Likes: 
Ho hum...
All quiet on the jodo front again then.....
......
....(yawn).....
Oh well I suppose I could crash through the silence with a brief seminar report. The BKA had it's first spring jodo seminar and grading to replace the regular weekend holidays in Watchet last weekend. The turn out was great in that it was getting a bit congested in quite a large sports hall but still enough room to move around.
The tone of the seminar was to move slightly away from Seitei Jodo in spite of the grading on Sunday to look at Samidare and Ran Ai. There were some newbies there who had barely advanced past Seitei Sakan but it was a good exposure to the slightly interesting side of SMR. Vito and Linda Tattoli, Jock Hopson and Chris Buxton led the seminar with the Tattoli's doing the koryu demos.
I for one have always enjoyed Samidare - the relatively small number of forms within the teaching set, the directness of the forms and the pre-emptive-counterstrike'ness which set Samidare apart from other teaching sets. The riai for the forms is also quite obvious and there is a good introduction to non-kihon techniques. All of this of course couldn't be delivered without some Tandoku Dosa and MARCHING UP AND DOWN AND SHOUTING!!!
We finished the first day by starting to introduce Ran Ai to those who didn't know it and to clarify some points for those that did (ZNKR Seitei Jodo undergoes occasional changes in style - more towards traditional Fukuoka taste I am pleased to say but not without the Tokyo pragmatism).
By lunchtime on Sunday we had remarkably gotten most of the newbies through Ran Ai without prompt. The afternoon gave a chance for grading practise and no one appeared worse off for not spending the whole weekend doing their grading forms. The ikkyu level group actually performed with fantastic flare with really solid understanding and demonstration of the basics.
Anyway just some light reading to break the monotony.
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