Saratoga Martial Arts Festival 2010
February 27 and 28, 2010 at the Holiday Inn, Saratoga Springs NYProduced by Single Step Productions, LLC.
In honor of SMAF's 10th Anniversary, we worked hard this year to put together something extraordinary. Past SMAF years primarily featured excellent seminars from individual instructors with occasional explorations into team-taught presentations. But this year, in honor of the Bai Liu Ha Yi—100 styles flow into one—spirit that makes SMAF so successful, we asked our instructors to collaborate on ideas for demonstrating the common yet distinct forces in martial arts. This year we are therefore excited to present a schedule that primarily features team-taught semianrs!
This year's seminars showcase what is uniquely different stylistically but conceptually similar. The format will allow instructors to highlight particularly interesting elements of their styles. It will foster interaction amongst our instructors concerning solutions to similar problems. For the most part, for each topic you will receive the combined wisdom of two or more instructors.
At the same time, we also want to continue to bring you some particularly unique individual seminars, ones that highlight unique arts, weapons, and meditations that are otherwise hard to find, e.g. Wudang Sword techniques, the Tian Gan breathing exercises of Ba Gua Zhang, the Filipino weapon called the Karambit, 18 Bronzeman Iron Dummy Training, Balintawak Escrima, Daito Ryu Aikijujutsu Kodo Kai with Goldberg (Shingen) Sensei, and more!
As your review our schedule, please consider the time that instructors put forward to form these collaborations. More importantly, plot a careful course through your SMAF 10th Anniversary experience! As we always say, the bad news is that you can choose only one seminar at a time; the good news is that you can't make a bad choice.
Yours in the arts,Steven J. Pearlman, Ph.D.
Executive Director, SMAF
"Way of the …" Seminars
At SMAF this year, we wanted to find a way to present martial arts to you from a non-stylistic perspective. To do so, we broke arts down into their common components. We then grouped instructors according to those components rather than according to style. While just about any of our instructors could present on just about any of the topics listed, we tried to match instructors with topics that would make interesting experiences for you—our participants. Should you choose an element with which you have a strong background so as to deepen your foundation? Or should you choose a less-familiar element so as to explore the unknown?
All of the seminars are open to martial artists of all ranks and previous experience. Instructors typically offer enough breadth and depth to make the seminars appealing to everyone.
