Nuevo Escrima

Is possibly what Jules Jacob could have called his seminal 1887 tract that established the epee as a distinct weapon from the french foil. He didn’t. Instead he called it Le Jeu De L’Epee but his reasoning and his reception weren’t too distant from those of the Nuevo-Tangueros. Some welcomed his work as the future and as an innovation. Others labelled it a prostitution and would have it nowhere near their salles.

Why and what had he done?

Jacob had gone back to the drawing board and examined the combinations and possibilities of movement with respect to the necessities of the duel rather than to those of tradition. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Paris was beset by a duelling craze. Every hot blooded young male who considered himself to have any bit of standing would seek to find himself on the terrain in the early morning light. From there being hardly any salles des armes in the city it went to there being too many. But what was worse was that during this craze a number of serious swordsmen lost to complete novices (most of these duels were to first blood, so nothing too significant in the injury stakes). They lost because the novice was given something along the lines of the following advice. “He is an academic foil fencer, he will guard his torso but not his arm, strike him there.” You see the serious swordsman neglected to observe that he was no longer sur les planches of his academic salle but on the duelling ground and did not adapt to suit. The foil fencer in him worried only about the academic target area of the torso. To the duellist fighting for first blood it doesn’t matter where the blood flows from so long as it isn’t from him. Jacob recognised this. His approach included the weapon arm, the forward leg and the head in the target area. He recognised that the fleurette had become too florid for use on the duelling ground. That tradition had become stiff and academic.

So too with tango. There is a facet of it that can be labelled traditional. It is all too easy for that ‘t’ to drift into upper case, for moves to be done because “that is how they have always been done”, for it all to become academic. It is a risk that anything having that traditional facet shares. For those pitfalls to be avoided the changes in terrain must be noted. Be aware that the young blood may not speak exactly the same language, their aims of expression may be different. To some extent nuevo tango is a search for a language of movement that suits that of the young blood. For the other side of the house this doesn’t mean that you have to change the moves to suit them. You have to change how you communicate the moves to them. Even tradition has to stay up to date otherwise it may lose more than first blood to the novice.