Ms. Bruce did a nice, limited gymnastic floor routine with some TKD interspersed.
Exactly. And the TKD was mostly symbolic. Ah, that looks like the kind of thing we do when we do an ax kick. Look, that was a side kick... and now some roundhouses... and
there was a punch (possibly)...
But the TKD moves are embeded in something that looks like a basic gymnastics performance; some of the things that the wu shu people have been doing for a long time are far more extreme and jaw dropping. Mostly what comes across is the lack of force behind what martial moves there are. Yes, she can rotate rapidly rotate 360 and throw eight roundhouses at head height in that position, but none of them would knock a fly very far off its path. And the punches suggest about the same level of impact as a cheerleader's hand routines.
Somersaults have been included in XMA `kata' performances for many years now, so it wasn't all that surprising to see several in there. Again, it's hard to see what possible connection this kind of movement could have to a well-designed set of combat-effective tactics, but clearly that wasn't the poinnt of the performance.
She missed several required elements of the floor routine, however. She's quite talented, incredibly flexible, and clearly works hard in training. But I saw no function in her routine... In a few cases, were she to try to hit someone, the punches would either fall short as she pulled away, or have no power. I did find one move interesting; it appeared that she intends it as a grab, then shoot the right knee across, under the grab, to a hooking axe kick from the left... Neat idea, and I'd like to see her give it a shot with an apponent.
Right, no function, only form. People who haven't been keeping up with the current XMA-style kata routines will probably be more impressed with this performance than those who've been watching these routines get more and more acrobatic, more and more airborne, and less and less about fighting methods over the past half decade or so. Ms. Bruce's performance looks very well done and precise, but it's relatively conservative; she didn't do any cartwheels, for example, which I've seen in at least one neo-kata... exhibition, I guess, for want of a better word.
In a sense, though, her style of performance is nothing more than the logical outcome of a view of forms which leeches them of all substantive combat meaning. If you want to know where CB is coming from, it seems to me that it's built into the core premise of the `traditional' performance ethic, which focuses on a kind of conventionalized style and assesses competitors on how closely they adhere to these requirements while executing the moves of the form. Once you make that leap—from the form as an instruction manual on the one hand, to the form as the physical expression/interpretation of a page of Stepanov notation for a somewhat violent-looking modern ballet, on the other—you're on the way to Ms. Bruce's performance. Because no matter how `classical' you try to keep the martial ballet you've scripted, someone will come along at one point with modern dance ideas and pretty soon you'll have... just what we were looking at. It's like going from
Swan Lake to
The Rites of Spring... yes, the first is über-`classical' and the latter is... well, the choreographic analogue of Stravinsky's wild music—but they're both
dances, in the end.
Regarding the traditional forms... I watched several of them. I don't know these kata. From these performances, I have no idea if there is combat application or not; none of the performers I saw had that focus I've discussed elsewhere. I can't put an opponent "into" their form... Many of the movements seemed to have deliberately had the rhythm altered... I don't know. Sharp, clean technique. Lots of power in some of the moves. But they didn't grab my attention.
What I saw was a very deliberately paced, almost monotonously `4/4 timing' performance of hyungs from the standard repertoire. The difference between those forms and Ms. Bruce's is that it's probably possible to recover combat uses of the sequences performed from the execution of the traditional hyungs at this point. But there was no sense that the performer in any of them was actually engaging in combat
moves; what we were getting seemed to be a series of meaningless
movements put together because, well, this is the way the poomae is done, so that's how we'r doing it.
I think you're quite right, Tom, in your OP comment that both of these kinds of demonstrations miss the mark in terms of the basic martial purpose of hyungs; as dances, they correspond to difference between Ivanov/Tchaikowsky's grand opera and Nijinksy/Stravinsky's modern dance. Artistic styles evolve. But basic methods for carrying out certain kinds of tasks tend to change much more slowly, because those methods are often the best ones for carrying out the task at hand.
... 
