I am celebrating my first Tai Chi birthday. A year ago now, I started learning the ancient Chinese art from my partner. As it stands, after twelve solid months of training, I barely know the movements of two of the forms, and I’m just beginning to understand some of the things that David has been telling me since I started out: needless to say, we are both proud--and glad!--that I am making progress.
This is one of the other artistic outlets that I was referring to in this post, one that I would not normally even talk about because I don’t qualify as an artist in this medium, only as an apprentice. But, a few months ago, a funny little thing happened and it became clear to me that most people do not seem to consider Tai Chi an art. As I mark my first year of training, I feel compelled to sort through the why and the how of Tai Chi as a martial art.
For a thing or action to be art it must meet the following criteria:
1) An art requires skill.
As is witnessed by my status as a rank beginner after a year of training, Tai Chi requires a certain amount of commitment and discipline to learn.
2) Art must cause revolution.
Tai Chi certainly causes revolution for the practitioner: learning it is like re-introducing yourself to your body--or at least it has been for me. But is that enough? Shouldn’t art cause change for more than its creator/doer? This is may be going out on a limb, but I would say that Tai Chi does have an effect on the people who see it as well as those who do it. There’s something purposeful and centered about the movements that is at the very least calming and mesmerizing to watch.
Tai Chi is often done in a park or other public open space: it’s hard to find enough room to practice in a private location. And, when David taught us in the Park Blocks this past summer, the general curiosity about what we were doing was a little overwhelming at first! Passersby didn’t necessarily need to talk to us, but they did like to look at us. Maybe it was something about us taking time out of our too-harried lives that made them want to do the same by watching?
David’s Tai Chi class in the North Park Blocks this summer
Which brings me to last May, when artist Horatio Law presented China-on-Willamette for the South Waterfront Artist-in-Residence program. The main component of this three-part art piece was Tai Chi for 1000, a happening at which Law projected that a thousand Portlanders would gather at the South Waterfront park-to-be to do the 24 posture Simplified Form together, a tribute to and reminder of the often unacknowledged role which Chinese immigrants played in the building of this city and region in the 19th century.
To prepare for this event on 31 May, Law and the Artist-in-Residence program hosted a month-long series of Tai Chi workshops which David led. And here’s the rub: while Law, the artist, was familiar with the form, he was far less adept at it than me, and I’m an amateur. It was for this reason that Law hired David to teach most of the workshops and also had David lead the Tai Chi for 1000. My partner has been practicing Tai Chi for fifteen years and teaching it for seven. He may not qualify as a master, but, to my mind, in this case, he deserves the title of “artist” more than Law--who never even mentioned David by name in the publicity about China-on-Willamette.
I mean no disrespect to the creator of Tai Chi for 1000 nor to the organizers of the event, but I do wish to point out their disrespect of this demanding art form. It is a near-miracle that they managed to bring together practitioners from disparate schools as well as interested beginners for a single event which, to some degree, highlighted Tai Chi’s underappreciated possibilities, but how does their work compare to years of training? Why is Law the artist while David and the other longtime practitioners are not? Why was the event itself the art? Doesn’t the challenging and revolution-causing action which occurred at the event merit that title more so?
Tai Chi is not a dance, nor is it like the only other mind-body fitness option that I know of, Yoga. Unlike the Indian art, Tai Chi cannot be distorted by Western ideas of fitness. It’s never going to be a sweat-inducing super-toner, never going to fit into the American ideal of strenuous aerobic exercise in which muscle tension is paramount. The rewards of Tai Chi are far more subtle.
But, if learning to be more centered, both physically and emotionally, and understanding physical and social conflict in a more useful and sane manner is denied the title of “art,” it nevertheless remains a Very Good Thing.