This is my attempt at turning the China Night DVD I made into a web site. The videos are hosted on YouTube, so you'll need Macromedia Flash in order to view them. There are some minor issues with Internet Explorer and this "WebDVD" that I haven't been able to work out yet. If anyone knows why, feel free to drop me a line. Otherwise, consider it yet another good reason to switch to Firefox. :)
I came back in 2003 for one last performance. My fiancee and I were beginning the process of organizing our wedding in Ithaca - what better excuse to frequently visit and put together one last China Night performance before my good friends Allen and La'Toya graduated? (Allen got a Masters in Engineering, for those of you doing the math and realizing it was more than four years). I opened the club's performance with a modified version of our system's Point Form. Allen and Rob (a new grad student club member) put together a staff vs. staff fight to follow that. I then went on stage and performed the same three-section staff staff form that I did in 1999. Rob and Ken (another new grad student member) had come from the same school, and put on a traditional Xingyi two-man set, which Ken followed up with a solo Bagua Zhang form. Allen and I finished with another bit of "Gung Fu Theater." This one was a bit less elaborate. I was meditating on stage, and Allen was in the audience heckling me to do something. The ruse worked, in that half of the audience was telling Allen to shut up and not disrupt the performance! Unfortunately, we didn't think to make the heckling-to-stage transition abundantly clear, so I'm not sure everyone understood that the heckler came up from the audience to stop me from just sitting there. We then went at it with a three-section staff and a spear. When I finally disarmed Allen, the coward ran away! Worse yet, he came back with a broadsword! So we fought some more. The end of our fight was a bit weak, unfortunately, because our original idea (literally knocking Allen back into the audience) resulted in an injury during rehearsals, making it abundantly clear that aiming to kick Allen into a narrow aisle without the house lights on would be incredibly dangerous.
Copyright © 2006 Erik Harris.