[Keith Nelson]

I thought I should post a brief blurb concerning the recent weekend seminar (back 2 weeks ago) on Fiore's abrazare, hosted and taught by Bob Charron, at his salle (which is excellent for training).

This was a really nice introduction to and surprisingly in-depth dive into the abrazare of Fiore, with an emphasis on learning the plays in sequence and really retaining what we learned. The plays as taught flowed beautifully from one to another and presented both their counter-movements and the next play in a clean and martially sound sequence. We went through all 16 of the plays of abrazare (from the Getty) and two of the plays of the bastoncello over the course of the weekend. By the end, everyone was able to chain together at least the first 12 plays in a dynamic flow with their partner and work through them without a partner as well. The final couple of plays were done as a separate set, but with the intervening flow shown to allow doing them all as a set of 16. Additionally, we learned to get into many of the plays directly from the remedy master.

As auxillary and introductory topics, we covered Fiore's directives/requirements for wrestling, basic safety for falling, basic concepts of body awareness and wrestling application, and got an excellent demonstration of Fiore's wrestling plays on horseback from Kristi Charron and one of her students.

My thanks to everyone that I had an opportunity to interact with at the seminar, it was a pleasure to work out with folks who were pleasant partners, concerned with getting things right, and safe to work with. It was especially nice to see some repeat folks from the last seminar (June of this year) at the Charron's, as well as the new faces. All in all, this was a stellar weekend and I look forward to the next seminar at the Charron salle.

For those interested, I understand that there might be a couple of spots left in a second abrazare seminar that will be occuring in the first weekend of December. I'd suggest contacting Bob Charron directly (stmartinsacademy@juno.com) for more information .

Keith Nelson