We had a fantastic seminar with Tony this past Saturday/Sunday! Each day began with exercises from the Wolf system, Tony’s training paradigm for martial arts and physical movement skills. These included fully cooperative and semi-cooperative balance exercises: in the former, partners work together to form a physical system of shared balance which they then explore; in the latter, the exercises shift to deliberate attempts to explore your partner’s balance system and exploit weaknesses. All of the exercises involve warm-up and stretching components, as well as spatial and body awareness components, and safe falling exercises. Towards the end they are combined in a series of spontaneous partner drills. It’s all tightly integrated and proves to be a perfect warm-up for martial arts practice, far superior to anything I’ve experienced previously. (My students can expect to see it incorporated into our regular practice.)

Tony then segued into Bartitsu practice. He began us with canonical Bartitsu exercises, exploring the major components of Barton-Wright’s established practiced (time wouldn’t permit all the canonical materils, of course) and getting the correct practice mastered as well as limited time permits. As the day developed, and we began to integrate boxing, kicking, jiujitsu, and walking-stick, Tony then developed the transitions between the various arts and showed how they were intended for use as an integrated system.

He incorporated neo-Bartitsu in a manner that brought us directly back to the Wolf system exercises. At various points, increasing as each day progressed, we would be given one of the kata or set-pieces to perform, with one partner “breaking” the exercise and the other partner responding. The responses were derived naturally and intuitively as a combination of the balance exercises with which we had begun the day (Barton-Wright was clear that disrupting the opponent’s balance was an immediate priority) and the individual Bartitsu techniques. By the end of Sunday we were performing fairly complicated semi-spontaneous exercises with confidence and skill.

Here’s a photo from a neo-Bartitsu demonstration at the end of the weekend, where we start a drill at speed, I “break” it by changing the expected action into something unexpected, and Tony responds by countering, breaking my balance and throwing me, striking me as I fall, and then belaboring me as he sees fit:

If you’re near, or know someone near, the remaining cities on this tour, then GO! This is a rare opportunity to train with a highly skilled professional martial artist.

I’d like to thank Tony for his effort, energy and dedication – and I’d like to thank the students for the same!

That afternoon, Sergei gave a lecture about Bartitsu at the Maiakovsky Library in the centre of St. Petersburg. The lecture-hall was full. The most exiting moment was the arrival of Nikolai Vashilin, the old master of combat scenes of Soviet cinema, who had devised the fight choreography for the famous “baritsu” encounter between Holmes and Moriarty in the Russian “Sherlock Holmes” telemovie (1979). The old master told about the production of that movie, and said he was surprised that so many people were still interested in his work.

Sergei then demonstrated a variety of Bartitsu walking stick self defence defence techniques against a “hooligan”.

The English Martial Arts Academy and Modern Bartitsu are holding a special one day event on the 11th of April. This will be a full day’s training, covering punching, kicking, grappling and stick work. As a special offer people who book for both this, and the upcoming Modern Bartitsu beginner’s course will receive a 20% discount of the total cost of both events.

Led by Tony Wolf, day one included a three hour introductory class covering each of the core skills of the Bartitsu repertoire and day two followed that theme into the “Bartitsu blend” process of spontaneously combining jiujitsu, low kicking, fisticuffs and walking stick fighting.

Photographs courtesy of Kathrynne Wolf.

The next seminar in Milan will be in collaboration with a savate instructor.

Thanks to Ran and to photographer Ugo Cesare Tonelli for these images.

Instructor Chris Amendola will be offering a Bartitsu class at the upcoming Western Martial Arts Coalition Gathering in Houston, Texas between March 19-21.

BARTITSU: THE NEW ART OF DEFENCE IN 1898

A blend of the “Antagonistics” of Europe (Boxing, Savate and Walking Stick Fighting) with the JiuJitsu of Japan, Edward William Barton-Wright’s Bartitsu was a surprisingly modern approach to personal protection created in 1898. For today’s mainstream martial artist, the idea of being functional at all ranges and cross-training in different systems may seem like “old news”. However, these ideas are old – much older than commonly thought today and Barton Wright’s system provides great insight into just how old.

In this section we will explore the rudiments of unarmed striking from period Boxing (and possibly Savate) and basic techniques of JiuJitsu from the Bartitsu Club (1899-1902), with an eye towards integrating these systems based on underlying mechanical concepts of movement/body-mechanics. “Translations” of these techniques will also be presented for use with the walking-stick or cane. The emphasis in this section will be on Bartitsu as a personal protection system, as opposed to other sportive/recreational applications.

Equipment: Mask, 36″ training dowel, cane, or walking-stick.

The Freelance Academy Press is a new publishing house devoted to the topics of Western martial arts, American and European history, arms and armour, chivalry, historical arts and crafts, and related adult and young adult fiction.

Look for many exciting new media from the Freelance Academy in the months and years to come, including 19th century “antagonistics” projects.

Courtesy of photographer Riccardo Gallino, here are two images from the latest location shoot for the upcoming documentary, “Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes“. Supervised by co-director Ran Braun, these sequences included both choreographed demonstrations and free combat displays of neo-Bartitsu stickfighting. They were shot in the historic Villa Meda Battistero in the Italian town of Canzo.

The fight team included three senior instructors from the Nova Scrimia organisation and also the Italian National Stickfighting Champion, who travelled from Verona, Brescia, Saronno and Como to take part in the filming.

A gallery of pictures from the Canzo shoot is available here.

The neo-Bartitsu stickfighting footage will be edited, with Ran’s guidance, by students at the Prague Film School (one of the world’s leading film production academies) as part of a special project co-ordinated by Karin Bleiweiss.

The Academie Duello historical fencing and martial arts school will host Tony Wolf teaching a two-day Bartitsu intensive on March 27th and 28th, 2010.

Each class will include the study of both canonical and neo-Bartitsu. The canonical material is based on E.W. Barton-Wright’s classic 1900 articles, “The New Art of Self Defence” and “Self Defence with a Walking Stick” and provides a platform for training in neo-Bartitsu, continuing Barton-Wright’s experiments in cross-training between jiujitsu, fisticuffs, low kicking and the Vigny system of walking stick fighting.

Details are available here at the Academie Duello website and prospective attendees can make inquiries and bookings via this page.