Halloween has come and gone, so bring your bowl of candy and let’s catch up with the Bartitsu class held weekly at Academie Duello.

How It Works

Here’s a quick reminder for those who didn’t read last month’s report. Bartitsu is a combination of four disciplines: English pugilism (Boxing), French kickboxing (Savate), Japanese wrestling (Jujitsu) and Swiss walking-stick fighting (La Canne). With two hours to practice each week, the Vancouver Bartitsu Club studies two disciplines per session. The first is a review of the previous week, the second is new material from a different discipline. Then, we examine how to combine the two.

Weeklies

Here’s the weekly breakdown:
Week 6 (2 October, 2010): The weekend of VCON, the Vancouver Science Fiction (do they call it “speculative fiction” now? I don’t know) Convention was busy for me. The theme of the convention was Steampunk, so I would have been remiss not to demo Bartitsu there. So, in class we reviewed boxing and learned some new cane techniques. As soon as class ended, we jetted off to the convention to lecture and demo for an hour.

Week 7 (9 October, 2010): Reviewing the previous week’s cane and moving into our second lesson on Savate. This led us nicely to those preemptive strikes that lead to leg attacks.

Week 8 (16 October, 2010): Savate review and onto new Jujitsu concepts. We progressed to more breakfalls, practiced the back-heel throw, and learned the come-along hold.

Week 9 (23 October, 2010): Jujitsu review involved mostly gaining more mastery over the floor (breakfalls!) Then, since everybody loves it, back to cane fighting. We spent some time mucking around with the figure-4 throw from a preemptive strike, and some eventually got it. It was a great opportunity for exploration. In sparring, we did cane fencing and discovered that the padded sticks are too flexible to be disarmed. So a bonus lesson for me in equipment choice.

Week 10 (30 October, 2010): Review of cane, in which everybody figured out the figure 4 throw. Then, more Savate in which we drilled our known kicks, and learned the coup-de-pied horizontal against the heavy bag. The combo of horizontal stick strike with a low round kick (before or after) is really effective.

November will bring us more combinations and more mastery. Also, November will feature another Umbrella workshop.

Why don’t I have any pictures or video? Next month, don’t worry. I’m just so engrossed in the teaching that it never occurs to me to whip out the iPhone. So I’ll get someone else to take pics.

Until next month, I snack on leftover mini-chocolate bars, David McCormick.