Anyone who had anything to do with the highly successful MAF festival last year will have had contact with Kwoklyn Wan.  He was everywhere at the event, from the gate at the entrance to making sure that every exhibitor had the opportunity to have their photo taken with his famous fashion guru brother Gok Wan.  What started off as a local ‘fairground’ fun exhibition turned into a ‘happening’ with people from everywhere swapping techniques and telephone numbers in a fun filled, friendly atmosphere.

Running a successful kwoon with 700 members in the middle of Leicester and successfully teaching JKD both here and in America with some of the world’s best instructors, this larger than life character is beginning to take the martial arts world by storm.  Kwoklyn and his partner Andy took the time to visit me at my Dojo for a photo shoot and chat…..

SR  Hi Kwoklyn, how did you get involved in the Martial Arts?

KW  I started in 1977 at 4 years old, my Dad is Chinese from Hong Kong and my Mum is from Southampton in England.  So even as a small child, my uncles were forever coming over and practicing their martial arts in my house and so it was always in my environment.  My parents owned a restaurant in Leicester and the Secular Hall was only 2 minutes down the road, they enlisted me into the Shotokan Karate club there run by Anthony Conroy.  I was so young, all I remember is my Mum taking me there on the bus and having Kentucky Fried Chicken afterwards!

SR  Tell the readers a little bit more about your uncles..

KW  I remember them visiting and training in various styles and under various names, sometimes Kung Fu, Wing Chun and sometimes Chinese Boxing.  I remember them drilling their strikes on the hessian rice sack, teaching me various moves and demonstrating the one-inch punch on me!  It’s been like that for the last 30 years!

SR  How long did you do the Shotokan Karate for?

KW Only for about 2 or 3 years, later I did Wing Chun with Derek Frearson in Leicester - I trained with Derek for many years on and off .

SR  I didn’t know Derek did Wing Chun!

KW  Yeah, and 7 Star Praying Mantis.

SR  I know he did Tai Chi with Bow Sim Mark…

KW  That’s right, he did Tai Chi as well, although I never really got into that.  Instruction was mainly from my uncles, in half hour to an hour lessons each time they came round.  I don’t hold any certificates in Wing Chun although I’ve been practicing it most of my life.

SR  I’ve always loved the ‘family’ aspect of Kung Fu, at parties everyone would get up and do something however good or bad they were and no one was ever ridiculed, it was all enjoyed, usually most of them were three sheets to the wind anyway!

KW  Usually on brandy!  As I became older, my training became more structured, I returned to Derek for more Wing Chun, trained in Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Ju Jitsu, Judo and Systema, trying a bit of everything becoming a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’…  that was until I found a Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do class, I stayed with that until I found Lamaar Davies and then Tim Tackett found me.  Jeet Kune Do was me…  it was a freedom that I needed, although you did techniques in a certain way it was ‘principle led’ and you could adapt as you went along.

SR  I always think that there’s no point in training in anything if you can’t then validate it.

KW  The functionality of what you do is prime.  I have no objection to kata or form, but if you can’t be shown the reasoning behind it – it just becomes a dance!  You would never be able to use it in a combat situation because you’ve only learned it to a set rhythm and timing.

SR  I understand you also worked the doors?

KW  That’s right I did them in Leicester from 16 years of age, working at the ‘Dome’ in Leicester High Street.  I’ve been in plenty of ‘real’ situations and worked them continuously until I opened my own school about 5 years ago.  So I’ve had the street confrontations, I know what works and what doesn’t. I was using a ‘fence’ before it had a name!

SR  I’ve always called it the ‘wedge’ originating from the ‘jeet’ point and bridge in Kung Fu.  A ‘fence’ sounds too defensive to me.

KW  That’s right, in Jeet kune Do once your bridge has been met – you’re on home ground.  So I have the background and I have had to make my knowledge work, which a lot of martial artists don’t.

SR  There’s also a lot more information readily available now, in the old days we’d have to travel all over the place to learn the next couple of moves of a kata, there was no video, DVD, internet or ‘youtube’ available.

