Fiore Five Day Seminar at SESH

[Ken Quek]

Five members of the Pan-Historical European Martial Arts Society of Singapore (PHEMAS) attended the Fiore Five Day Seminar at SESH on 25-29 June.

We wish to express our congratulations to Mr. Windsor on conducting a highly challenging and extremely rewarding seminar which touched on all aspects of his interpretation of the Fiore system, including material from the spear and pollaxe sections.

All of us came away from the seminar with a deeper understanding of the system, which will help us greatly in our own efforts to practice the art.

Our thanks as well to all friends old and new, from Helsinki and beyond, with special mentions to Ilkka Hartikainen and Topi Mikkola for their hospitality and guidance. We hope to see you all again soon!

[Mick M.]

Heya,

I believe congratulations and salutations are in order for the PHEMAS blokes in achieving their next levels too?

Well done chaps!

Regards,

Mick

[Guy Windsor]

I am editing the video footage of the tournament; I'll post a link here when it's done.

[Ivan Curic]

Looking forward to it

[Greg Galistan]

I would like to add my thanks to that of Ken towards everyone at SESH and beyond who helped us train and learn and looked after us while we were there. Especially to..

Guy and Michaela Windsor.

Topi and Heli Mikkola.

Joeli and Laura Takala.

Marret and Maria and

Ilkka Hartikainen (For he trashing he gave me at the tourney. )

Cheers all. We miss you already
Greg

[Guy Windsor]

The Five days of Fiore seminar concluded with a tournament, run so that students could have a chance to apply the things they had learned. The set-up was designed to give everyone a fair chance to win, and everyone at least a couple of decent matches. With 18 students in the tournament, having them all fence everyone would have taken forever (171 bouts), so the following system was devised.
The students split into two groups: six seniors (group A) and 12 less experienced (group B). In the first part, every member of group B challenged a member of group A in turn: they could choose any part of Fiore’s system that had equality of weapons (abrazare, dagger, sword, spear, pollax). Each bout with weapons was run with two rounds, with three passes per round. The first pass began with a committed attack by the group A member, then second with a committed attack by the group B member, and the third started out of measure and was free.
Abrazare bouts were started from out of contact, and fought to best of 5 falls. A decent throw, a lock held for 3 seconds, or submission all scored one point.
The bouts were presided by a judge from group A. The senior fencer had to prove his blow beyond reasonable doubt; the junior just on balance of probabilities. If a pass was inconclusive, no point was scored, if a double hit occurred, the hit counted against both fencers, and 10 penalty push-ups required from each.
If the score was tied after 2 rounds, it went to sudden death, with both fencers free to attack or wait. Incidentally, both rounds were completed even if the score made the winner clear before the end (so, if the first four passes went to one fencer, we still did the last two, as this is about practice and good fencing, not winning per se.)
If the group B fencer won his bout, he joined group A, where he could be challenged. However, defeating an original group A member was required for entry into the group.
Once the first part was complete, the remaining group B members had a second chance to challenge group A. By the end, group A had grown by 5.
The final elimination round to determine the winner was fought in seniority order: most senior fenced next most senior, the weapons being chosen by the spectators. Winner stayed on, until the last man standing. This meant that the highest ranked fencer had to win 10 consecutive bouts to win the tournament: the lowest ranked could win by winning just the last bout. In the event, Petter Brodin won three consecutive bouts to win the tournament.
The prize was to fence me, at the challenger’s choice of weapons. Victory would gain a full set of training clothes (trousers t-shirt and top). As it happened, Petter didn’t quite pull it off, but did so well that a prize of a school top was awarded.
The three Provosts present were asked to nominate the top fencer in group B: they unanimously chose Jan Kukkamäki, who received a school t-shirt.

We learned a lot about what not to do in this tournament; the last bouts were marred by tiredness and in some cases fencers were just keen to get it over with, and made dangerous mistakes. In future if using this format, I would apply the following changes:
1) two consecutive double hits mean double elimination. In one bout we had 6 consecutive doubles, which exhausted the combatants with push-ups. I finally stated that the next double would mean double elimination, and suddenly the fight cleaned up.
2) Break for lunch between rounds 2 and 3.
3) Disqualify dangerous fencing on the first offence.
4) Change the format for the dagger bouts, so that in the first and second passes, only the attacker has a dagger; then arm both fencers for the third.

I have edited clips from the video footage: at least one point per bout. This first clip has footage from each of the 12 first round bouts, and will be up on YouTube in minutes.
I’ll get the clips for round 2 and the elimination round up as soon as I can.

