Aikido
While in Seattle, I had the opportunity to stop by a couple of aikido dojos around lunch time, to see what was offered in the area. I would have prefered to have gone to a judo club, but only the aikido guys had anything scheduled for the early afternoon when I was free.
The first place I sent was Two Cranes Aikido. They actually didn’t have a class that day, but there were brown and black belts doing exercises. Everyone seemed friendly (though everyone is relatively friendly in the smiling/waving sort of way on the West Coast), and I watched for about twenty minutes.
Their movements are arguably prettier to look at compared to what we do: more circular, and a tendency not to have uke thud on the ground at the end of techniques. There were a couple of techniques that seemed to require more “cooperation” from uke: something with a shomen strike and tori entering to be behind uke, and then both turning to face each other for the completion of the technique. I wouldn’t have assumed that uke would turn without contact, though, on the other hand, if uke doesn’t turn around, so much the better. There was also a bit of body bending when getting out of the way of shomen, where tori would bend over to the side, or turn the hips and bend backwards. This happened on a couple of techniques with a tori wearing a hakama. This is different from what we would do, where maintaining posture and not bending (backwards!) so early in the entry are signs of good technique.
The other dojo I went to was Tenzan Aikido at the Seattle Holistic Center. This was a big place: it’s the largest mat I’ve seen, complete with very high ceilings. From the signage at the Holistics Center, they offer a lot of yoga classes, which must help pay the bills in a way a dedicated dojo may not. The main instructor wasn’t there, but I got to take a class in my sweat pants and t-shirt. By the time the class started, there were three or four more senior students (one in hakama, the others wearing white belts but relatively experienced), along with me and a white belt who was taking her sixth or seventh class.
The class was a bit over an hour long: warm-ups/stretching was very yoga-like (assuming my limited yoga experience at the gym is any guide) and not particularly physically challenging. Then we walked around in suwari for a few minutes, which is useful practice, if only to save myself the embarrassment of stumbling up to shake sensei’s hand after a test. Then we did ukemi, which, as far as I could tell, consisted of just forward rolls for this class. Since I didn’t know how they did forward rolls, I volunteered to go with the newbie white belt for instruction while the other students rolled around.
Their rolls put the hands down around the front foot, leading hand’s palm down, fingers pointing back. I think the other hand goes down next to or behind it, fingers facing forward. The resulting roll is fairly soft for putting energy down at the feet: in Eizan-ryu, we try to project energy outwards, putting out the lead hand as far away from the lead foot as we can, and roll along the edge of that hand.
Later, we were doing an exercise where, in Eizan-ryu, uke takes a back fall or side fall. I was actually told to do a back roll for this. They spotted a flaw with my ugly back roll — more stepping back, and then tuck the back leg, with the instep of the foot on the ground, rather than toes as I had been doing — and helped me fix that, which is a very good thing. I’ll be able to do Eizan-ryu ukemi games a bit better now.
The differences in the ukemi might have to do with the expectations of energy in techniques, at least for beginners. We tend to use a higher level of energy, with a lot more down than I saw and felt in these classes. Expecting to back roll or putting energy down at the lead foot may not be advisable in these cases.
In particular, the main exercise we did was iriminage. The senior students did a variation that involved more movement and circles, and what looked to me like uke and tori not maintaining contact during this transition circle, which makes me think this isn’t going to work. But the newbie white belt and I, and later, one of the more advanced kyu students, did an iriminage very much like what we do in jujitsu (the instructor actually mentioned that there should be something in my repertoire that looks like aikido iriminage). The main difference was that uke backrolls out at the end of the technique, whereas we put more down into the effort and uke is forced to breakfall. It’s easy to do the same with the aikido version, but perhaps they reserve that for when uke’s ukemi is better (though, arguably, one gets better ukemi by doing ukemi), or, more likely, it’s a difference in philosophy — both dojos I visited emphasized peace and cooperation in their literature. I didn’t slam uke into the ground during this iriminage. (As a side note, I was chatting with the newbie before class started, and she mentioned that she didn’t watch a class before taking one, otherwise she would have been too frightened of the ukemi. I thought of sensei’s observation that a lot of people who watch us from the start of class get up and leave when we do breakfalls, and that the aikido people must think that we’re some sort of Visigoths with sharpened incisors and tattoos covering our faces.)
That was the class: warm ups, ukemi and three or four techniques. One thing I noticed was they didn’t have a section devoted to taisabaki, which the newbie and I wound up doing anyway when we starting off doing iriminage, since she couldn’t get the footwork down. So, the instructor had us stand on the seams in the mat and practice taisabaki/tenkan for a little while. I guess in the context of an one-hour class, it’s not feasible to devote ten or fifteen minutes to this exercise.
This whole dojo touring was useful: I’ve now taken some aikido and had the instructor tell me I had to lead and extend more, even if I have a handle on the basic mechanics; I have a good idea what’s wrong with my back roll so I can work on it; and I got to practice iriminage a bit, a technique I kind of suck at (though last month Sensei Coleman got me started on keeping my momentum/energy going forward while actually moving backwards in a small circle, which helps fix our iriminage variation where uke is lead around and around until tori gets bored and slams uke into the ground).