2023-03-15

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

Last night in the beginner class, after working on kata, I asked my students, “What am I actually doing in the kata?” One student answered, “punches and blocks”, which is correct, but not really what I was going for. I clarified, “Yes, but why am I doing those things?” The same student answered, tentatively, “Because you’re being attacked by four people?” I wanted to fix this misconception right away, so I called for a sit-down and we talked a bit.

I don’t believe kata were designed to practice defending ourselves against a gang of attackers. Rather, I see it as a menu of possibilities. Kata isn’t a series of logical “and” statements; it’s a series of logical “or” statements. In other words, instead of one person attacking, and then another, and then another, I see one person attacking this way, or maybe that way, or maybe another way, and the kata teaches us to deal with each possibility. Of course, we may be attacked by more than one assialant, but kata recognizes the difficulty of these situations and teaches us to deal with one at a time by moving in ways that only allow one assailant to attack at a time.

I’ll leave it at that for now, but I plan to write a full blog post on this later. If you can’t wait, chapter 4 of Kane & Wilder’s “The Way of Kata” is devoted to the “rules” of kata interpretation, and it’s quite good.