[Guy Windsor]

The video clip is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOIROQRx0go

[Mat Clarke]

Originally Posted by Guy Windsor

The video clip is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOIROQRx0go

Thanks for the footage and debrief. It is good to see other weapon systems besides Longsword in a HEMA tournament (especially the wrestling!).

[Ken Quek]

In order to put the tournament in perspective:

The Five Days of Fiore Seminar covered material from almost all sections of the Fior di Battaglia, in the order presented by the Getty manuscript. Thus the participants were taken through abrazare, dagger, sword in one hand, sword in two hand, armoured combat, spear and pollaxe sections. The only portion of the treatise not covered by the seminar was the mounted combat section, for obvious reasons.

Mr. Windsor took care to work extensively on abrazare and dagger as foundational skills for the later sections, placing particular emphasis on the practical application of body structure, effective grounding and tempo and measure. Due to time limitations not all plays were covered, but enough was done to enable all participants to perform the five actions of disarm, strike, lock, break and takedown with seven of the nine remedy masters of dagger (the 2nd and 7th being left out as being best practiced in armour).

The sword work was similarly comprehensive, beginning with sword in one hand techniques and covering plays from zogho largo and zogho stretto as well as the armoured combat section, and introduced a full practical repertoire of techniques.

The pollaxe and spear were covered more briefly as a result of time constraints. However, all guards were introduced, and their tactical use was practiced, so that fencing with them was a feasible and profitable exercise.

Mr. Windsor conducted a well-paced seminar that was physically and mentally challenging. Energy levels were kept up well throughout the seminar despite the amount of material covered and the intense practice. This can be seen from the obvious enthusiasm displayed in the tournament video!

Personally my greatest gain from the seminar came from Mr. Windsor's systematic presentation of the structure of the treatise. In my (admittedly brief) study of Fiore I have seen chunks of the system, but never quite the coherent whole that I experienced during the Five Days. Mr. Windsor's interpretation of the system is very faithful to the source, and his intellectual rigour and integrity were on clear display as he discussed the difficulties of interpretation. He never failed to give credit to others in the field, and was open about contentious points and gaps in our understanding of the treatises.

This seminar has been a real eye-opener and an inspiration to greater efforts both in training and in treatise study. It has equipped its participants with a deeper understanding of Fiore's system and given us the means to continue our study. Many thanks again to Mr. Windsor and SESH for organising a superb event. I hope that it will be the first of many more!

[T. Stoeppler]

I´ve just watched the clip - looks like a clean and fun tournament! I especially like the tournament rules design and balance - wonder how this would work out in larger scale?

Regards, Thomas

[Christian H. Tobler]

I agree Thomas - it's really refreshing to see something like this. But given the discipline that Guy and his school apply to the art, I'm certainly not surprised.

All the best,

Christian

[Guy Windsor]

Hi
As an illustration of the tournament format, I thought I'd put up the entire bout between Petter Brodin and me.
The clip is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj70AjDAcIk

Petter's total Fiore experience amounts to one seminar last year with me in Bergen, and the four days of instruction prior to the tournament. A credit to his group, the Frie Duellister, http://www.frieduellister.no/
The match was presided by Topi Mikkola.

[T. Stoeppler]

Yes Christian, I´m not really surprised as well

Guy,
The tournament format is really very good, clean and fair! Just my eyes hurt a bit from the sped-up playback *ouch*

Regards, Thomas

[Guy Windsor]

sped -up playback? what's that?

[Guy Windsor]

WTF? how did that happen? The sound is fine but the action is way weird. I'll try to upload it again...

[Guy Windsor]

I've done it again, and though the original mp4 works fine, when YouTube uploads and configures it, the same thing happened; run time reduced by half.
Any ideas how to fix this?

[Ivan Curic]

MP4?
Have you tried adding &fmt=18 to the end of the adress line?
That should play the original MP4, in high quality, h.264/AAC.

If that one's ok, then there was a MP4>FLV transcoding problem on their part.

If not, it's your codec.

[Guy Windsor]

OK I'm uploading it again. Then going to bed. In the morning I'll try adding the fmt thingy.
If that fails, then I'm sending you the original clip, Ivan, seeing as you seem to know about these things, and perhaps you'll figure out why it ain't working?

[Ivan Curic]

Sure... Sorry for the late reply. Can't sleep lately...
Anyway, here's the alternative link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZXegvdP_9E&fmt=18
The image is crisper, however, there is something wrong with the encoding.

You just mail me the thing in the morning and I'll try to sort it out.
Probably has something to do with the frames/second mismatch in the file info.

[Guy Windsor]

Thanks to some helpful advice from Mr Curic here, it's about fixed!
see here
Enjoy!

[Ivan Curic]

Glad to be of help