Kata

What is graceful and flowing yet dynamic on the outside, but methodical, simplistic and brutal on the inside?

If you said kata, you’re not only correct, you obviously know something about karate that has seemingly gone unnoticed by an entire generation of more impressionable but less informed learner.

Too often judged by its appearance, and sometimes even likened to a book, what is seen on the surface is never what’s contained within the kata.

Once a closely guarded, secretive practice, kata is the very reason karate, as an art, has been preserved and passed down to this day. Its heritage can be traced back to the Chinese progenitors of quanfa. Sadly, the unique formula once used to help deliver the contextual intentions culminated in kata was lost in the wake of the modernization of Karate, which obscured the original defensive application principles. It can be argued that the North Asian, Confucian-based pedagogy is partially responsible for the widespread confusion in relation to kata. Specifically, a culture of learning and replicating “the classics”, rather than understanding them results in a gradual degradation of meaning. The result, when coupled with the cultural mystique surrounding the martial arts, has been a lack of recognition concerning the most logical scenarios addressed by kata.

Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo-jutsu approaches kata as classical configurations. Specifically, the kata provides an entry point for negotiating HAPV through the classical forms contemporaneously practiced. Using contextual scenarios participants are able to rediscover the link between the ritualized movements of kata and their corresponding defensive principles, as originally intended, before exploring related henka.

In addition, participants are introduced to a framework in which they are better able to understand how universal defensive principles were ritualized into model examples, and how these templates were ultimately configured into kata.