Schedule

place: Stř­elecký ostrov (Shoot­ing Island)

13–15 Sep­tem­ber 2024

Friday

  • 10:00 ‑12:30 —  work­shops: Har­ri­et Devlin or Gian­fran­co Pace
  • 14:30 ‑14:50 — prac­tice in pairs: Tap Sao
  • 14:50 ‑17:00 — prac­tice in pairs:  Free push-hands
  • (17.00 — 18:30 — Pri­vate fenc­ing lessons for long-term stu­dents of Tomasz Nowakows­ki only. Sor­ry for the others.)
    19:00 — .. Those inter­est­ed can meet for din­ner togeth­er. Pivo­var Národ­ní, Národ­ní 8 (map)
    (Not includ­ed in the reg­is­tra­tion fee.)

Saturday

  • 10:00 — 12:30 —  work­shops: Gian­fran­co Pace or Tomasz Nowakows­ki
  • 14:30 — 14:50 — prac­tice in pairs: Tap Sao
  • 14:50 — 17:00 — prac­tice in pairs:  Free push-hands
  • 17:00 — 18:00 — break, prepa­ra­tion for “Gala” evening
  • 18:00 — 19:00, Har­ri­et Devlin,
    Talk: “From Resis­tance Work­er to Tai Chi Pio­neer: The Remark­able Jour­ney of Ger­da Ged­des and Her Dis­cov­ery of Tai Chi Chuan and Its Symbols”.
  • 19:00 — … forms exhibitions
  • par­ty

Sunday

  • Work­shops – Expe­ri­enced teach­ers will present their meth­ods of work in Tai Chi Chuan and/or push hands.
  • Prac­tice in pairs
    • 4×5 min­utes of Tap Sao
    • Free push-hands: 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.

Teachers

 

Harriet Devlin

Biography

Har­ri­et Devlin

Har­ri­et was born in Hong Kong, the daugh­ter of Ger­da Ged­des – the first non-Chi­nese to teach Tai Chi Chuan in Europe. Har­ri­et remem­bers her moth­er being taught Tai Chi Chuan in the 1950s by Mas­ter Choy Hok Pang (1885−1958) and his son, Mas­ter Choy Kam Man (1921−1993). Ger­da ‘Pytt’ Ged­des spent many years study­ing Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy, art, and lit­er­a­ture to under­stand the mean­ings of the sym­bols in the Yang Style Long Form and evolved an inter­pre­ta­tion of an alle­gor­i­cal life jour­ney embod­ied with­in the form. Har­ri­et learnt from her moth­er at The Place, Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary Dance in Lon­don, and was priv­i­leged to attend class­es with Mas­ter Cheng Man Ching before he died in 1975. She also stud­ied in Amer­i­ca with Sophia Delza in New York, revis­it­ed Mas­ter Choy Kam Man in San Fran­cis­co, and took fur­ther class­es in Tai­wan. In addi­tion, Har­ri­et stud­ied Shi­at­su in Amer­i­ca and Japan and taught and prac­tised for many years. Har­ri­et began teach­ing the Yang Style Long Form in the 1970s and has con­tin­ued ever since, along­side moth­er­hood and her pro­fes­sion­al career as a muse­um cre­ator and uni­ver­si­ty aca­d­e­m­ic in the field of his­toric build­ings. Har­ri­et has lit­tle expe­ri­ence of push hands as the sym­bol­ism of the form has fed and stim­u­lat­ed her through­out her life.

Abstract of the Talk

Har­ri­et will give a presentation/talk/demonstration: “From Resis­tance Work­er to Tai Chi Pio­neer: The Remark­able Jour­ney of Ger­da Ged­des and Her Dis­cov­ery of Tai Chi Chuan and Its Symbols.”

