Josh GoldMassimo Di Villadorata, the wiry and bespectacled Italian-born shihan who introduced aikido to Canada in 1967, arrived at River of Life dojo this year with his usual canny exuberance and spirited entourage from Montreal Aikikai-Daniel, Claude, and Yuliane.
Presiding over the intimate 3-day event from off the side of the mat, meanwhile-utterly alert and always in perfect posture, sitting, standing, or lying down-was the self-possessed chihuahua recently rescued by River of Life’s Chief Instructor, godan David Goldberg. David Sensei had named him Ito, Japanese for “little string.” Among other things, the seminar was an initiation of Ito as our princely little mascot-he would be one of us now-and a live example of animal zanshin.
Massimo Sensei would point to Ito with a flourish.
“Look at him. He’s like a general. And this is the attitude to approach your training with. You are the king of your immediate outer and inner space, into which you allow no one to set a foot.”
His voice is gravelly, with a pleasing Italian inflection. There’s a messy goatee, graying disheveled hair, and an intermittent twinkle in his eye that can only be described as a menacing joy. He’s not physically imposing, but, still, you don’t want to attack him; he seems willing to kill you if he has to-not that he would take pleasure in that-or at least committed to taking you along with him if you happened to kill him. He grew up in Milan. O’Sensei had dispatched two senior practitioners, Tada and Kawamukai, to spread the art in Italy; Massimo Sensei assisted them. In his secular life, he’s an acupuncturist with a master’s degree in education.
Reinventing the Wheel
His main message has to do with establishing and continually reestablishing one’s bodily and spiritual alignment on the center line while in relationship with one’s partner, and at the same time moving forward through the technique or through whatever takemusu emerges on its own. One strives to maintain stability while deliberately walking a narrow, economical path along the center, and prevails by simultaneously rolling forward like a wheel on its edge.
“People always talk about aikido as being a circular art, like a wheel, which is true,” he says. “But it’s not like a wheel lying flat on the ground spinning in a circle. It a wheel standing up on its tread and rolling forward, always forward.
“Enter, enter, enter.”
A number of times he likened this idea to marubashi training: You’re on a bridge stretched over a precipice-it’s like walking a tightrope; one errant step this way or that and it’s over. So the situation is extremely hazardous and verging on disaster. In order to survive, you must constantly align your body and your your mind straight forward; your point of connection and your spirit must be extended on and through the center line.
Check your posture. Are you facing your attacker directly, or is your belt knot pointing off to the side at a 45-degree angle? If so, immediately straighten your hips and square everything up-head, shoulders, hips, knees, feet. Position your arms and hands as if you’re holding a sword in front of your center. The arms and hands should form a triangle and extend, creating a wedge aimed at your partner’s center. Never move your hands without moving your body along with them, and move in such a way that the wedge remains in front of your center at all times. “I am not one arm but one body.” If you drift out of this alignment, you will fall off the bridge and die, so as soon as you realize it realign immediately. And always push (lead) forward.
“Push, push, I am always pushing,” Massimo Sensei says. “Keep your mind and your body in this place of always moving forward.”
It’s very simple, we do it with the sword all the time, he says.
“Then you put the sword down and you forget.”
How to Die Well
He takes his glasses off, places them on the shomen, and then can’t spot the uke he wants. Finally he settles on his local favorite, River of Life shodan John Caprara, a genial, moustachioed real estate attorney with a bounce in his step and smooth ukemi.
“And don’t be afraid to scare the hell out of your attacker,” Massimo Sensei says. “You want to change his mind about his intention, you want to break the balance of his mind.” Suddenly and intently, he advances on a momentarily bewildered John, pointing a finger at him and glaring his version of a samurai’s 1,000-yard-stare. “Keep constant control over uke. After you throw him down, stand over him. Make it hard for him to attack again. Why let him get up and set himself and attack again? Take his space!”
Again and again he returns to the foundational principles of correct posture, correct alignment toward uke, and that relentlessly forward orientation in body, mind, and spirit.
First, he demonstrates the wrong way: slumped shoulders, a sagging head, like a vulture’s, arms extended forward but weakly, like tree limbs sagging under snow, and his hips angled sideways, like an archer.
“Aikido is not Egyptian,” he says, edging sideways in his version of comic Steve Martin’s stylized Egyptian crawl.
Turning to us in this wilted pose, he looks hopeless
“I don’t want to die this way,” he says. “I don’t want someone should take a photograph. You always want to prevail, but if perhaps you don’t prevail, you want to die with dignity.”
His realigns his body and insinuates everything about himself forward, his expression darkening and his eyes glinting with that scary bliss.
“Here,” he says. “Like this. Now, if I die, at least I die with dignity. My attacker he will remember me.”
Not so Fancy Footwork
We started on Friday night with a bokken and footwork exercise, the prelude to a weekend also devoted to exploring the relationship between sword movement and empty-hand movement. Stand in hamni, holding the bokken in segan. Tsuki and then lift the sword overhead as you either step forward or slide forward. Then pivot-shoot your hips-so that now you are facing in the opposite direction with the sword poised above your head. Bring your forward foot straight back. (Do not swing it around circularly.) Pivot again, so that now you are facing in your original direction. Complete the strike. Practice walking across the mat this way, with or without a bokken, until you settle into a natural, easy rhythm-a slow-spinning top gliding effortlessly along a straight line.
The idea is to protect and preserve the geometric integrity of the space immediately around you-again, by controlling the center line and moving continuously forward while taking the least possible steps.
“You gain speed,” Massimo Sensei says, “by taking fewer steps.”
