An online friend sent me this video on Nov 10, and I immediately started taking notes on it, lol.
There is nothing better/worse than a white dude learning about arnis and getting So Fascinated by it. Thank the gods that he has a Filipino friend.
The first few minutes are generally a solid if brief history: Eskrima/kalis/arnis started as a commoner’s art with no official “system,” aside from being practical, deadly, and using a variety of weapons.
Spain came around and forbid blade usage, hence the transition into the now-famous sticks. Speaking of which, Filipinos killed Magellan using the bladed version of eskrima. Like… A LOT of Filipinos. Magellan and 49 Spaniards just rolled up to a full army of 1,500 natives and assumed, “Well, we have guns, so we’ll be fiiiiiiiiiiine!” Fuck around and find out, colonizer.
Magellan died because he underestimated the battle-hardened Filipino natives.
The thing that jumped out at me was the comment about eskrima being “hidden in dance and play,” which is likely referring to two things: The maglalatik dance is specifically a war dance. I don’t know if that’s “hidden,” so much as “this is literally supposed to be practice for young men to learn how to fight, and for seasoned fighters to keep in shape.”
The other might be the common old wives’ tale saying that kalis fighters practiced to music. This is something that I’ve only seen done 1) for performances/displays where no actual fighting was going on, or 2) to pull foreigners’ legs about secret Pinoy techniques. Some people call it “cheesy,” and I personally think some guys saw Pinoys sparring to their workout playlist (or the historical equivalent), and they thought we did that all the time.
Like, nobody minds if a white guy spars with “Eye Of The Tiger” blasting because maybe he just likes working out to music, but when a Filipino guy/group spars with eskrima to their favorite beats, suddenly it’s a “time-honored tradition?” I haven’t seen any dance-battlers mentioned in the Boxer Codex or other records, so until someone has evidence, I won’t say it’s historical.
Regarding the hands-on stuff: I feel like they intentionally skipped the most boring stuff, either so the video would be more exciting, or to just fuck with poor Martin. Like, they handed this poor man a stick right off the bat and started him out with hitting stuff and sparring? Where is the training montage??? Was all of it cut???
Also, here’s an intersection with “real fights aren’t nearly as long as the movies pretend” and “fighters are not necessarily good video-makers:” The spars lasted all of five seconds each, and it was mostly to “the first one who lands a hit wins.” This is okay when it’s clearly in good fun, but it’s also not very educational and it tips a little bit into “TELLING people how awesome eskrima is” instead of “SHOWING people how awesome it is.”
Martin does not look like he learned any footwork, either, but he says he knows boxing! The sport that people literally compare eskrima’s footwork to the most often!
Maybe this is my entertaining/acting side coming out, but if you’re planning a video well in advance, with someone that you know is not trained in this field, and an indirect purpose of this is to spread knowledge of your country’s national sport/combat-style, I feel like you need to set aside a couple hours for a crash-course of “here’s how to do X, Y, and Z,” while the actual students and teachers are doing fancy stuff. You can film however much you need, and then CUT however much you need to fit the time-limit.
The video would have greatly been helped if they kept a training montage that lasted twenty or thirty seconds--it would be much more involved than what the video seems to have done, by just tossing a new guy a stick and messing around with him.
General impression: An easy to digest taste of eskrima, like Cup-O-Noodles / instant ramen, or whatever your country’s version of “cheap and easy food” is. Not bad for what it is, but you’ll need something meatier after a couple of hours.
