Hello 

I wanted to write a short debrief of the inaugural Honolulu ILC workshop over the labor day weekend a couple of weeks ago. This was a somewhat risky undertaking on my part and definitely far riskier than the Chen Tai Chi and ILC workshops i've organized in NC.

The ILC student base in Honolulu remains quite small: the core group is at most 7-8 person, half of which could not make it to the workshop. My target was for about 10 participants and if i can get 15 participants, Sifu should be able to break even. Hence I have to network and publicize the workshop sufficiently to get the numbers. A big help in terms of participants was the Aikido group led by Chris Li and mentored by Dan Harden. Dan was open minded enough to encourage all his students to check Sifu out. Steve Arboleda also managed to get another 2 person to the workshop. All in all, we had 20 participants (not all of which came for both days).

In terms of workshop content, Sifu had a heavy emphasis on the philosophy and principles. In terms of exercises, we only got to open-close. We barely started on spinning hands and did some sticky hands. The emphasis on theory was actually quite good for me personally, since I left NY two years ago, when the whole concept of neutral was just developing. The idea of neutral (or tai chi) is definitely fully developed now and central to the art -- that helped to plug a couple of missing gaps in my understanding. I am guessing that the theory stuff was also particularly relevant to the Aikido folks.

One thing i tried this time is organizing a free "Meet the Sifu" event on Friday evening. My goal for the event was really for the local MA community to meet Sifu and be exposed to ILC. The MA scene in Honolulu is kind of interesting. It's quite diverse, but people tend to remain in their silos. Moreover, the different ethnic groups will tend to go with their traditional MA (eg. Karate, Shaolin, Wing chun, Kali etc). And MMA is big here as well. There are a lot of MA schools, so much so that MA class in general are cheap (Aikido/Judo classes run at about $20-30 a month!). MA schools and instructors also tend to remain quite closed and don't talk to each other (NC was much more friendly in this respect). I tried to spread the word about this event to a few wing chun and yiquan contacts, and had only a few replies of people coming. So on the actualy day, i was really expecting this event to be more of a cozy picnic among the out-of-state ILC students and the local ILC students and a few friends. Well, i think we have at least 30 people show up from a cross section of the local CMA community. Sifu gave a brief spiel of what ILC is about and there was some spinning hands/push hands going on.  We did have a not-so-pleasant encounter with a local CMC teacher, but on the whole the atmosphere was open and genial. Several people said they would come to the weekend workshop, but they did not show up. While the event did not generate any leads in terms of workshop participation, the event certainly brought ILC into the radar of many of the local CMA groups. If you asked me if i were organizing an inaugural workshop, would I organize a "Meet the Sifu" event again, I would say definitely, but i wished i had someway of knowing that 30+ people would show up. I would have brought more publicity materials (brochures, DVDs, books etc) as well. I didn't expect the few contacts i made were such good hubs ...  

I hope this might be helpful to some of you folks. Let me know if you would like to know more about any aspect.

Lipyeow