KW  That’s right – ‘youtube’ and other martial arts TV on the internet like WOMA are a valuable resource, once you’ve got your foundation in training you can always pick up additional drills and methods from this media.

SR  It’s also a good tool for the students to broaden their knowledge.

KW  Definitely!  Then by speaking to people like yourself and Pat O’Malley, my technique can be ‘tweaked’ to make it more effective.

SR  You can have a technique that’s 99% correct and it still fails you, that last one percent that’s the ‘magic’ that can make the difference between what works and what fails.

How did you come to open your academy up in Leicester?

KW  I always wanted my own place, wooden floors, big windows, I’d been teaching in various halls for about 4 years and decided I wanted to teach martial arts full time.  I started to look for a location, found where I am now and just started up with my existing students, our membership is now up to 700 so we’re a busy school!

SR  What’s your ratio between children and adults?

KW  We only have around 30 children and the rest are adults.  I don’t teach the children because I swear too much!

SR  What do you teach?

KW  Thai Boxing and Kickboxing, I don’t profess to be a qualified teacher, but I have the foundation.  We’re a fitness oriented, hard hitting, full contact club.  The Jeet Kune Do is traditional under the guidance of Lamar Davies.

SR  Who is Lamar Davies?

KW   Lamar is a Jeet Kune Do instructor in America and founder of the ‘Hardcore Jeet Kune Do Association’.  I found him on the internet, trained with him and liked what he was doing, I found it really practical.  He is ‘old school’ in the way that he has a huge training syllabus, but it’s up to us what we do with it, we can add and delete as we wish.

SR  You mentioned your connection with Tim Tackett, who’s he?

KW  He graded under Dan Inosanto in 1973 as a full Jeet Kune Do Instructor, for me and many others he is the ultimate Jeet Kune Do instructor, he was there right from the start.  I was lucky in that he approached me, came and trained with me and I did several weeks intensive training with him to be sure that I had a grasp of his system - he was surprised that a 25 stone man could move so fast and apply the principles.

I’d like to record that at no time did I ask him for a certificate, he asked me to represent him in the UK.  People will always bitch, but I’ve had the honour to train with him on a regular basis and have been over to America and trained with the famous ‘Wednesday night’ group and taught on his Summer Camp.  Some of the people I was teaching had been training 20 years longer than me!  They still enjoyed my teaching, which I think is down to the varied martial arts background that I have.

SR  How did MAF come about?

KW  I went to a boating show with my wife and kids in Leicester and a Capoiera group were doing a demonstration, I was walking around, the sun was shining,  kids playing, people were looking at the boats, having barbeques and so on.  I thought “what a good idea, to have a martial arts show in a similar vein!”  I’m not talking about the big shows or exhibitions but a festival.  It took me two years to put the idea together.  Last October I took Adam as a partner, he’s been training with me for 6 years and has a background in arranging events and building websites.  The event turned out to be an enormous success.

SR  MAS certainly did very well at the event.

KW  It was all about people going there to have a good time.  The festival had a ‘local fair’ feel about it; we had the capoiera group, bouncy castles, spiritualists, healers and lots of people having fun just showing what they do.

It was a local place that people could go to with little money and have a good day watching people that loved what they do showing their arts to an appreciative audience.  There was no hierarchy or bitching, just people training and often ‘trading off’ techniques with each other showing what they do.

I didn’t get the time to speak to everyone, but I got around as many people as I could.

The exhibitors, demonstrators, workshop instructors and participants have all said that they would love to come back next year.  Hence April 2010 we’ll have another big show, we’re looking at locations now.

SR  It was a winning formulae because it was so friendly.  I was only there for a couple of hours but arranged enough interviews to fill the magazine for months ahead.

KW  Saturday, I was a bit stressed as it was the first day and although Sunday was packed, I really enjoyed it.  The next MAF will be for 3 days so that we have that extra day to make sure we have everything right on the Friday for the weekend.  We would also like to a have a special  “A Night With….”  show and for the Bruce Lee Foundation to come over.

