This is Ruth Dathorne one of my too Tai Chi students that is now suffering form EMF sensitivity and who we are raising money for her treatment at the Breakspear Clinic.... All money from my seminar in Sheffield on Saturday will gonto this fund - This interview was published in 2008 Ruth Dathorne runs a Tai Chi club in Sheffield and is a Karate black belt. Her other major interest is in dance, from nightclub dancing to tribal, she’s a girl that just loves to move. I thought the comparison between the Martial Arts and dance was worth a discussion…. SR Hi Ruth, how did you get into Martial Arts? RD Watching Jackie Chan in a movie, he was on a mountain top, with all the blue skies and space around him, it was almost as if his body was his ‘toy’ and he was playing with an immense amount of skill… it was very inspiring! SR Did you get into dance first, or Martial Arts? RD Martial Arts, I started qigong in ‘99 and then went to a Kung Fu club, it was all guys and wasn’t quite what I was looking for, I only did a few sessions and then met a friend that I had known at school and she told me that there was a local Wado Ryu karate class run by Phillip Young. I went along and found a Martial Art that suited me. SR How long did you train there? RD I Started in Sept ’99 and I remember you doing a course there the following year, you were talking about the internal system and chakras and I knew that was what I wanted to do. The following day you did a healing course, but regretfully I couldn’t attend that. SR When did you take your black belt? RD In May ’03, I had been doing karate for three and a half years. SR That was pretty good going! I remember you were pretty good. RD I think my co-ordination skills were good and I have perfectionist tendencies, so I push myself pretty hard. At the time I had been pretty ill and was still in recovery, so I don’t think the intense training really helped that much! SR How did you then get into the Tai Chi? RD When I was about to take my black belt I went to your Tai Chi course in Huddersfield at Bob Sykes Dojo and then your subsequent Summer Course in Chatham. I can remember in Chatham training in the Karate group and looking across at the Tai Chi group and wishing that I was in with them. I had already been doing a lot of dancing at the time in nightclubs and I could ‘feel’ the similarities in that ‘joy’ if movement. I was also attracted to the esoteric side. I can remember you teaching me to ‘soften’ into my thighs and down to the feet and the incredible feeling and flooding of energy that came from that. I knew that I was starting on a journey that I was meant to make. Having tried a few other Tai Chi clubs and the Karate, I felt that they lacked the depth that your Tai Chi had. I needed that depth and the room to grow. SR How would you describe your journey through Tai Chi from there? RD Because I lived in Sheffield and you were in Chatham, I realised that I had quite a task to learn it remotely, I felt that I should have started in Tai Chi, but then the Karate had given me so much. I probably needed the hardness and ‘yang’ from the Karate to kind of ‘open me out’ so that Tai Chi could ‘fill me in’. I did enjoy the hardness and fighting aspects of the Karate but was relieved to get into the Tai Chi, I felt like I’d come home… I felt that Tai Chi was filling in the same ‘lines’ as Karate – but with a different and more holistic substance. I was involved in the nightclub scene and was getting a bit fed up with it. I felt a bit isolated and needed a better outlet for my expression. SR How did you get into dance? RD Through the nightclub scene in the beginning. Dance gave me the bit I was missing, the yin to the yang of Karate. Karate had the regimentation but lacked the spontaneous flow of intelligence. Dance is so evocative and heightens the emotions. SR You have to excuse me a bit here, because at my age, ‘dance’ is doing the ‘twist’ or the ‘mashed potato’ in a discotheque. I’m a bit like your granddad getting up to dance at a wedding! So you may have to explain what it is a bit further! RD Sure! (laughs) It’s personal to me what I saw in the Nightclubs was that everyone needed to take something to dance and I didn’t want to do Karate and get ‘wasted’. The kind of dancing taking place was not for me, I needed something softer and more melodic that would ‘lift’ me. I needed more creativity. SR Where did you go from there? RD I was finding Karate increasingly less satisfying and thought that I could increase my skills in dance. I wanted to learn dance and movement and enrolled in a GCSE class for dance and found that it was as regimented and certificate based as Karate! I think that in the same way that people find it difficult to kiai (spirit shout) in Karate and to express themselves in that way, within dance you’re given permission to move and be expressive and creative within the structure of society. SR That’s true, I can’t sing or dance but I do it anyway. RD I found that in the Nightclubs I could be more creative than using a particular pre-planned move. Formal dance and the Martial Arts did give me methods of using my body with the stretches, expansion and connections that I needed to move – but then I could make them my own. SR How would you define the relationship between Tai Chi and dance? RD In order to be freeform, your body has to have a sense of itself all of the time, Tai Chi gives you this skill. You can match the elements of Tai Chi to dance, ‘sink, swallow, float and spit’ is in every move, you need earth in tribal dance in the legs and feet, air allows you to float, to change direction very quickly giving you options of movement, water gives you the fluidity and continuity and fire the passion and intuition. Music is a vibration, when in tune with it we can be highly motivated. Think of the effect of the ‘Rocky’ tune ‘Eye of the Tiger’… that gets everyone boxing! SR In our Tai Chi class we’ve been working on continuity of movement in spirals and I’ve been using the Tibetan Chanting for that because the ‘dirge’ in the background is the perfect pace. I even get the students to hum the pace along with the music, it works a treat! RD Music gives you the opportunity to feel that there is a tangible force in the air, that everything is alive and doesn’t need to be so stop/start… SR You said that dance gave you the aspects that Karate didn’t and that Tai Chi put the two together and more for you, do you think that dance can add anything to the Tai Chi? RD In Tai Chi you’re learning to separate the minutiae parts of your body in a set form and you’re allowing the form to unravel in a set way to allow chi to flow. In dance you’re given other options in the way that you can separate different parts of the body to link down to the feet and finding a great deal of subtlety. You’re allowing the nervous system to go ‘free style’. In Tai Chi you’re given all these methods of using the body, having learned Tai Chi, it enhances your dance, and conversely the Tai Chi and dance combined can enhance the Tai Chi. In effect, dance becomes like a free form of Tai Chi! SR I think my dance is ‘drunken style’ Tai Chi! RD You’re creating neural pathways, in dance you can be opening your body in ways that you wouldn’t do in a prescribed exercise. SR I can see that. Many years ago I learned a form of Buddhist Yoga and then I learned a form of free style yoga where you literally cleared a room, drew the curtains, laid on the floor with your eyes closed and just stretched as your body felt it wanted to. It was an incredible experience with releases in the body that I couldn’t have got in any other way! I don’t think I could have done it so well if I hadn’t have practiced the formal yoga first. RD I couldn’t dance in the way that I do if I hadn’t softened the tissue first and formed the connections that I have in Tai Chi. I don’t dance as much as I would like to nowadays and if Nightclubs were different I would definitely go out more and let rip! I miss the ‘collective dance’ of clubs as well. SR You mean like the Macarena? RD (Laughs) SR There are many people that are against music in Martial Arts… RD If you needed it constantly, that would be wrong, but as an occasional training aid – I don’t think you can beat it! For Tai Chi it is difficult to find the right kind of tracks that are not too intrusive. Everything in this universe is a vibration…. When you get harmony, you get Tai Chi and dance.. SR Thanks for your time Ruth. RD Thanks Steve.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 08:47:37 +0000
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