styles

Nearly everyone in the Lower Mainland fencing community fights similarly.  In fact most of Tir Righ fights similarly.  It’s often refered to as Tir Righ Standard.  It’s effective, it’s safe, it’s defended, and it’s worked well for a lot of fighters.  This is how we teach new fighters.  It’s how we retrain fighters who are doing poorly.  This style is ingrained in us.  At Investiture the other week Master Guido was commenting to another fighter, one of the very few who fight differently, that as most of the people fight the same here you can use the same techniques to defeat almost all of them.  And he’s right.  Everyone is used to fighting same style vs. same style.  We’re becoming a little stagnate in our style.  We found one that generally works for most people, and are sticking to it.  And it is a good general style.  It melds clasical and period fencing, and allows for variation and experimentation within a construct.  But if you face 1/2 of the fencers in Tir Righ you have a general concept of what they are going to do and how they are going to fight.

And it’s so ingrained that when I was trying out something a little different I had someone adjust my entire style about a 1/2 hour before a tournament… I did very poorly in that tournament.  Immediately before a tournament is not the time to make sweeping changes.  But the bigger issue is that other styles of fencing are not seen as “different” but “wrong”.  What really got me thinking was this post: http://classicalfencing.blogspot.com/2011/03/gorilla-tactics.html at a clasical fencing blog I read.  It brought up the idea that maybe we need to examine why we do what we do.

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