ISMAC
As promised, here’s my report on the International Sword Martial Arts Convention.

I rode down to the convention with Brian, Aldo and a sheaf of polearms. Just over the border (where our weapons of medieval destruction caused no consternation whatsoever), we had to detour to avoid road construction. At one point, the detour signs disappeared and we found ourselves in the wrong part of Detroit. Oh dear Ghod. I’ve been to some pretty sketchy corners of Romania, including Copsa Mica, a town dominated by the blackened carcass of a communist-era carbon factory. Detroit looks worse. There were whole streets where most of the buildings were boarded up, and some of the houses were charred and collapsing as if they’d been bombed. It looked like the zombie apocalypse had struck.

The Airport Westin, where the convention took place, was very comfortable and full of friendly, helpful staff. It’s physically attached to the Detroit airport. The one drawback was that the hotel and the airport are in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t enough time between sessions to leave them and find food outside. The hotel restaurant is lovely, but priced for business travellers with generous expense accounts, and the airport has nothing but a coffee stand outside the gate area. In theory, hotel guests could enter the secure zone by showing ID to a uniformed bureaucrat at the airport entrance and having him fill out some forms to show to other guards at the metal detectors, but the crat at the entrance had a tendency to disappear without explanation for an hour or more at a time, only to return and walk past the hungry, waiting hotel guests without making eye contact. He also kind of creeped me out when he kept pronouncing my surname as El-Imam. We had one dinner in the airport (which had surprisingly reasonable prices) but ended up ordering in a lot of pizza and Chinese food the rest of the time.

The seminars at the convention were marvellous. A lot of the well-known longsword instructors were there, including Sean Hayes, Stefan Dieke, Bob Charron, Guy Windsor and of course AEMMA’s own Brian McIlmoyle. I was particularly interested in Stefan Dieke’s stuff, because I haven’t had much exposure to the German school of swordsmanship until now. I think some of that voiding footwork and the zwerchauen are going to find their way into my sparring in the future--in fact they already have. German longsword works on different principles than the Italian school, which were highlighted in a joint class run by Stefan and Guy Windsor. Where Fiore likes to build a solid structure behind the sword and position it so that his opponent is at a mechanical disadvantage, the German stuff (or at least my limited understanding of Stefan’s interpretation of it) keeps the blade in constant rotation outside the body’s profile and moves the body around the sword, relying on the ballistic nature of the strikes to overcome the opponent’s blade. To me, the two systems don’t seem mutually exclusive. Whether you use one set of principles or the other should really depend on where you find yourself at a given moment in a given fight.

The Fiore seminars were also fascinating. I now see where so much of the bickering on swordforum.com comes from. Different teachers can read the same passage and come up with radically different plays based on it. It makes a lot of difference whether you think Io acresco lo pe means “I increase (step) the foot [as a general rule]” or “I am increasing the foot [right now, in this picture]”. There are even some who seem to think it means “I have increased the foot”, which is unsupportable as far as I can tell. (Am I right eulistes?) The Fior di Battaglia is crying out for a good professional translation, but I really don’t see it happening in the near future--although Aldo’s work in progress may be the best attempt yet. The people who fence the system don’t have the fluency in fifteenth-century north Italian dialect, and the academic Italianists don’t have enough fencing theory and fighting experience to see what Fiore is getting at when he says something ambiguous.

It’s also interesting to see how many people talk the talk and train the training, but don’t actually fence with their beautiful longswords. There was a longsword freeplay session on Saturday night, but the only non-AEMMA people who came equipped to play with steel or aluminum were Josh Little from Detroit and one of Bob Charron’s students. It was a bit disappointing. We did get a chance to test drive some good boffers that a couple of guys had developed. They made for highly entertaining kamikaze fighting.

One really interesting element of the seminars was the different teaching methodologies that the various instructors employed. Guy Windsor uses stepped drills to teach complicated plays. The students perform four exchanges in a row. On the first exchange, Partner A makes a straight attack and Partner B does nothing except to practice not flinching. On the second exchange, A attacks and B makes a cover. On the third, A attacks, B attempts to parry and then A performs a remedy. On the fourth exchange A attacks, B attempts to cover, A attempts a remedy and B performs the counter-remedy. If the play gets fouled up, the partners return to step one and do the drill from the top. As Guy points out, the reason for the foul-up usually lies in the step immediately previous to the one that the partners are attempting. Performing the steps in sequence helps to iron out the difficulties.

Sean Hayes had another good structure for drills. He had one where the students first learn two covers they can make from the same posta, e.g. one for a fendente from the right and another for a fendente from the left. Then Partner A assumes the posta and Partner B gets to choose which attack he’s going to make. A has to decide on the fly which defence is the right one. This keeps the drill from getting mechanical and prevents A from starting to parry too soon. You can gradually add complexity by giving A the choice of more than one starting posta and/or letting B attack from more than two angles, until the drill starts to resemble free fencing at a controlled speed.

On Sunday, I stepped away from the swordy classes for awhile and tried out James Loriega’s introduction to flexible weapons, which was good wholesome fun. I now have some nice tricks to show my JKD instructor next time I see him. It turns out that you can use a bit of rope not only to strike and to tangle people up, but also to give them rope burn. Next year I’m going to try more of the unusual weapons while I have the opportunity. Right now I’m regretting that I didn’t do any of the polearm classes or Paul McDonald’s session on Talhoffer’s duelling shield.

In all I took 21 hours of classes, besides doing some sparring and taking in a great lecture by Kristi Charron. Kristi, who teaches horseback riding, was talking about what we can learn about medieval riding from manuscript illustrations. She made a strong case for medieval artists’ understanding of the mechanics of equine paces despite the lack stop-motion photography in the Middle Ages. In a lot of fighting scenes, the horses are actually walking, and that’s no mistake on the artists’ part. Elsewhere, pictures that have been thought to depict warhorses actually show victorious knights parading home on their amblers.

I’m definitely planning to go to the convention again next year. It’s a shame that it conflicts with the Ottawa Medieval Sword Guild’s camping weekend, but the learning experience is just tremendous. However, next year I’m bringing a camping cooler and my own food.