Meeting with Edward Hines and Tim Cartmell

So I was in London and Paris for the past week for vacation, which is why there was a dearth of postings. Anyhow I am back and now and have a couple of things to report, probably the most interesting of which was my meeting with Edward Hines and Tim Cartmell (who are both students of Luo De Xiu) in Paris on Monday. Tim had happened to be there because he had been teaching in Lille and had decided to stop over a few days in Paris before returning to LA. Thus on a sunny spring afternoon, we met for drinks near the Paris Opera and sat at an open air cafe to look at girls discuss martial arts.

It was a great privilege to talk to them both as they are very much my seniors in Gao Baguazhang and they have done much for disseminating the internal arts in both Europe and the United States. Originally I had hoped to structure the discussion more as a detailed interview for my blog, but as the atmosphere was so informal that I gave up and so we just had a nice afternoon together. Both Edward and Tim had met my Sifu in Hong Kong before and had even trained with him a little bit but this was probably 20 years ago. The discussion was pretty wide ranging, from why Tim Cartmell moved towards teaching more BJJ and sparring (although he does also have a small private group to whom he still teaches Bagua) and we also talked about the lack of interest in martial arts by young people in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Mostly I was interested to the reception to Baguazhang outside of Asia, and what was interesting is that while there were many people who had studied some internal arts before and wanted to go deeper, recently many new students had no background in martial arts at all. In Paris there were no Asians who studied under Edward, but there were many Vietnamese at Tim's school. 

The other topics included the efficacy of Aikido, where to find a good swordsmith (apparently there used to be a good forge in the south of France which produced beautiful cavalry sabres), Gao Baguazhang in the UK, the use of single poses to build structure, training in pilates and how the use of pilates core movement was a little different from internal arts but could be used to the same effect. But all in all it was just a nice time shooting the breeze with the guys, who were really down to earth and the nicest of guys, and shared a love for the martial arts. One thing I did notice was that both of them were quite slight of build, no excess muscle, although Edward had quite well developed shoulders, which goes to show that you don't need to be built like a house to be effective at martial arts. One of the joys of learning martial arts has been the opportunity to meet friends from across the world 以武會友 and this was another example of that, for we are all strange birds to devote so much of our time to something that is so esoteric. Am looking forward to practicing with Edward on my next trip to Paris, whenever that may be.    

Please find the related links for their schools below for additional contact information

Shen Wu
Bagua Paris

[Pictures to follow]