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This is the final part of the interview done in 2005 with Andrea Falk and
Antonio Flores, two of the first people to study Wushu at University in China.
Due to the size of this interview it has been split into two parts:
- Part 1: Why did you come to China, and what do you
remember about your training
- Part 2: Changes in Wushu, the Beijing Wushu Team
VCDs and where Wushu is heading
Interviewer: Andrea, a moment ago you just said that
training in China is more of a business now. In what sense?
Andrea: People pay to go now. They’ll have a foreign
student’s class and you’ll see the younger teachers training them.
Interviewer: Do you think this means they don’t care
as much about training foreigners?
Antonio: The Chinese coaches, if they see your
commitment, then they’ll care. So you must be committed, be serious, give 200%.
Interviewer: I’ve seen some coaches just sit and read
the paper whilst their classes are running. Is that because their students
aren’t committed?
Andrea: Well the coach won’t commit unless the
students commit. The student first has to prove themselves… and then the coach
will teach them. My master in Shanghai, I would go and help out a new guy and
he’d say ‘oh don’t bother with him’… well, if you don’t bother with him he’s not
gonna get it… ‘oh he’ll never get it’ he replied. That guy just keeps coming and
coming and coming and eventually he will get taught.
And you can teach reading a newspaper, because you can hear. Even Xia Bohua
would occasionally go off and get his mail, come back, and say do it again, do
it again until he heard the right sound, then he’d look up and say ‘yeah ok
that’s better’. If your doing something 50 or a hundred times he doesn’t need to
watch you do it every time, he can hear when it’s closer and then he’ll look up
and tell you that it’s a bit almost sort of closer… and that’s a compliment!
Antonio: From an instructors point of view there is
also a need not to watch every time as you want to see the contrast. You also
don’t want to effect your sight – if you are always watching someone do this
type of movement, even your practice might change! You need to be able to look
objectively at your student and say ‘oh, here’s your mistake’.
Andrea: This is why I teach outside, I’m always
looking around at other stuff!
Antonio: I was once teaching a group of Russian
students – I really needed a newspaper when I was teaching them. These guys are
real artists, so complete. I’d say ‘ok, this is the movement, blah, blah, blah,
blah – this is the technique, this is the way you do it, ok?’ – give a brief but
complete explanation. Then you go get your magazine. Take your time, 5 minutes,
go back, they’re doing it perfectly. Russian practitioners are really really
hot.
Andrea: It’s their attitude.
Interviewer: So what would you recommend to people
about training in China?
Andrea: It really depends on what you want to do. If
you want to learn for fun, for health, or for competition…
Antonio: or just to enrich your life…
Andrea: there are so many ways to come to Wushu, you
have to decide which way is right for you. The way I went, through University,
that’s what gave me the really really good basics, even though I’d trained
before in Canada it was a case of ‘forget all that’. I’ve seen other people who
haven’t been through University who don’t have the basics.
Interviewer: So going to University to study Wushu
gives a good foundation?
What to do if you are late for
class at a Chinese University
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| Try reading what the teacher wrote on the board... |
...try reading what your friend wrote... |
...give up!! |
Andrea: I don’t know if it still does, as I had a
different kind of training, I don’t know if they’re still that strict.
Antonio: If you want to become a coach or an
instructor, then select an instructor program. An instructor needs to have an
all round knowledge of Wushu, you have to be qualified as a Physical Education
teacher and you need to know the traditional sciences of China including
Acupuncture, Qi Gong, medicine, philosophy etc. Those were the requirements in
my time. That’s a lot of work in 4 years. If you don’t want to do that, if you
just want to master Chen style Taiji Quan, then just do that side of it.
Andrea: But if you want to compete and go onto a team
then go train with a team. It depends entirely on what you want to do.
Interviewer: You mention training with a team. A lot
of foreign Wushu practitioners want to train with the Beijing Team at Shichahai.
What advice would you give to people considering this?
Andrea: You need to have attained a certain level in
order to consider training with that level of coach.
Antonio: You need to have a good background before you
go. They’re not going to give you an A, B, C. If you want to spend 2 good months
or a summer with the Beijing Team and train with them then you need to have been
training already, otherwise you’re going to get hurt.
Andrea: There are good coaches outside of China now.
If you just wanted a China experience then you could go to a lesser team, but
don’t show up to the Beijing Team if you can’t do the moves. The teacher isn’t
going to pay much attention to you if you really don’t have the moves, the power
or the ability.
Antonio: And that can be very frustrating. Instead of
having the great experience you were looking for, you could come back
disappointed. It’s better to look for a program that’s suitable for you. For
example Tiyu Daxue (BSU) has summer programs where you can train Wushu at
recreational times, courses where you can join in with the teams, etc, so they
have different emphasis. Try to be clear about what you want.
