I've come to a portion of the curriculum at Studio X which is heavily focused on weapons work. The desire to transcribe these weapons forms has led me to revisit and reconsider some of my previous musings about how weapons work might be captured on paper. In particular, I think I was too quick to write off the idiosyncracies of individual weapons in the hope that some weapon-agnostic notation could be developed.
Right now I'm learning how to use the cane, which is what Studio X calls a rattan staff that reaches to the general vicinity of the performer's lower lip when placed butt-end on the ground. From a purely mechanical standpoint its about the simplest weapon there is; there aren't any joints and its radially and linearly symmetric. So, if the reasoning in my last post was anywhere close to correct it should be pretty easy to write down a cane form, yes?
That turns out not to be the case. The cane can be wielded with one or two hands, and there are a couple of grips to choose from in either case. That, by itself, throws a monkey-wrench into things because we don't really have any way to indicate how a weapon is held. And then there are other complications: weapon strikes aren't well-named, a strike can return via multiple paths, etc. All of which leads me to conclude that any weapons notation we may develop is going to be more complicated that I originally thought. So let's look at this cane form that I'm working on and see if we can come up with some insights which might simplify the problem.
First things first, how do I indicate the grip I'm using? I think that depends on the weapon in question. In some cases the grip is implicit; a broadsword or straight sword is only has one grip1. Ditto with the sai; it has two basic grips with well-defined transitions from one to the other. These problem of which grip is being used is simple because there's only one place to put your hand. Compare that with the cane which you can grab in the middle, on the end, or one-third in. It would seem that it we can solve the problem of identifying the grip being used in the case of the cane then we can do it for anything else.
Which brings me back to a thought which first surfaced in the context of grappling, the idea that grappling can be characterized as the bringing-together of two surfaces. If I need to say "left hand grabs the end of the cane" why can't I just do it with existing grappling notation? Assuming "CE" is "cane end" and "G" is "grab" this would be
| CE |
| ⇈ |
| G |
If it does work this would also allow us to indicate a mixed grip:
| ⅓ | ⅓ | |
| ⇈ | ⇈ | |
| SG | RG |
where "SG"/"RG" indicate "standard grip"/"reverse grip" and "⅓" indicates one-third of the way in from the end of the cane. Is that an abuse? Is that too confusing? Does it screw things up in the long term to allow both weapon regions and attacker regions to be the target of a grapple?
On further reflection I think that the general idea is sound, but overloading the grapple notation is confusing. I nominate "↔" (Unicode character 0x2194) as the "grip" operator since it has a reflexive, bringing things together feel. And, conveniently, there's "↮" (Unicode character 0x21AE) that we can use to say "let go". So the mixed-grip example above would be
| SG↔⅓ | RG↔⅓ |
I like that; it's compact, evocative, and memorable. Let's set the grip problem aside as "provisionally solved" and move on to the other complications.
As I noted above, weapon strikes are generally not well-named. We've mostly solved this problem for blocks by noting that all blocks have certain elements in common which can be used to generate descriptive names; is the same true for weapons? Yes, I think so, at least on a weapon-by-weapon basis. Recall that this notation system is ultimately intended to be a mnemonic device for students; it will never be a stand-alone language capable of conveying all the nuances of a particular technique. So we need only come up with reasonably-concise identifiers which are sufficient to prompt the student, a task which seems well within the capabilities of the existing notation system. I do not find the lack of well-named-ness to be a particular stumbling block.
What's giving me more concern are some of the complexities in the actual wielding of weapons. All strikes have a return path, but when you're performing empty-handed techniques the return path is almost always direct; the striking limb returns to it's resting/set/default position via (the most viable approximation of) a straight line. This is not the case with most weapons; the return may be direct or it may be circular with several equally-viable options. In the past I've toyed with the idea of adding a "return" component to the basic "attack" action, but at this point that seems like an ugly hack to me. Returning a weapon is a separate action which happens after the attack, which strongly suggests that it should be treated as a separate action for the purposes of notation.
I think that this approach is best because it accurately reflects how students learn. Students (correctly) think of the choice of return path as a separate decision that is made after the strike itself. I recently spent some time with a lower belt working on a beggar's cane form, part of which involved helping em remember which side the return was on for each of a series of overhead strike. This tells me that writing the return down as a separate step within the notation is the right way to do things.
So how do we designate a return? If we've decided to separate the return from the strike then the return is simply another action that can be written down using existing notation. The sequence "right overhead strike, left return, right overhead strike, right return" is simply
| R | ||
| OS | ||
| R | ||
| OS |
I like that... it's emminently readable, and certainly meets pedagogical purposes. I'm going to play around with this new notation and see how it goes.
1 Not strictly true, but true enough.
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