This past weekend, I once again had the extreme pleasure of having one of my budo friends come to New York to teach. He's highly skilled and a great guy. We put stuff up on the Web and Facebook that the Saturday practice would be an open seminar with extremely reasonable rates for a day's practice.
It's a good thing I don't bring people here for my students' sake, or for attempting to make money (I do it for myself), because I would have been severely disappointed on both counts. Only one person came to the Saturday practice, and only one besides me took part in the Sunday morning practice. Since I was not especially surprised or disappointed, I turned my thoughts to why this happened. I should point out that this is not the first time it has happened, but the second (the first time we had a similar practice, we had four people attend).
First, let's review the excuses. In no particular order:
One group I am affiliated with was interested until they understood that my old sempai might be coming. (My old sempai, a true entrepreneur, had raided this teacher's dojo less than a year ago and walked off with half the students.) So, to a man, they declined. This was probably wise. However, when the old sempai later sent his regrets to my friend, they still declined the Saturday practice. As to the Sunday practice, the teacher stated that it was "too difficult to get everyone together on a Sunday morning" to make what would have been a 40-minute car trip (or equally-long train trip).
The students I teach at the community college gave a blank stare when I pointed out that the seminar would have an *especially reduced* student rate. Nevertheless one person said he would come, but did not.
A friend of my friend from upstate was so enthused about the event that she was even sending him messages late on the night before to get directions, etc. Another no-show. Eventually, after we wondered and worried if she had gotten lost, he sent her a note. She said she had been up too late the night before on a family matter and did not further elaborate.
So, there are two issues here. One of indifference to the event itself, and another of commitment. We should look at these in turn as well.
As to indifference to the event, my friend and I both speculated. This is my take: One of my old professors at NYU, with whom I taught an undergrad course (his first in many years) bemoaned at one point the students' contentment with lack of direct experience. He accused them of being content to feed off of others' direct experiences (in this case, his three years of living in India as a young scholar), rather than going to places to see for themselves what they were like. I do not have any current stats on the idea of a "gap year" abroad, but I have a feeling the numbers are not very large. When I was a student, people were always taking a semester (or longer) off to "go on the road." There were myriad reasons, including irritating parents or a troubled love life, but the idea of "taking off" and disappearing to the Southwest, Europe or someplace else (one guy I remember actually ran away and joined a circus that came through the town!) was not considered the novelty it was years later when I was at NYU. I imagine the lack of curiosity has been exacerbated by a number of other factors at this point, but I have little doubt that being able to see as much exotic stuff as you like on YouTube has probably not improved people's sense of adventure. Why go abroad when you can just watch? LOL.
For that matter, why spend money to go to a seminar when you can just watch the kata on your computer? This elision of virtual with actual experience is really nothing new. Many years ago, I went to my first noh performance in Japan. I had seen truncated performances at Japan Society, and I had seen a number of videos. But seeing noh on its home turf was a mindblower. First, the resonant quality of the stage, nonexistent in Western theatre stages, was a revelation of sound. I could feel my body actually vibrating with the singing of the chorus. Secondly was the audience - totally absorbed, physically and mentally, in what was taking place onstage. I later met some American theatre students and asked them if they had ever seen a noh performance. Every hand went up. "Not on video" I qualified. Every hand went down. The problem was not that they had not actually seen a performance; the problem was they thought they had.
For budo, this means, obviously, that many people, for economic reasons or lazy reasons, will not only blow off an opportunity to improve their practice, they don't know the difference. In this case, not only can they see the same kata (though not necessarily of the same quality, and how would they know?) from the comfort of their living rooms, but they assume that whatever I picked up from my friend I will be transmitting to them at the next class anyway. Leaving aside that I am poor substitute, of course, the point is that there is no substitute for direct experience, even if you think there actually is one. However, if you limit your direct experiences for whatever reason, I suppose you cannot be blamed for thinking there is no difference. You just lose out.
As for the no-shows, I believe disappointed would-be hosts since time immemorial have wondered about that one. I doubt that it has either deteriorated since the web, or improved. It just is. As we used to say when not that many people came to a dinner party - "More for us!"
No comments:
Post a Comment