Schedule

Atten­tion! We are return­ing to our favourite island — Stř­elecký ostrov

15–17 Sep­tem­ber 2023

Grad­u­al­ly, we will add and update it.

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	Work­shops	Prac­tice in pairs	Gala-evening
Fri­day	10:00–12:30	14:30–17:00
Sat­ur­day	10:00–12:30	14:30–17:00	17:00–18:30
Sun­day	10:00–12:30	14:30–17:00

• Work­shops – Expe­ri­enced teach­ers will present their meth­ods of work in Tai Chi Chuan and push hands.
• Prac­tice in pairs – Par­tic­i­pants will indi­vid­u­al­ly agree on how they want to prac­tice in pairs. They will prac­tice in 10-minute rounds. Par­tic­i­pants will agree on the type of prac­tice (free push hands vs. form push hands, with steps vs. with­out steps). The lev­el is always adjust­ed to the prac­ti­tion­er with less experience.
• Gala-evening – Space for pre­sen­ta­tions of styles, schools and forms as well as a friend­ly meeting.

• Giles Ros­ban­der
• Roland von Loefen
• Tomasz Nowakows­ki

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Teachers

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Giles Rosbander

Biog­ra­phy:
Giles Ros­ban­der comes from Eng­land but lives in Ger­many. With a back­ground in dance the­atre per­for­mance and teach­ing, he start­ed learn­ing Tai Chi Chuan from Wil­helm Mertens in Ham­burg in 1996. Fol­low­ing this, he trained with Nigel Sut­ton and sev­er­al Malaysian teach­ers, includ­ing Lau Kim Hong, in the Zhong Ding Asso­ci­a­tion (Cheng Man Ching style); with Ömer Hum­baraci in Ham­burg (Shayuquan style); and then for some years with Fer­nan­do Chedel (Ma Tsun Kuen style). He has gained fur­ther input through encoun­ters with many oth­er prac­ti­tion­ers; he high­lights sev­er­al sem­i­nars with Dr. Tao Ping Siang as a par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tion. He has cross-trained in oth­er mar­tial arts and sports such as MMA, Aiki­do, Bagua Zhang, Wing Chun, and Systema.
He has also learned and prac­ticed cran­iosacral ther­a­py and mas­sage and is a pro­fes­sion­al translator.
He has taught many work­shops and sem­i­nars in Ger­many and Europe and has his own Tai Chi Chuan school in Berlin. He also co-oper­ates close­ly with his train­ing part­ner Mar­tin Neu­mann, giv­ing joint sem­i­nars under the title “TuiShou Stereo”.

Top­ic:
Dis­cov­er­ing the Cir­cles, Surf­ing the Circles
If we can sense and con­nect with the many cir­cles, big and small, that appear in (free) push hands, then we can start to neu­tral­ize, bor­row ener­gy and return it in a sin­gle move­ment. Many pos­si­bil­i­ties now open up: things start to become more effort­less, more effec­tive, more cre­ative and also more fun. So instead of work­ing hard and look­ing for solu­tions, we can begin to ‘surf the waves’ and let them work for us.
We can see this as an embod­i­ment of wu wei.
The prin­ci­ple of the flow­ing cir­cles in push hands can also be trans­lat­ed to Tai Chi appli­ca­tions and self-defence.
Impor­tant: for the cir­cles to work well, we need a good body align­ment with a clear con­nec­tion from sky to earth/earth to sky. So we will also work a lit­tle on bring­ing the spine to ver­ti­cal; this sup­ports the infin­i­ty of circles.

Links:

• Tai Chi Chuan class­es in Berlin
• TuiShou Stereo sem­i­nars in Berlin

Roland von Loefen

Biog­ra­phy: Roland start­ed his Tai­ji­quan prac­tice in 1988 with Hel­mut Bauer, Bar­bara Schmid-Neuhaus and Toyo Kobayashi in the tra­di­tion of Cheng Man Ching. In 1998, Roland met mas­ter Yek Sing Ong and his cur­rent teacher Wee Kee Jin. Through long inten­sive train­ing he even­tu­al­ly became a cer­ti­fied Instruc­tor and Teacher of Wee Kee Jin’s “Tai­ji­quan School of Cen­tral Equi­lib­ri­um”. In 2013 he found­ed and orga­nized the 1st inter­na­tion­al push-hands meet­ing in Haß­furt am Main.

 

Top­ic: We want to work on yield­ing, and push­ing with a relaxed force. If you can yield, you have the abil­i­ty to neu­tral­ize the oppo­nen­t’s force. Our exer­cis­es are fixed push hands and semi-free push hands. The advan­tage of Semi-free Push­ing Hands is, that you can learn to lis­ten and sense how your part­ner behaves. Win­ning is only sec­ondary as you change roles after 5 minutes.
We are using 3 dif­fer­ent stances for this kind of push­ing hands.

Yield­ing, yield­ing: An impor­tant sen­tence from the classics.
Seek the straight in the curve, first store then discharge!

Links:

• TAIJIQUAN Push Hands — Meet­ing in Has­s­furt am Main
• Tai­ji­quan-relax-sink Roland von Roefen

Tomasz (Thomas) Nowakowski

Biog­ra­phy:

Tomasz (Thomas) Nowakows­ki liv­ing in Lon­don, visu­al and mar­tial artist. He has stud­ied dif­fer­ent mar­tial arts since 1966 and has been teach­ing T’ai Chi Ch’uan and Qi Gong since 1982. Dur­ing the last 30 years, Thomas has taught Tai Chi Chuan and Qi Gong in many coun­tries: Aus­tria, Czech Repub­lic, France, Ger­many, Italy, Poland, Slo­va­kia, Tai­wan and the Unit­ed King­dom. He has led work­shops at his own school as well as for dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, and cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions. Thomas was a judge at the Open Nation­al Cham­pi­onship of Tai­wan in 2004. He is a co-founder of The Cen­tre of Taoist Arts Gold­en Hill (Zlaty Kopec) in Prague, the Inter­na­tion­al Push Hands Meet­ing in Prague and founder of Tai Chi Art Cen­tre Lon­don. In 1990 he met his cur­rent teacher Dr Ming Wong C.Y. and stud­ied his fam­i­ly style Tai Chi, Tai Ki Kung San Fung and some tech­niques and the­o­ries of Chi­nese med­i­cine. Thomas is the author of “Shapes of Bal­ance” sys­tem (struc­tured devel­op­ment of perception).

Top­ic:

“When you under­stand a tech­nique, you know a tech­nique. When you under­stand a con­cept, you know a thou­sand techniques.”
Under­stand­ing a con­cept is the core of my Shapes of Bal­ance teach­ing system.

The top­ic of my work­shop will be prac­ti­cal research of a con­cept of Chang San Feng 13th Fun­da­men­tal Forms Tai Chi in indi­vid­ual forms and their appli­ca­tions with part­ners in Tuishou (Push­ing Hands). Based on the com­par­i­son exam­ples from San Feng and Yang styles. We will be work­ing with tim­ing, coor­di­na­tion, the bal­ance of struc­ture and aware­ness of move­ments in action with partners.

Links:

• Cen­tre of Taoist Arts Gold­en Hill (home page)
• Tai Ki Kung