SR  Where are you planning to hold it next year?

KW  In or around the Midlands, there is one location that we’re considering that has a Bedouin tend that holds 20,000 people… it wouldn’t matter what the weather was like then!

SR  What are your future plans for your school?

KW  The school is doing well and we’ll just keep going as we are, I’ve been teaching professionally for 10 years now and tend to teach the ‘invitation only’ classes, where we train together more than it being a hierarchal structure.  I’d like to focus on those classes rather than teaching everyone.

SR  Do you have any plans for other events?

KW  We’re looking at a Bruce Lee Convention on his birthday, he was a great fan of birthdays so we’re looking at getting everyone together on that day.  We’re flying out to Los Angeles to talk to his wife Linda and daughter Shannon to put a few ideas on the table and get a Bruce lee Convention UK arranged.

We have the ‘Concrete Arena’ that launches this summer in August that is a full MMA show with 3 UFC fighters acting as judges to the first show.  We’re hoping for Mike Bisping to be there and Ian Freeman to compere.  It’ll be an all ‘glitz and glamour’ cage show.

I’m going to help Pat O’Malley out with the British Padded Arnis Alliance and help to build that up in the UK, he has groups in Europe that want to come over and compete.

Maybe we’ll also run a Freestyle Championships, as there seems to be a big market for it and we are considering promoting a series of events.

Quite a few spin offs from MAF really!

SR  I wish you all the best for the future and we’ll be there in 2010!

KW  Thank you.

“I would consider tai chi to be the ultimate skirmish art” said a night club doorman of 28 years and lifelong martial artist.  “This is exactly what happens on the doors and it gives us the skills to deal with being pushed, pulled grabbed and hit from all directions at the same time, we’re often in a melee and the ability to cope with simultaneous multi directional attacks is essential.”

The mental image that most have of Tai Chi is that of the ‘hippy’ or ‘health’ version and of old age pensioners creaking along to the only range of movement and speed that they can cope with.  Or it may be of the ‘youtube’ version of bodies flying unconvincingly away from an aged masters ‘magic’ light touch or of bad karate or aikido applications to the strange movements.

Tai Chi is a martial art.  It can be taught very methodically.  Those that consider it a martial art often say that you have to practice it for years to be any good, in fact the same can said for any art. Tai Chi starts with the qigong exercises, in the Yang Family these are essential foundation training that releases the body core to allow internal softening, connection and rooting.  They then work methodically through the body, opening the joints, softening the muscle and fascia connections, flexing the spine, correcting the posture and working all the powerful directional movements that a human body can do.  The ‘exercises’ also work the ‘jins’, the energy lines through the body exciting the system to engender a vigorous health and positive, powerful movements and technique.

When skills are taught, they are taught in the exercises first, then put into the hand forms, weapons forms, push hands and finally boxing and grappling applications.

Being taught properly and methodically means that the student is taught what he ‘needs’ rather than what he ‘wants’, this is known as ‘eating bitter’ and can be construed by a part of modern society who want to be ‘entertained’ as boring and painful.  Those people would be attracted to what is known as ‘tourist’ Tai Chi where they are entertained with simple unskillful movements that make them happy and keep the instructors rice bowl full.   This is the popular form of Tai Chi.

To be taught properly, the student needs to learn how to stand, how to breathe, how to think and focus his attention and then how to move.  He must ‘empty his cup’ of whatever he thought martial arts and fighting were to be able to learn the skills from exercise to form in a pure liberated movement free from emotion and wrong intention.  He would then learn how to generate power from the feet, through the legs, manipulated by the core and torso to be fed out through the arms and hands.  Different forms of connected power are used for striking, manipulation, locking, escaping, strangling, choking and throwing.

It takes time and effort (the meaning of the words ‘kung fu’) to work these skills into the body until they become natural and any form of trying to force them will result in unnatural tension and anxiety.

Development is a lifelong process, it’s said that the student will first learn in feet, then inches, then hundredths of an inch, then thousandths… then hundredths of a thousandth of an inch.  BUT….. he is better on day 2 than he would be on day 1, any skill learning is the same process.  ‘Tourist’ technique in any art may work until the student meets a powerful, internally connected fighter, who will simply walk through or disrupt anything he has to offer.

