Judo demonstration

Hi guys! I'm from Ukraine and I am keen on judo and acrobatics, so me and my friend tried to combine this two things.
As a result you can see this freestyle judo demonstration. I hope you'll like it.

Rocknrolla wrote:Hi guys! I'm from Ukraine and I am keen on judo and acrobatics, so me and my friend tried to combine this two things.
As a result you can see this freestyle judo demonstration. I hope you'll like it.

I would not call this judo or "freestyle judo" as you call it, knowing that there exists only Kôdôkan jûdô. I am not trying to be a contrarian or detract from your efforts or display. Jûdô is guided by two basic principles: sei-ryoku zen'yô and ji-ta kyô-ei. What you are doing is contrary to the first principle, literally the opposite, as you are putting in excess energy to achieve the most spectacular result and far more than necessary, whereas in jûdô it is precisely maximal efficiency at minimal effort. In fact, there is no kuzushi in what you do, and these essential parts of jûdô are sacrificed for the objective of something else: a preplanned movement that by preference is as mindblowing as possible. Hence, kuzushi is also not desired because true kuzushi would like make what you are aiming for impossible. What you are doing is a show display, and there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, it clearly is a talent and skill, and one you are investing in, which deserves appreciation in itself, but it is not jûdô even if it uses elements that are transposed from the jûdô curiculum. This, and the fact that one dresses in a gi, uses tatami and may have studied or even reached proficiency in jûdô does not make all one does jûdô. Really, in terms of objective, what it is you are doing is closer to the art of taidô than it is to jûdô. This distinction does not have so much to do with how they dress, but with what the principles and objectives are. For the same reasons what you see below is not aikidô (as it does not share the objectives of aikidô), but also taidô:








I would challenge if this should still be called budô. Already in the 18th century throughout the Meiji period many jûjutsu schools, including the parent schools of jûdô received harsh criticism in the sense of having evolved into completely unrealistic, largely fake schools, where the real martial arts skills had been replaced by chiefly-aesthetic performance arts, which often relied on unrealistic kata. The same issue has also largely haunted Kôdôkan jûdô and is one of the most prevalent criticisms on present day Kôdôkan kata, in particular from martial artists outside of jûdô, but increasingly also by jûdôka with longer careers who have personally witnessed this evolution. Let that be for what it is, but when you craft or practice the kind of things that you do --as legitimate and as interesting as it may be as some kind of unnamed performance art-- you would unnecessarily feed that criticism. Those kind of movements require lots of energy. Doing a real martial arts fight is a very heavy physiologically. In order to survive or win, one has to preserve energy, certainly when facing mutiple attackers hence why gratuitously handling that energy through unnecessary and irrelevant acrobatic movements would be anathema to your chances of survival. For these (and other reasons), please, enjoy what you are doing, but perhaps file it under a different heading in order not to cause confusion, and perhaps also in respect of the principles and ideas of Kôdôkan jûdô's founder, although if you choose not to, no one can blame you for much more than one could blame the IJF. Only, as an individual it is easier to interact, evaluate, amend course, than for a monstrous organization as the IJF has become.

Rocknrolla wrote:Hi guys! I'm from Ukraine and I am keen on judo and acrobatics, so me and my friend tried to combine this two things.
As a result you can see this freestyle judo demonstration. I hope you'll like it.

Mate great clip and a great way to showcase Judo as a fun, dynamic sport. You should be proud of yourselves. Make sure you make more videos and post them online

Dear Cichorei Kano,
Thank you so much for such a saturated reference. Your answer  contains a lot of information which makes me plunged deep in thoughts. I entirely agree, that this is just a spectacular performance, rather than practical skill. I pray you to excuse my negligence concerning the title. We are not very knowledgeable in all this terms.  I greatly hope that this didn't offend you too much. Actually we are doing judo and this reel was our collateral activity. We have some plans to make a more realistic video, using all above-stated principles. But for regular people it could be difficult to understand  inexpressible  beauty of rational motion (like that branch, which bands and throws down all the snow instead of breaking). Nowadays they want "panem et circenses". And probably IJF makes some effort to change judo in some kind of a show, sacrificing the very basic fundamentals. But anyway eventually some improvements always come in all spheres of our life and it's hard to tell wether they are good or not. Old generation due to the conservative views will blame the new generation. Like Socrates said: " Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

Rocknrolla wrote:Dear Cichorei Kano,
Thank you so much for such a saturated reference. Your answer  contains a lot of information which makes me plunged deep in thoughts. I entirely agree, that this is just a spectacular performance, rather than practical skill. I pray you to excuse my negligence concerning the title. We are not very knowledgeable in all this terms.  I greatly hope that this didn't offend you too much. Actually we are doing judo and this reel was our collateral activity. We have some plans to make a more realistic video, using all above-stated principles. But for regular people it could be difficult to understand  inexpressible  beauty of rational motion (like that branch, which bands and throws down all the snow instead of breaking). Nowadays they want "panem et circenses". And probably IJF makes some effort to change judo in some kind of a show, sacrificing the very basic fundamentals. But anyway eventually some improvements always come in all spheres of our life and it's hard to tell wether they are good or not. Old generation due to the conservative views will blame the new generation. Like Socrates said: " Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

Don't worry, no offense caused and thanks for your thoughtful reply. I understand what you mean. One thing to bear in mind though ... very late in his life Kanô defined beauty as an objective of jûdô, so there is nothing wrong with "aesthetics". The problem is ... that these were JAPANESE aesthetics, NOT WESTERN aesthetics, and the rules of Japanese aesthetics are thoroughly different from Japanese aesthetics and not mastered by most jûdôka as doing so is a study in itself. So, bear in mind that in order to create "beauty" in the sense it was meant in jûdô, one first needs to understand it. This is also why Westerners will keep facing a daunting task in competing (I am not using the word "competing" as a reference to competition, but in the sense of "having the ability to attain the same level") in jûdô kata or any form of kata subject to Japanese aesthetics such as shodô calligraphy, Nô or Kabuki, Ikebana, etc. Westerners can well achieve the same mechanic mastership, but the spritual level, and aesthetics is one of them, is very, very difficult. Even if you study all that you want and finally understand it, one also still needs to have the ability to create it. If we take something else than jûdô, for example calligraphy, then it is really, really hard for a Western to achieve the same level as a Japanese or Chinese calligrapher, not just because of technique, but because of the complex underlying aesthetics.