Sculpture and Karate teaching both are about creation. When you make a statue, you actually
create its form out of matter; when you teach karate, you create
a form in a student's mind.
Let us say you have 2 different
materials : Clay, and Steel bits and pieces, and you want to create the statue
of a standing man.
The Clay Statue : you first take
a big chunk of clay and shape it to the general shape of a guy -
about as tall and wide as you envision it. Then, little by little,
you adjust. You start shaping its torso, head and limbs. Once your piece
looks like a crude humanoid silhouette, you get into more details :
arms, shoulders, wrists, ankles... Later you get to even minuter details :
eyes, nose, fingers, ears and toes, etc... From the beginning, you
actually shape the statue by mostly removing unwanted material. This
is a global and synthetic way to proceed.
The Steel statue : If you work
with steel parts, you are going to cut, bend and weld them. So chances are that you
will first create perfect feet and perfect calves, then weld the
calves onto the feet. After that you might create perfect legs, and weld
them on top of the calves, etc, etc, until you weld the perfect hat
on top of the perfect head. This is a very detail oriented and
analytical way to work.
Both ways have their plus and minus.
With the clay, you have from the
beginning a certain idea of where you are going and you maintain it.
There is a certain continuity of goal in your work, but it is going
to take a long time before the whole thing looks good : for quite a
while your statue might be seen as a gorilla as much as a man.
With steel, there will not be any clear
indication of what you are actually building until enough things are
put together, but from the very beginning, each individual little
parts you build will look good - and you may get quicker a satisfying
sense of achievement. The difficulty may come if the individual parts
you have built do not perfectly fit one with the other.
Please note one important part : You need to adapt the way you work to the material. You
could in theory shape perfect bits and pieces out of clay and glue
them together, but you hardly could weld a great amount of steel
pieces together and remove parts of them to shape a human form.
Back to Karate.
Different students learn differently.
Some love to learn details before they learn the big picture - that
is the way to proceed with steel. Some students do better
learning the big picture before getting into details - that's the
synthetic way better suited to clay.
Instructors too have their preferences.
An analytical type of instructor will
spend a great amount of time teaching each individual move in great
details, so that the student has to learn the first move of a
fighting combination and be able to execute it perfectly before he is
allowed to learn the second move.
A synthetic type of instructor will
first teach a whole kata without worrying too much about the counts.
Only once the student can demonstrate something that sorts of looks
like the kata does the instructor begin to clean up each move.
Plus and minus of each way.
The synthetic method may be easier to
memorize for Western students. It is more like a dance or a gymnastic
routine - it is possible to tune it up so that the final execution of
the kata "looks" better faster, which may give the student
satisfaction and make him want to progress further.
The analytical method is probably
harder for more students - it requires more patience. In the case of
learning a whole kata, it will take a much longer time than the
global way, and the result may not always look better than the kata
learned the synthetic way.
On a strictly actual fighting and self
defense standpoint, it is likely that the analytical method will give
better results (providing the instructor knows what he is doing). The
accurate performance of a few individual move is more important than
the ability to demonstrate a beautiful looking kata including a
number of moves which the student does not understand.
Why bother with Kata ?
Kata are a tool to help student
memorize self defense moves by putting them together within a
routine. The past masters took the pain to create and transmit them.
They used both synthetic and analytical ways.
We should teach as they did. We should
make sure we transmit kata as they were taught to us - synthesis -
and make sure each individual move makes sense in an actual fighting
context - analysis.
Also lets keep in mind the sculpture
analogy : some students nature are clay, some are steel.
Some pure steel type of people are
absolutely not able to learn kata - which does not mean they cannot
do good karate and be excellent fighters. It would be a mistake to
try bother them too much with kata.
Some older or younger people cannot do
proper basic moves but can perform beautiful and elegant kata. Their
actual self defense ability might be close to zero. However, if they
stick around long enough, they will get better and one day be able to
actually realize what they are doing, from that day on, you should be
able to teach them actual applications of the kata.
Instructors should be able to tune up
their teaching to each type of student. No matter what your personal
teaching preference is, in order to really transmit karate, you
should be able to teach both ways.
And THIS...
is valid for all teachings.
