[Tristán Zukowski]

I just wanted to take this opportunity to inform the HEMA community that NYHFA's branch in Poughkeepsie, NY, is officially up and running! Interested parties can PM me here, or email me at nyhfa.psg [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

[Michael Edelson]

I just wanted to say how happy and proud I am that NYHFA Poughkeepsie has taken off. This is our first official spin-off and it's been a long time in the making.

It's not easy for a student to reach the required level to teach NYHFA's curriculum. Such a student has to have a deep knowledge and understanding of not only the techniques themselves but the principles and body mechanics that go behind each one and make the difference between simply going through the motions and being able to perform a technique under the stress of a life or death struggle at full intensity. He or she has to be a very competent free fencer, someone who can challenge the best the community has to offer and must to be able to cut (tatami) to very high standards of consistency, accuracy, power and control.

For the last few years Tristan has travelled 3 hours each way from Poughkeepsie to Brooklyn to train here in the main branch and almost never missed a class. He exemplifies the qualities of a great student and instructor: humility, integrity, dedication and perseverance. What you will learn in NYHFA Poughkeepsie fully meets NYHFA standards, but it is not just a rehash of what I teach. Tristan does what any good martial artist does, he learns the material and then makes it his own. That’s probably the most important quality in any instructor.

[Tim Hall]

Congrats to you both! Is there a website up for the Poughkeepsie branch?

[Michael Edelson]

[Jean Thibodeau]

Also congratulations on the new branch.

Reading a bit on your site's Blog I sort of agree about the general idea that techniques in themselves are not the art but become useful to those who already know how to fight. ( Well, at least in period, many things that seem hard to pin down where obvious to people experienced with real fighting physically and in mindset ).

Techniques are like knowing the alphabet: You can't write without knowing your letters but you are only really writing when you can use them to make words, write sentences and paragraph and actually have something to say.

So as important as it is to learn your alphabet ( sword techniques ) actual fighting is all in the intent ( kill & not be killed ) and situational awareness and the techniques are your work tools and not the skill and artistry in using the tools.

( Hope this doesn't sound too abstract or pretentious or that I'm any good at it, but I have been sort of thinking about this for a while that one starts naively spontaneous when one starts learning, then one gets really stiff learning " parroting " techniques and one eventually stop thinking about techniques during the fight but now one is using an " educated " spontaneity.

As " Yoda " might say " Do not try, DO ".

[Michael Edelson]

Hi Jean,

The way I see it, the techniques in the manuals are like complicated words...heterogeneous, accretion, truncation, concatenation, etc. These words are meant for people who already know how to speak English quite well.

Someone who takes the manuals and starts parotting the techniques is saying these words, and eventually learning what they mean, but without speaking the rest of the language. So if I show this person a mixture of different kinds of substances, they will smile and say "heterogeneous!" But if I say, "So hey bud, how ya doin'?" they will stare at me blankly, not understanding.

You can imagine how such a person would talk. I believe this is why some of the free fencing we see is so detached from reality, such as people walking into a bind because they don't know how to fight outside of one, etc.