by Robert Wolfe • Photos courtesy James D'Angelo
On June 2nd, nearly two-dozen cities around the United States hosted “Change Your Mind Day,” a series of festivals sponsored by the Buddhist magazine Tricycle — The Buddhist Review. The local observance was held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Reservoir Park, and featured presentations by prominent area Buddhist monks and teachers, as well as demonstrations of meditation and yoga techniques, and martial arts.
We were invited to participate by Anthony Stultz, Spiritual Director of The Blue Mountain Lotus Society, at the suggestion of one of his students (who also happens to be acquainted with a member of our dôjô). Our understanding was that we would be demonstrating in the park band shell, which is a large structure with a painted concrete floor. Given the amount of time we would be allocated, there would be no point in taking mats, so we planned the aikijutsu portions of the demonstration to require only rolls and relatively low-energy falls.
When we arrived at the park, we were met by an apologetic Mr. Stultz and the startling fact that the nice, flat, open band shell was filled with an Elizabethan-style stage — stairs, platforms, a strongly sloped surface, and not a dozen feet clear in any direction. It seems the Shakespeare Festival was also planned for later in the day.
We trooped over the stage and decided to deal with it.
As it turned out, things went quite well, despite the fact every aspect of the demonstration had to be modified on the fly from the manner previously rehearsed. The biggest problem was the slope of the stage toward the audience — demonstrators had to be particularly careful in kata or rolls in that direction, due to the excess energy accumulated. Fortunately, no one flipped into the front row.
The demonstration included kenjutsu and aikijutsu, as presented by Robert Wolfe, Randy Manning, Alan Starner, Ed Dix, John Butz, and Carmen Altomonte. Don Dickinson provided support services and distributed brochures to the audience.
Rain threatened throughout the afternoon and that, combined with limited advertising, precluded strong attendance of the outdoor event. Still, we had a good time and left confident we had presented an exciting and intriguing glimpse of our ryû.
And we were glad we decided to avoid mentioning how the sword cut “Kesa-giri” got its name…