2011 Minnesota Renaissance Festival–Martial Arts Special Edition

Each weekend at the Renaissance Festival has a theme and special acts. While it was a Middle Eastern theme featuring belly dancers, there was a one day only demonstration of martial arts on the schedule. Of course I was curious about it and went over to check it out at the 1 PM performance.

Instead of people kicking and punching while breaking the occasional board, I was delighted to find it was a Japanese sword combat school putting on the display. Even better, it wasn’t bamboo rods but sharpened steel blades being used.

 

Things opened up with traditional drum beating and horn blowing. The latter turned into a comedy routine along the way. A man in full armor (rusty at that) came up to harass the horn blower for not being loud enough.

Whereupon the blond belly dancer defended him with a giant foil covered cardboard can opener and chased the knight off. It was bit of levity before things got serious.

The master of the dojo instructed his students to sit on the mat, senior students in front, juniors in back. There they performed individual practice draws. Yes, those are sharpened blades.

Following the draws, wooden swords were brought out for practice exercises. To the casual glance it looked like kids fooling around, but if you watched closely you could see they were paired off senior with junior. This was as much instruction as demonstration and done slowly for this reason.

Then real duels began. These were much more serious as you can see by the expression on the senior here.

Kinetic would be my description of these bouts. They were primarily self judged and the combatants would break off to bow when they thought they would have been cut. Since they are mimicking the effects of fighting with a real blade, evasion and dodging are critical to survival.

The youngest student had a hard time of it, but the master kept encouraging her to try again. Eventually she got a cut through the tatami reed bundle, if a ragged one. She was so serious and nervous that you couldn’t help rooting for her.

A senior student took on two bundles at once. I thought he was moving slowly until I tried to capture him with the camera. What happened is his movements were so graceful and controlled that it only looked like he was slow. He really made it look effortless.

It was not a good day for this student.

This student came out with a triple the normal thickness bundle. A skeptical master asked him if he really wanted to try this and if he’d done it before. The answer was yes to both and away he went. First cut is shown here and he nearly pulled it off.

The second cut didn’t go as far in as the first, only getting half way. Not looking good.

Third time was the charm and succeeded when he changed the angle of the cut. The master said he didn’t think that was what made the difference, though. Well deserved applause from his fellow students shows the spirit of the school.

This was the highlight of the festival for me and was the last thing I expected to see at a renaissance festival. But as they pointed out, the samurai were still going strong in Japan during the 1500’s to 1700’s. It is nice to know there is a school teaching this here in Minnesota.