Seminar at Kronborg Castle in Helsingør
Autumn seminar at Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, Denmark 25.-26. November 2006 By Chapter Master Mikkel Stjernberg
The castle administration had allowed us to have the seminar in the dance hall; the biggest room of the castle. It gave us plenty of space but also a continuous flow of curious tourists.
One of them even filmed us for more than half an hour with his video camera. It turned out he was doing a Japanese sword fencing system in his spare time, and he was curious on how we used the European sword. He even told us that he thought we would have problems against a samurai.I asked him, of course, where we would find a real samurai to find out but he mumbled something and started adjusting his camera.
This didn't influence our training, though, and we all worked hard for three hours both days with no breaks. We could only be in the dance hall for a certain period of time each day, and we didn't want to waste any precious minutes with Jonathan and Kristina.
We started out with a simple three step exercise. Anything we wanted to do – just three steps. Jonathan and Kristina simply wanted to see where we were at technically. They didn't see any need to repeat the very basics, and we went on with the three step exercise.?We worked with weapons of different lengths and the ability to keep the correct distance at all times according to one's weapon. Meaning for instance that the staff should take advantage of the staff's length and the half sword should only close the distance needed for cutting the opponent down.?"We have observed several times that many students have a tendency to always crash in to close the distance.
When up against an opponent who knows what he is doing you will get hurt and never win the fight, because your opponent will simply move out of the way and cut you. This exercise is to teach you to keep the correct distance at all times. Not only when you are defending but also when attacking," Kristina said.
During the exercise Jonathan spotted a tendency in all of us to not be able to take advantage of the moulinet with the sword when shifting from a guard to an attack.?To teach us how to do that we were given an exercise where we should beat the opponents weapon away from the centerline, while we ourselves were moving offline (with the "Knight's Move") and then gain momentum for our second attack by doing a moulinet with correct timing and the a new step. ?We did this for some time and varied it in many different ways. Ended up doing it more or less completely random before we went back to our three step exercise in order to implement the technique there.?After a while Jonathan and Kristina wanted to see a more correct use of power. They made us do a drill of hitting a staff with the proper part of the sword to generate power.
It turned out to be quite difficult to get the simple but subtle body mechanics to work. We all had a tendency to lean away from the staff instead of putting the momentum of both sword and body into the staff by dropping the body weight into the ground by using a "corkscrew movement". ?A very good exercise indeed. Simple but extremely difficult to master because you have to do two different movements going in seperate directions but still work together.?Again we went back to the three step exercise and implemented our newfound power expertise into it. Turned out to be quite good for us to use a technically based power instead of the brute force we usually turn to when stressed. We all relaxed more and the exercise became much more crisp as a whole.
Day two
The following day we started out with the same exercise but this time it was sword and buckler against staff. This made it even more difficult to close the distance without simply crashing in with too aggressive attacks.
It was a delicate balance to find between holding the initiative and not get too aggressive.?Jonathan and Kristina pressed us all to move even more by telling us to move around the opponent while keeping the initiative. This proved to be very difficult but it give us a very good understanding of our own limits of movement. Again it made us do everything in a crispier way than before.?As we went back to the three step exercise we all experienced great flow in our offline movements while keeping the correct distance and mellowing our aggressive tendencies.
As most of our friends in the Guild know, we have a soft spot for the saber in Helsingor. It's lightning fast and it's a great and versatile tool to use in the training. And now, it was time to work with the saber.
To be honest, we were all a bit rusty. For more than a month we had focused on the core syllabus of the Guild and hadn't had time for saber training. It took a couple of minutes to adjust.?Jonathan and Kristina instantly started to go into details in terms of the positioning of our guards with the saber. To improve it they gave us an exercise where we basically moved between the guards with a series of shifting attacks in a fast pace.?Then we began implementing the details in a small five step drill with a surprisingly large variety of movements. There was a lot of fine tuning to be done, and the moment we felt we had the pattern, Jonathan and Kristina changed a movement to never make us feel secure with a fixed pattern. ?We continued this exercise right until the very end of the seminar. It was time to wrap up and go home.