The Best Part Of Kali

Howdy all! This week I want to talk about one of the best aspects of training in the martial arts over the last 40-plus years and that's all the interesting people you meet along the way.

I've been blessed to get to work with some great instructors like Remy Presas, James Keating, Dan Inosanto, Hock Hochheim, Mike Janich, James Loriega, etc. but beyond that I've met just hundreds (probably thousands) of fascinating folks over the years. Some were very skilled instructors in their own right though we were all students of the art as well.

My latest Kali-Friend is Guro Annie Sheng, a longtime student of Inosanto Kali who has trained in a number of other Filipino and world arts. Like Kali itself she is quite multi-faceted; a warrior, a scholar, an artist, an author, and a mom to two young children!

(Left to Right - Myself, Guro Annie, Guro Ron, Guro Howard)

Our meeting was quite serendipitous. One day I had the random thought to search "Kali Finger Lakes NY" to see if there were any other practitioners and was overjoyed to find her Word Press site you can see here and to learn about the Cornell Kali Club which she helped to found a few years back.

Beyond her martial resume, there are links to her artwork including a special section of Filipino martial art related paintings. Her style is bold, colorful and whimsical. It was great to get to see these pieces and more in person after we trained. Further, as "D.A. Xiaolin Spires" she has written a lot of science fiction for periodical anthologies like Clarksworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, etc. and I believe she has a full length novel in the works.

What was a lot of fun in training with her and Guro Howard (a Balintawak specialist) was that although we had never met before we were all able to FLOW like we'd all worked out together for years. There was no need for many words or long explanations, we all knew the art and so we were able to play it and create something together.

We started off with a series of sinawalli (double stick) drills which honestly I'd never done before in that format. But given the nature of sinawalli once you see the structure of inward and backhand, broken and fluid strikes, there are only so many variations (8 to be precise when it comes to 3-beat sinawali as MAA Keating teaches on Developmental Training Vol.1).

From there we moved into sumbrada, and since there was no point just doing the basic version with people who are at this level I mixed it up by going left vs. right hand, double stick, using abanico to break timing, and other variations MAA Keating teaches on Advanced Sumbrada. This was a blast and we did different counter strikes and disarms out of the mix.

One funny moment was when Guro Annie said I was doing "abstract sumbrada" and I responded that, "It's not abstract, it's literally the same drill but reversed using the other hand". Then she told me, "Oh yes I see that, it's just that "abstract sinawali" is what we call that variation in the Inosanto lineage."

Ha ha, done in by terminology again! In FMA you never can be sure what a term means from school to school so if someone asks "Do you do exercise X" the best thing you can say is "Show me what you mean by X".

Ron and I plan to train with Guro Annie as we can plus go visit the Conrell Kali Club once they get started again for the year, so hopefully our Kali "Book of Friends" will expand again even further!

All the very best,

Pete Kautz

PS - Like this Article?  Sign up for the Training Tips at the top of the page and get an original article like this sent to you by e-mail every week on Tuesday!