2007 JapanFest Demonstration

For the past two years, US Taido has per­formed at the annual JapanFest in Atlanta. It’s always a fun event for those inter­ested in Japanese cul­ture and a good venue to show­case Taido.

I’ve been hear­ing over the past month or so how much effort every­one had been putting into prepar­ing to put on this demo, and I really think it paid off. I was only able to attend for one of the two days, but the Taido team’s per­for­mance was by far the best mar­tial arts demo of the day. It was solid action from begin­ning to end and showed off the US Honbu Dojo’s best sell­ing points: fam­ily atmos­phere and unique inte­gra­tion of tech­niques not usu­ally taught in Taido dojo.

I really have to give a lot of kudos to Mitsuaki Uchida and Brendan Dumont, not only for their excep­tional break­ing per­for­mances, but for the plan­ning and coach­ing they put in to make this demon­stra­tion hap­pen. To pre­pare this event, they had to design and coach four dif­fer­ent tenkai, a few dan­tai hokei, sev­eral self-defense sce­nar­ios, and be ready to per­form their own parts. I was espe­cially impressed by the adult tenkai, as it was thus far the best inte­gra­tion I have seen of tech­niques from Judo and Jiu Jutsu into Taido’s frame­work of move­ment. While it doesn’t fol­low the tech­ni­cal rules for a tour­na­ment tenkai, it does a fan­tas­tic job of show­ing what makes American Taido awesome.

Check it out:

And here is another demo fea­tur­ing some younger stu­dents doing some really nice moves:

All of the other demon­stra­tions were fan­tas­tic as well, and I want to say to all of those who per­formed that I was very impressed. I think the audi­ences were impressed too, and I imag­ine that you’ll be see­ing some new faces around the dojo over the course of the next month as a result of this demo.