Saturday, August 11, 2007

Points on a curve

The second Saturday of the month rolls around once again, as it is wont to do, and if you have been paying attention at the back you'll know that that means a fencing workshop.

Goodness, it was warm today. The rapier section was largely given over to voids of various descriptions - voltes, demi-voltes, intagliatas, slips of the leg and body and the contortion formally known as the inqantata, and now called the passata sotto. All good sweaty fun.

After lunch, we started on a new saber curriculum that promises to give us a taster of different infantry saber forms, in the same way that our rapier studies have ranged from studying Agrippa (which we have), through di Grassi and developing into Capo Ferra's point attacks. It was mainly footwork today, although we did touch on cuts snapping from the grip and the guard positions which are somewhat different to the Hutton guards that we have studied previously.

At half past five the birthday girl Rachel arrived, accompanied by wyves Kat and Luisa, to join me in taking an Adept's assessment. This was mainly to reexamine the areas that we had had problems with at our first attempt six months ago, so we had to demonstrate cavares, cavationes, beats, stringere and guardagnare before moving onto voids and finishing with some off hand weapon freeplay with willing freeplay bunny Dave. I chose my trusty buckler and gave a good account of myself, even bending my sword on Dave at one point. I seem to have much more confidence to initiate attacks when using an offhand weapon than when just using a single rapier, which may be an issue that I need to revisit at some point.

After we had both run through our assessments, the Prof totted up our scores and highlighted some areas where we had had temporary mental blocks, and identified some areas for further work, before confirming that he was happy for both of us to considered as Adepts and wear a red sash.

Hurrah and huzzah!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done !

Anonymous Me said...

Congratulations!