IS THERE A CENTERLINE IN GUIDED CHAOS (LIKE IN WING CHUN)?
QUESTION: A JKD guy I met saw your videos and was saying that GC does not
deal with the centerline. I disagree. In a real fight the centerline is not really
that clean cut. What's your opinion?
ANSWER: There's no such thing as the "centerline," by any of its many definitions,
as far as real violence is concerned. The "centerline" is purely theoretical.
One of the several "problems" with Wing Tsun:
There is little/no acknowledgment of the subtleties, details and fluidity of the
human body. WT attempts to reduce violent physical interaction to a geometry problem.
The truth is, however, that the human body is way too fluid and moves in too many
different ways with too many joints to reduce it so drastically.
Whether you consider the centerline the imaginary line connecting the torso midpoints
of two opponents, as in WT, or the more common definition as simply the vertical
midline of the body where all the best targets supposedly are (b.s.--look at any
anatomy chart), it makes no sense. The human body is not a solid, inflexible shape--
even a human body uneducated in applied looseness/pliability. The human body
naturally moves with some fluidity. Only a classically trained body attempts to move
like a solid geometric statue! The first time I moved with Lt. Col. Al, I completely
"controlled the centerline"--except that he gave me nothing there to hit, and he hit
me from all the remaining angles before I could feel anything coming.
This is so easy to explain and demonstrate in person, hands-on, but so difficult to
explain in words/writing.
You'll hear me and other GC instructors mention the "center," but we mean something
real, not theoretical. Every body/object has a center of gravity, a central point of balance.
This is constantly changing and moving within an object as fluid and malleable as a
human (or any animal) body. One of the goals of Guided Chaos training is to improve
your ability to feel/perceive an enemy's center and how it is moving with utmost
precision and speed, and to effortlessly take advantage of it. (See Newsletter #124
for one major facet of this.) This can enable you to instantly take balance, hit through
the center from all angles to achieve maximum damage, and keep yourself safe by
feeling the positional and movement relationship between your center and the enemy's.
(This can include the "center" of a group of attackers. John says that he can "feel" the
center of a group as if the group were one body. You can begin to understand this if
you're a member of the group moving against him.)
I hope this helps.
--Ari Kandel, 3rd degree GC
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