Don’t think that after spending a summer in a general course you’re gonna be
able to go back and say ‘here, look, I can teach, I have a certificate’.
Andrea: And also don’t expect that because you do 2
months of training here that you’re all of a sudden gonna be really good. It’s
still you, and it’s still you that has to do the work.
Interviewer: So Wushu has changed an awful lot since
you started training it, but has changed dramatically over the last few years…
Andrea: That’s related to the judging. It’s now easier
to judge, more standardised, so that you can say ‘this move is so many points,
and this is why it’s so many points’… as far as I can see anyway… although
judging wasn’t that hard to do before. In order to get into the Olympics they
had to make it more like Gymnastics or Figure Skating, to make it more
accountable…
Interviewer: Do you think these are good changes?
Andrea: [laughs] there are no good cats or bad cats,
there are only cats…
Interviewer: A lot of old school Wushu enthusiasts
believe that the current trend in Wushu is going too far… I mean if you watch
competitions these days a lot of athletes are competing moves they can’t even
do.
Andrea: It’s that ‘higher, stronger, faster’, it’s the
Olympic ideal. Unfortunately this means people start forgetting the basics. It’s
like in the Figure Skating you used to have to compete the compulsory Figures,
which everybody hated, and then you did the optional routines that everybody
liked. You had to do the Figures, it was very very strict. Now they don’t
compete Figures anymore and you see people falling more in the competitions.
It’s the same thing in Wushu. They’re going for the higher, faster, stronger,
flash and perhaps not practicing the basics as much as they should be. If you’ve
got to land in a horse stance then you’ve got to be able to hit that horse
stance so you’ll have to have done a lot of horse stance. I think [athletes]
just may not be [practicing basics] as much as they used to. We just wouldn’t do
anything without first doing the basics, we’d never do practice without going
through the basics.
Interviewer: What do you think about the new springy
carpet and the Wushu Costumes?
Andrea: Athletes used to wear what they liked, it got
really wild, we had some shaved heads and Shaolin outfits coming along… so they
said well let’s change the rules and make all the costumes the same!
Costumes didn’t matter though, as the old champions [First Generation Beijing
Wushu Team] could do a five step form and you’d be like ‘whoah’… so like pubu
chong quan, and you’d be ‘uh, that’s so beautiful’, I mean it was absolutely
perfect all the time. Absolutely stunning.
Antonio: In the 80s, stances, everything, everything
was very very clean.
Andrea: It used to be that if a competitor did a
spinning kick, landed in a horse stance and moved their foot very very slightly,
the audience would either laugh or gasp. I’m serious. The audience was
knowledgeable, they expected absolute perfection.
Interviewer: Do you think the people who make up the
audience has changed since then?
Andrea: Oh yeah, in the 80s competitions were packed,
and when they said like ‘next its Li Zhizhou’ everyone would be like [excited]
and you hear the excitement increase when any of the big names were announced.
They couldn’t walk down the street…
Antonio: They were all over the newspapers, on the
radio…
Interviewer: Was this fame just restricted to the
Beijing Wushu Team?
Andrea: Every place would have their people. Like
everyone from a certain locality would know their wushu team.
Interviewer: So how did the Beijing Wushu Team
Videos/VCDs originally come about?
Andrea: That was Anthony Chan. He had the idea to
create these instructional films. They were filmed at Shichahai.
Antonio: The case was that in 1979 the United States
and China started to establish diplomatic relations. At that time Anthony was
one of only 2 or 3 people in the United States that were practicing Chang Quan
and he made a trip to China and practiced at BUPE and with the Beijing Team. He
had an excellent visit and decided to create these Videos. The Beijing Team were
also invited to go to the United States.
So Anthony put together a professional crew to film the Videos and they show
everything in normal speed and slow motion. He also cut the taolus into sections
and each section into moves which is exactly what Wushu books used to do. So you
end up with Videos demonstrated by the best.
It was an outstanding project. It is also outstanding that they have been
brought back again by Andrea.
Interviewer: So the Videos were created in 1983, but
it was another 20 years before you came along Andrea and put them onto VCD. How
come it was so long?
Andrea: Because nobody ever thought of it really.
These tapes had been around, people had them, had copies, it was just one of
those things, you just assumed they were still around. Then there was a young
English kid who was really into Retro Wushu and he contacted me as he was doing
a Retro Wushu website. It was kind of because people were beginning to realise
that there’s a difference now between the classic Chang Quan and the new Chang
Quan.
I think that’s what happened. Wushu was really really popular, and then it kind
of went down, and now its come back up again, and so there’s a huge difference
between the classic beautiful Beijing stuff and the modern Olympic stuff. So
people are starting to look back at it, and that’s why it came up again.