Workshop Topic

In the two work­shops, Har­ri­et will explore mean­ings and sym­bols with­in the long form, through prac­tice, art, and Taoist phi­los­o­phy. From cra­dle to grave, we go through a process of change, of ‘becom­ing’ and ‘debe­com­ing’. We are all the time on our way towards some­thing else. The Alle­gor­i­cal Jour­ney of Tai Chi Chuan shows these nat­ur­al stages of trans­for­ma­tion with great clar­i­ty. Accord­ing to the Chi­nese philoso­pher Chuang Tzu, our start­ing point is one of orig­i­nal igno­rance; we have no knowl­edge. As we go through life, we accu­mu­late knowl­edge and learn­ing, which we have to shed again, so that at the end of our lives, we no longer have to hold on. In Taoist phi­los­o­phy, when we die, our spir­it soul will float upwards and will join with the ener­gy of the cos­mos, and accord­ing to the life we have led, we will con­tribute to this liv­ing energy.

Har­ri­et will join the after­noon Push Hands ses­sions as a stu­dent rather than a teacher.

Linkd and References

Gianfranco Pace

Biography

Gian­fran­co Pace

Born on 15th June 1969 in Cata­nia, Italy, he began study­ing Chen style Tai­ji­quan as a teenag­er under the guid­ance of M. Shi Rong Hua, who instruct­ed him with a ‘fam­i­ly’ sort of teach­ing. After about ten years of learn­ing from him, in 1998, he trav­eled through Chi­na seek­ing the effec­tive qual­i­ties of Taijiquan.
Fol­low­ing the advice of his teacher, in 2001, he went to study in Chen­ji­agou, the cra­dle of Tai­ji­quan, liv­ing in M. Chen Xiao Xing’s home. Upon his return to Italy, he attend­ed sem­i­nars by sev­er­al mas­ters of the 19th gen­er­a­tion of the Chen family.

In 2003, he found­ed the ITKA, Inter­na­tion­al Tai­ji­quan Kung Fu Asso­ci­a­tion, propos­ing the entire tra­di­tion­al tech­ni­cal pro­gram, enriched by oth­er exer­cis­es and his own method of teach­ing, a result of his prac­ti­cal experience.

He has been invit­ed to teach in dif­fer­ent coun­tries around the world for his effec­tive­ness in Taijiquan.
For five con­sec­u­tive years, he has taught in New York, and he has also held sem­i­nars in Flori­da, Mex­i­co, the Domini­can Repub­lic, Chile, Argenti­na, and Brazil. In the lat­ter four coun­tries, he was able to estab­lish ITKA schools for South America.

In 2015, he was appoint­ed by the Ital­ian Fed­er­a­tion of Wushu Kung Fu as the mas­ter respon­si­ble for the entire field of Tai­ji­quan. In June 2016, he presided over an inter­na­tion­al sem­i­nar togeth­er with Grand Mas­ter Yang Jun, the great-grand­son of Yang Cheng Fu, a direct descen­dant of Yang Lu Chan. The theme of the sem­i­nar was ‘Chen style meets Yang style’. In March 2017, he chaired anoth­er inter­na­tion­al sem­i­nar togeth­er with Mas­ter Zhou Zhong­Fu (Wu Style) in Genoa. He has been invit­ed for his mar­tial qual­i­ties by the Wang Acad­e­my to teach along with M. Wang Zhi Xiang.
In July 2017, owing to the invi­ta­tion of Mas­ter Wang, he taught in Chi­na at the Sanya Inter­na­tion­al Camp.

Now, he is work­ing inten­sive­ly, lead­ing sev­er­al Tai­ji­quan and Nei Gong ITKA Instruc­tors Cours­es in Italy, Spain, Ger­many, and South America.

In 2009, he real­ized the dream of build­ing a school where it is pos­si­ble to study and live for long or short peri­ods: the ITKA’s main site school was estab­lished close to Catania.
Owing to this, a new project called ITKA Col­lege start­ed, and now many peo­ple from many coun­tries, includ­ing Scot­land, are study­ing inten­sive­ly to reach a high lev­el in Taijiquan.

It’s wor­thy to high­light that, even though he has been invit­ed by sev­er­al expo­nents of the Chen Style’s 19th gen­er­a­tion to rep­re­sent their school, Mas­ter Pace has nev­er accept­ed these requests in order to car­ry out the ITKA Sys­tem, a high-lev­el method that is tra­di­tion­al and inno­v­a­tive, rec­og­nized in many coun­tries around the world, and since 2017, even in China.

Links

Tomasz (Thomas) Nowakowski

 

Biography

Tomasz (Thomas) Nowakowski

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).

Workshop 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

 

 

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