We practiced this footwork while defending against a cross-hand grab. As uke grabs, nage steps or slides forward, placing her foot to the outside and behind uke’s striking side leg, then pivots (fight the tendency to swing the leg around!) while lowering her knees and guiding uke to the ground. Depending on uke’s size and speed, nage may have to continue to step and pivot while spiraling uke downward. Afterwards, we performed the same technique at higher speed against multiple attackers.
According to Massimo Sensei, your job as nage during randori is to move in a way that creates order for yourself and chaos for your attackers.
“You want them to have doubt about attacking you. You want to disturb their minds.”
He also demonstrated a very cool under-the-arm ikkyo from a cross-hand grab: Nage makes the usual ikkyo connection, wrist to wrist, with the other hand planted on or around uke’s elbow. Instead of proceeding in the usual way, however, nage maintains the contact but moves into uke in such a way that nage’s elbow enters under uke’s arm and ends up against uke’s face. Nage then completes the turn under the arm, sliding his back past uke’s chest, while maintaining light contact only at the wrist. Once the turn is complete and nage is properly realigned, ikkyo is performed.
Okay, you had to be there.
On Sunday morning, he had us all stand in a circle with our bokken, striking each other progressively, from person to person. The starter made a shomenuchi strike at the person in front of him, who blocked by holding the bokken forward and pointed to the right. After blocking, that person then turned, circling to the left, to strike the next person in line, and so on. This continued, faster and faster, until the circle got into a rhythm. A second attack was then added, so that now there were two circulating the circle at the same time. We were having so much fun.
“Okay, enough of that,” Massimo eventually said. “Now just attack each other.” We all looked around. “It doesn’t matter who. Just attack each other.”
We were like children, laughing and grunting as we chased each other with our wooden swords-the entire seminar had the same buoyant feeling.
Some Stray Pearls
Massimo Sensei said other useful and intriguing things I can’t figure out where to put, so here they are:
•Mental training is more important than physical training.
•A proper yokomenuchi is a shomenuchi that only at the last moment turns into a strike to the side of the head. “Otherwise you make a big round strike and you are completely open.”
•Real peace can exist only between two people who are both strong.
•Keep your tongue touching the roof of your mouth while training. “You will have more power that way. I don’t know why, someone else will have to explain. Just do it.”
•Practice your tenkans on a straight line: Step or slide forward, then pivot 180 degrees, then drop the forward leg straight back. A more circular movement could land you off the center line; bad for body positioning.
•”You are not a right or a left hand but the center between your right and left hand. You are not your left brain or right brain, but the center between them.”
•”There is no reality. There is only perception. What you want is to change the perception of the attacker. Musashi [Miyamoto, famous 17th century samurai swordsman] talks about becoming taller or becoming smaller, depending on what the situation calls for. You can do it. I am not changing the physics of the universe, I am changing the perception of the physics of the universe.”
Other activities and occurrences rounded out the event: There was some spontaneous knife-throwing against a fallen hickory limb during the Saturday lunch break (a Russian aikidoka named Vitaliy Logishev, a professional ballroom dancing instructor, provided the blades), dinner at a sushi bar, a boy scout troop camping on the dojo grounds next to the stream, fishing, making fires, and otherwise poking around. On Sunday we arrived to find two abandoned or lost dogs, dispirited but sweet-natured, guarding the dojo entrance. They smelled of skunk. David Sensei ended up borrowing my rescue yellow Xterra to deliver them safely to the SPCA. And in the circle at the end of the seminar came an uplifting moment when Don Levine, the founder of Aiki Extensions, an international organization that creates projects to promote aikido and peace around the world [www.aiki-extensions.org ], thanked River of Life for its recent contribution to AE’s new Awassa Dojo in Ethiopia-the first aikido dojo in black Africa. (There have long been dojos in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and South Africa.) When Massimo Sensei heard the dojo was struggling to survive and could also use some visiting teachers, he immediately suggested that we all volunteer to go to Ethiopia, flying on our own dimes, to hang out for a week or two and teach, feel the love, spread the art.
“The ball is now in your yard,” he said to Don Levine.
And so it goes.
“Winning-to prevail-is always important,” Massimo Sensei had said at one point. “But more important is to give every last ounce of what you have and of who you are as a person. People say, ‘train hard.’ I say, don’t train hard.
“Train with passion.”
(Special thanks to dojo manager Julie “Jet” Tollen, who helped organize the seminar and kept it running smoothly, and Tom Berthoff, for his skillful action photography.)
Marguerite Del Giudice, a writer and life coach, has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tina Brown’s Talk, and National Geographic. She teaches and trains outside Philadelphia with Sensei David Goldberg, at the River of Life Martial Arts and Wellness Center, in Ft. Washington, PA.
Having discovered Aikido at a demonstration given by
di Villadorata sensei, I immediately enrolled at Montreal Aikikai and have been his student for the last 35 years.
Marguerite’s deft and remarkable article on his presence at this recent seminar just confirms he has always found new ways to keep this noble Martial Art fascinating and challenging. Her point of view sheds a new light upon my everyday view of his exceptional way of transmitting my favourite life passion.
Bravo and merci Marguerite !
Daniel Laurendeau
Apprentice of Massimo di Villadorata
and
Head Instructor
McGill Aikido
Just a correction: the admired and excellent Di Villadorata sensei may have intorduced Aikikai Aikido to Canada but I was studying with Takeshi Kimeda sensei in Toronto in 1966. Kimeda sensei began teaching in Canada in 1964 or 1985 and has been for many years referred to as “The Father of Canadian Aikido” and is an immensely skilled member of the Aikido Yoshinkai.