Class review: 5th of November

Although a bit late, I have the review materials for the class at UT this past Thursday. Despite the peculiar habit of people showing up whenever they want to - class does actually start at 5pm, people - we managed to get through a great deal of material, so much so that we will be ready to fence starting not this Thursday (the 12th), but the following Thursday (the 19th).

So without further ado, here are some of the things we discussed last week:

1) The tempo window: as with every other weapon, be it fist, foot, sword or whatever, there is a good and a bad time to attack the opponent, particularly if the opponent is wielding the same or a similar weapon to the one you are. Dall'Agocchie and Capoferro mention five specific instances in which I can safely strike my opponent. For the sake of simplicity, these five instances can be distilled into one, easy to remember rule: I can only safely strike the opponent when they're busy doing something else, be that changing hand position, stepping backward, performing a cavazione or opposition, cutting, etc. With a thrusting weapon, such as a rapier or smallsword, this window of opportunity is very small, and with an experienced fencer, the window will be almost imperceptible, due to the size of the motion.

The two main drills we have been working on in class, the perfect and imperfect spirals (the former being a strike via a contracavazione, the latter a strike via opposition) work on the assumption that our opponent wishes to defend himself by closing off the line, and it is during this action that we strike. Our two motions together make one tempo, though my contribution to the tempo will be far smaller than his, because the proportion of our actions has changed significantly, provided I have stringered his blade. But...what if the opponent doesn't react? As we saw in class, if I attack out of tempo, my opponent has a contratempo action immediately available to him. Hmmm....

2) Creating motion in the opponent: the simplest answer to our quandary is to make our opponent move, in this case by removing their sword from the equation by way of a mezzo colpo, or half cut, either from the "true side" (a mandritto) or from the "riverse side" (a riverso). I make an angled cut downwards to my opponent's sword to bring it offline, and during his recovery, I perform a cavazione and strike to the other side; simply striking straightaway is actually quite risky, as we have seen. Needless to say, the rapier fight is one of great patience!

3) The cuts: to wrap up this review, I think it would be worth it to discuss the names of the cuts, and diverse angles. There are quite a few of them, and unfortunately, the direct English translations don't flow very well, so we need to learn the Italian for each one.

- Fendente: a downwards, vertical cut.

- Sgualimbro: a downwards, diagonal cut.

- Tondo: a horizontal cut.

- Ridoppio: an upwards, diagonal cut done with the true edge.

- Falso: an upwards, diagonal cut done with the false edge.

- Montante: an upwards, vertical cut, usually done with the false edge.

- Tramazzone: a downwards cut done from the wrist.

In other news, Saturday's class may be moved to 12-2. More details on this later in the week.