One of the things that I really like about Studio X is that weapons work is part of the core material and not an occasional adjunct. As a result I now have weapons forms to memorize, some of which are proving to be challenging. So now seems to be a good time to start thinking about developing a vocabulary for weapons forms.
There's good reason to be skeptical about the idea of a single, a unified vocabulary which encompasses the vast menagerie that is kung-fu weaponry. Even if we confine ourselves to only the most frequently used weapons there's a still tremendous amount of variation. That said I want to take a stab at it and see if we can up with something which is good enough for our purposes.
Based on my experience, when it comes to mechanics everything is ultimately a stick1:
| Symmetric | Asymmetric | |
|---|---|---|
| Solid | Staff, headless cane, escrima | swords, spears, kwon-dao |
| Jointed | nunchaku, 3-section staff | 9-section whip |
Some are one-handed, some are two-handed, some are sharp, some are not. Some slash, some stab, some bludgeon. But you can generally capture the motion of the weapon by accurately describing the position of the two ends through time. Moreover, its usually even simpler than that. Each weapon has a standard repertoire of strikes, so I suspect the vast bulk of the time you can get away with using standard symbol, the same as hands and feet. Where things start to get tricky, in my estimation, is in the notion of the return path.
Technically punches and kicks also have a return path, a motion that follows the delivery of the strike/block to prepare the limb for further actions. But it's almost always the case that there's only one correct return path for any given strike/block; the exceptions are so far and few between that they don't merit concern. With weapons, on the other hand, there may be a number of options, each of which has implications for which follow-up strikes are possible. Thus it seems to me that the first step in expanding the notation system is to find some way to represent the return path.
Recall that the complete grammar for a strike/grapple is
where the direction and target are usually implicit and thus omitted for the sake of brevity.
The logical extension of the above is to place a symbol after the target which indicates the type of return to execute, since the return happens after delivery of the strike. If we adopt this convention, however, it suddenly becomes necessary to specify the direction and target of every strike (even if these are otherwise implicit) for which we wish to indicate a return path. This may be required for the bulk of the strikes in a weapons form, leading to the inclusion of a lot of redundant data and unnecessarily decreasing the readability of the final form.
This argues that we should find a way to record the return path without necessarily needing to specify the direction or target. The solution which immediately springs to mind is to use the '+' symbol like so
where the return identifier is up to the discretion of whomever is using the notation.
Consider the headless cane; an overhead strike can be returned directly, using an inside loop, or an using outside loop. These could be recorded as "OHS+D", "OHS+I", and "OHS+O"; quick an easy.
I'm by no means completely sold on this, but I think it shows promise. I'm going to try to record a staff form and see if I run into any difficulties.
1 This generalization seems to apply across the bulk of MA weaponry, but there are obviously some exceptions: tonfa, wind and fire wheels, bench, tiger head shield.
2 While "inside" and "outside" are correct from a technical standpoint they're also relative directions; I'd probably use "left" and "right" in production to aid comprehension.
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