extra repetitive movements have been left out.



This second one is form two (ErLu), about 5 minutes long (this is one that I am DEFINITELY doing too slowly).



SPECIAL NOTE: if you only have dial-up, it's probably not a great idea to view. Upgrade to DSL or Broadband, as it's getting cheaper all the time.