The difference with Tai Chi is that it is a skirmish art; it is a continuous double helix spiral of movement and momentum, during this continuous movement the practitioner remains actively powerful and responsive in all directions for every hundredth of a thousandth of an inch.

The founder of the Yang style, Yang Lu Chan, was the son of a farmer who loved the Martial Arts and had studied Shaolin Hung Quan with a local instructor before studying in the Chen family village under Chen style Master Chen Chang Xin.  Yang Lu Chan was his most talented student and eventually returned to his home village at Yung Nien where he taught for a living.  He was undefeated locally and in his travels where he won many matches utilising his soft and yielding art that as a result became known as ‘mien quan’ (cotton boxing) or hua quan (neutralising boxing).  ‘Cotton boxing’ because for the opponent, it was like putting their hands into soft cotton and finding a needle in the middle!

By the time he was middle aged Yang taught at the Imperial Court and was tested by experts many times and never defeated, this earned him the title ‘Yang the Invincible’.  He became the martial arts instructor to the Shen Ji Battalion and taught in the Royal Households earning the title 'Ba Yeh’ (Eight Lords) because eight princes studied under him.

Teaching at the Imperial Court was a grave responsibility in that he was obliged to teach well or it would be considered treason with a probable death sentence!  It also gave Yang the opportunity to meet with and compare his skills with the best in the land.

Yang was a hard taskmaster to his three sons with one dying early, one attempting suicide and one frequently running away and attempting to become a monk.  Eventually both remaining sons became masters in their own right and both taught at the Imperial Court.

‘Cotton boxing’ is an interesting term because it indicates where the vital secret of Yang Tai Chi Chuan lies.  In combat the mind tends to be coarse and responds only to harsh and sudden movement ignoring the soft and sensitive.  The Tai Chi practitioner develops the skill of  ‘four ounces to move a thousand pounds’ and when the opponents mind is going coarse, his becomes more sensitive and works on a subliminal level neutralizing the opponents force with light touches, sticking, following, redirecting and controlling with power connected from the feet and legs up through the core, manipulated by the waist and out through he hands.  The ‘soft’ strikes carry that same connected power that although deceptively soft, carries the ‘kick’ of a donkey!

It becomes a ‘skirmish art’ because the body moves in that framed, posturally aligned and internally connected manner and is able to repel attackers from any direction at any time.  I remember when I talked about ‘fa jin’ being ‘like a whip’ to Ma Lee Yang she thought about it for a moment and then said that it was more like a ‘pin ball machine’.  This troubled me for ages, as I couldn’t see her point until I grasped the double helix and the ability to bounce or send power to any point of the body and in any direction in an instant.  A whip has vulnerable points in its’ movement and is committed – the pinball isn’t.

It makes the martial aspect of Tai Chi very different to that of most other martial arts.   I don’t think there is a ‘best’ art, only the best art for the character of each student.  It’s never the art, but the person that practices it that makes it efficient.

Good Yang style Tai Chi as a ‘skirmish’ art certainly suits doormen, security personnel and law enforcement officers.  I have taught all 3 categories successfully for over 3 decades.  Sometimes you have to search for the right instructor and art and not be put off or be influenced by others or by the first instructors you meet.  It can take as much time and effort to find the right instructor as the actual training itself!  People have often said to me “I always knew it was there in Tai Chi, it was just not easy to find”…..

Steve Rowe is an International Tai Chi Instructor teaching Presidential Bodyguards, Security Personnel, Police Self Defence Instructors and runs an association with over 15,000 students across Europe.  He is also an 8^th Dan in Karate, 3^rd Dan in Iaido, 2^nd Dan Jodo and 1^st Dan Ju Jitsu.

He is the Chairman of the Martial Arts Standards Agency and Shi Kon Martial Arts International.

You can read his blog and articles at www.themartialarchive.com and his website at www.shikon.com