So I asked Anthony if he still had the tapes, and he said ‘ah yeah, they’re just
in my garage’. So I just asked if I could bring them out. I mean I was
publishing books so I figured I could publish Videos too… I just didn’t realise
all the work involved…
Interviewer: As you say Wushu was very popular then
more or less fell off the map for several years, but now people are finding it
again. Do you have any ideas why?
Andrea: To me the level actually went down. This
happens in many sports. It reaches such a peak that there has to be a dip in
ability. It wasn’t just the Beijing Wushu Team, the level was so high, as I said
the audience used to gasp if you so much as moved one of your feet. It was
brutal. The level went down, people lost interest.
Antonio: Wushu was also becoming International. In
1985 friendly matches started, in 1989 we had the Asian Championships and 1991
the World Championships. So China had the challenge of saying ‘how do we get
foreign enthusiasts up to this level’, so they had to bring the level down.
Interviewer: Do you think they actually lowered the
level then?
Andrea: Well they used to actually pretend that
foreigners won…
Antonio: The audience really understood though. I
remember in 1986 there was a Chang Quan competition and Zhao Chang Jun steps up
and performs followed by Phillip Wong from the United States. Phillip had been
training with the Beijing Team, had superb skills, and it was evident that day
Phillip did a better exercise, and even the audience recognised it. When they
announced that Zhao Chang Jun was first and Phillip second, the audience just
stood up and left.
There are now lots of gifted kids out there in the west, and there are some very
tough judges too… but more and more, especially since the International
Federation is organising things, judging programs where different countries are
sending people along are happening. So in International Competitions its not
only Chinese judges. Things are getting more balanced.
Interviewer: So the lull was because China was waiting
for more interest to come from the International scene?
Andrea: Well it wasn’t just that. The amount of work
that has to go in to achieve that amount of perfection is more possible in a
very strict socialist society. Before, if you got selected for a Wushu team then
that was it, you were made for life, but its different now. Everyone has to have
a different angle, when you finish with the team then what next?
Antonio: That’s right, an athlete could retire from
competition and then go to University to train to become a coach.
Andrea: There was a system set up for that, the
athlete would be taken care of.
Interviewer: So when China opened its doors to the
west, it sounds like Wushu paid a price?
Andrea: Well it didn’t help… before, as I said
earlier, I was told what to do, all the students were the same. You really
really trained hard, you had no choice, but you were taken care of. So the
Beijing Team athletes were taken in as children, that doesn’t happen anymore,
but people are thinking more about the angles now. If you became a wushu star
then you could go on to appear in movies – like Li Lianjie (Jet Li) was the
first one to make that jump, that was never in anybody’s mind before. They just
trained so hard, I know people train hard now, but you have no idea how hard it
was.
Antonio: Yeah the movie industry has really helped
with the increase in popularity of martial arts and wushu. When in Star Wars
Darth Maul was played by a wushu performer people said ‘yes, that’s the kind of
moves I want to see’. Now more or less every movie will have some wushu in it,
even Disney films, like Shrek, have got wushu in them somewhere! If a film wants
action, it’ll definitely have martial arts.
Andrea: In one sense that makes wushu more popular but
in another way it lowers the level a little bit, because people aren’t serious
about Wushu. They want to do the jumps, they want to do the flashy stuff, like
if you wanna be a stunt man then “teach me that”, but then you don’t have the
basics, won’t have done the hard hard training, and that’s what made wushu so
beautiful.
Interviewer: So what do you think about Wushu trying
to get into the Olympics?
Antonio: Wushu belongs to the people. The Olympics is
a way to give it to the people. I feel that often the self defence aspect of
wushu is over used in film, making people believe wushu practitioners are often
bad people. Whether wushu is practiced for sport, health or recreation, it is an
art, it is not good or bad, wushu is wushu.
Andrea: I think it’s great if people want to go into
the Olympics and do wushu. The only thing I would like to see is more events.
Men doing Gun and Dao is okay but what about all the other styles, like Spear,
Sword, Rope Dart for example?
Antonio: If the price to enter the Olympics is to lose
all those events then, well…
Andrea: It’s too big a price, but if people want to do
that then that’s up to them.
Andrea Falk lives and works in Canada, providing translations of Chinese Wushu
books through her company tgl books. As well as being responsible for reviving
the priceless Beijing Wushu Team Videos, she also provides many Wushu books,
VCDs and DVDs from China and training materials through her website,
The Wushu Centre
Antonio Flores is the Head Wushu instructor at the Beijing International School.
Along with his wife, Hui Xuna, a member of the first generation Beijing Wushu
Team, he continues to provide private Wushu instruction through his Wushu
Exchange program. For more information please visit
www.wushu-exchange.com.
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