If you ever wanted to witness a duel with real French small swords, say, or Italian sabers, the Lionheart Historical European Swordsmanship club will be holding a public training session outside the concert hall of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall tomorrow where all are welcome to watch. The club practices at least twice monthly.
Huang Chun-yi (黃郡儀), the club’s founder, grew up watching movies such as Lord of the Rings and Kingdom of Heaven and read books like Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. When she was older, she did some research about fencing and found a trove of historical fencing manuals online.
“I started my practice with a stick,” the 25-year-old tells the Taipei Times.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
Huang joined her university’s fencing club before founding the Lionheart Historical European Swordsmanship club in 2014. While Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) has been practiced in Europe for decades, it’s just recently gained traction in Taiwan.
The difference between Olympic-style sports fencing and HEMA, Huang says, is that while the goal of the former is to score points, the latter seeks to recreate various styles of European sword fighting over the last few centuries with real steel weapons modeled closely after historical weapons. Competition and spectatorship is de-emphasized in HEMA, which is regarded by its practitioners as more of a hobby and for the purpose of preserving tradition through recreating duels and combat moves.
The club imports most of their swords from the Ars Dimicatoria (which is Latin for “Art of Fencing”), a HEMA school based in Prague. Michael Knazko, an instructor from the school, was in Taipei last month to train members of the club. Needless to say, the club tends to attract history buffs, and many members also have experience in Chinese martial arts, kendo or sports fencing.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
We come to HEMA “wanting something closer to what the warriors of old have done,” says club member Kevin Yang (楊凱文).
He has a pdf file of the 14th-century Italian knight and fencing master Fiore dei Liberi’s fencing manual, Fior di Battaglia (“The Flower of Battle”), on his smartphone, which he tries to study regularly.
“We seek authenticity in HEMA,” Yang adds.
In addition to using weapons modeled after historical ones, HEMA practitioners worldwide also try to mimic the techniques and moves of ancient European swords masters as closely as possible.
Club member Jonathan Burke points out that this is what distinguishes HEMA from live action role-playing (LARP) or cosplay: “In HEMA, you’re not a fictional character, you’re recreating and perpetuating a historical tradition.”
He adds that safety is taken seriously in the club and that it’s ensured by various factors including several layers of protective clothing and a deliberate restraint of force.
Event notes
What: Lionheart Historical European Swordsmanship (獅心歷史歐洲劍術) training session
When: Tomorrow from 9:30am to noon
Where: Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂), 21-1 Zhongshan S Rd, Taipei City (台北市中山南路21-1號)
Admission: Free
On the net:www.facebook.com/leohistoricaleuropeanswordsmanship
The US war on Iran has illuminated the deep interdependence of Asia on flows of oil and related items as raw materials that become the basis of modern human civilization. Australians and New Zealanders had a wake up call. The crisis also emphasizes how the Philippines is a swatch of islands linked by jet fuel. These revelations have deep implications for an invasion of Taiwan. Much of the commentary on the Taiwan scenario has looked at the disruptions to world trade, which will be in the trillions. However, the Iran war offers additional specific lessons for a Taiwan scenario. An insightful
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
April 6 to April 13 Few expected a Japanese manga adaptation featuring four tall, long-haired heartthrobs and a plucky heroine to transform Taiwan’s television industry. But Meteor Garden (流星花園) took the nation by storm after premiering on April 12, 2001, single-handedly creating the “idol drama” (偶像劇) craze that captivated young viewers across Asia. The show was so successful that Japan produced its own remake in 2005, followed by South Korea, China and Thailand. Other channels quickly followed suit, with more than 50 such shows appearing over the following two years. Departing from the melodramatic
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS