This was the third session polishing the Mizu Quan and the one I was looking forward to the most, because last time we got right up to where I had learned when doing the form in Norway, just before the repeat.
Everybody has been so helpful in these last polishing sessions and I have managed to unpick many of the parts of the form I was not really sure of from learning previously, especially towards the end of the form where I only had a really rough shape. We always say shape first, detail later, but in most of the other forms I have learned, there has not been such a big time gap between shape and detail, so I think even my shape wandered off target quite a lot! Sigong made it all very clear in the seminar though and, as always, invited us to ask about anything at all we weren’t sure of.
Finally, we covered the very ending of the form which I hadn’t learned before. I think it’s a testament to how clear Sigong is even over Zoom that I was able to pick up the movements enough to have something to work on in the breakout room, where everybody helped me even further. From talking to others in the breakout room, I could tell they were appreciating the detail in the polishing just as much even though they had been through the whole form previously, and we managed to clear even more things up by working together. That’s the other great thing about people in the centre, we all help each other as much as we can, and we are all developing our eyes to see what is really happening and then unpick what it can mean for how to do the movements properly.
It really is a beautiful form and now that I have the ending I am really hoping to be able to perform it with someone else at some point so that we can explore how we move around each other in the space.
Thank-you so much Sigong for getting me to the end of this one!
by Lee Baylis
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