Formosa Neijia

This video is an example of Taiwan Chen style through the Wang Meng-bi line. Thanks to aboroth for making it available and drawing my attention to it.

I also need to be honest by saying that the performer in the clip above is also one of my teachers.

This version of Taiwan Chen has some interesting features about it. First of all, the footwork is really good. I’m often disappointed by Chen style, in general, in this area. This version doesn’t rely on such big, wide stances. The stances are a bit narrower, and moving quickly and smoothly from one stance to another is emphasized.

Second, the power generation is a bit more hidden than in some versions of Chen style. We don’t see as much obvious power generation in some areas as in other versions of laojia. But it’s there.

Third, because of the two above aspects, I find the applications through this line to be quite interesting. The approach relies quite a bit less on the “elephant wrestling” approach to Chen style that we’ve talked about a bit on the blog. For those who don’t know, that term applies to adopting a wide stance trying to throw the opponent around. Works great for big guys, but us smaller guys have to use different tactics. My guess is that Wang Meng-bi must have been small. He looks like it in the photos I’ve seen.

My teacher above also does huleijia and I talked to him about the realtionship between laojia and huleijia. He said that, in the way that he was taught, the first four levels of huleijia are actually part of the laojia system. The lian (smooth) frame is normal pace and height laojia. The second frame of this laojia system is zhen — meaning to shake. This is the strange looking movement that most would associate with huleijia. The third level is zhan possibly. I was trying to digest what he said about zhen when he was talking about the third level, so I didn’t get this part so clearly. The fourth level is hechi — everything in levels 1-3 together. Only after those levels are complete is true huleijia done and it’s bascially just one frame done as a form. So he considers it the “huleijia form.” He said it was very exaggerated and did some of it. My reaction was that it looks better than the zhen frame with its strange shaking. I asked why do the shaking and he said I would understand after I learn it.

So that’s my brain dump on the huleijia and laojia from this teacher. I would highly recommend the above teacher, especially for weapons, if anyone is coming to Taipei.

UPDATE: The following is a comment made below by a fellow student under the teacher above, Zhou laoshi. He adds some insight into what he got from Zhou and I want it preserved in case the comments get lost. Here’s what he had to say:

I think he told me something slightly different (actually I notice that he’ll sometimes answer the same question differently on a different day…. I think it depends on what part he feels explaining to you at that point would be most beneficial). The phases he described for me were: lian, zhan, quan, yuan and Yin-yang. He actually showed me zhan because he thought it would be beneficial to my qigong, not because i had mastered the previous phases.

Lian is as you know. Zhan, like I said, is a kind of “stretching out and feeling the postures.” You pretty much hold each posture and stretch the arms and shoulders out as much as possible while still maintaining the structure and roundness. You kind of jiggle back and forth to increase the stretch, while the stance also sinks lower and lower.

I think quan refers to the smaller circles made with the wrists and shoulders, which you don’t see him doing in that video. For these movements it seems one arm generally circles faster than the other, such that one does 1.5 rotations in the same amount of time the other does only .5.

I think yuan is then adding circular motions of the body, giving you “circles within circles.” Then Yin-yang, was like the phase you describe as “zhen.” I do also recall him mentioning “zhen” at one point, but I’m not sure if it’s the same…It might be that you use “Yin-yang” to “zhen” the opponent? I didn’t even know these phases were a Hulei-jia ‘thing” at the time. I just that it was the order for Chen Taiji. Apparently he takes Paochui through the same phases.

It’s possible that he was just giving me an overview of the training by description, and not necessarily giving me the names. It may also be that you’ve already got yuan and/or quan down from your previous Taiji experience and he doesn’t need to break it down like that for you. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have actual forms for quan and yuan, he just introduces them seperately from lian. So maybe it’s that although there are smaller interim phases, the form itself only goes through a five-step progression? I wonder what the difference is between “heqi” and the final “huleijia.”