The above form is Baji Xiao Jia...I had competed with Da Jia before and took Gold in a forms divison, but that's not really what I want...and I guess using the term 'performance' might have given the wrong idea.
It did, actually. I found myself thinking, this shouldn't be a performance. What others might think of it as performance art shouldn't be an issue at all. What matters is that you are doing the form correctly so that you benefit from the exercise. Visually the form could be the ugliest thing ever devised, but if it correctly teaches you the skills and gives you a way to properly train those skills, then it is of the highest value. Forms were originally meant to be a training tool, a way to practice that would help your skill in your martial method develop and grow. If you do your form correctly, and you pay attention to the details, then you should benefit from the practice. It's only in more recent times that forms have become a method of performance art. Once that happened, in my opinion the practice of forms lost much, or even all, value. When the focus is on impressing an uneducated audience, then usually the important stuff gets thrown away for the sake of that which is visually impressive, even if it is useless as a martial method.
OK, so I have no background in Baji and will not comment because I don't know if you are doing it correctly or not. While it may or may not be visually impressive to me, that is irrelevant. I can only encourage you to look inward if you are estranged from your sifu and have no other alternatives. If you are striving to get every point of the form correct, and you have a strong concept of what that means, then keep at it. You never "get there", you are always just working on it.
If someone tells you to change your stance, or don't splay your fingers, or deepen the stance, or whatever, I would really hesitate to take that advice unless they are knowledgeable about Baji and you know that you can trust their input. If you are actually doing it as your sifu taught you, there may be good reasons for each of those details.
The only thing I will echo is that in CMA the power is often derived from the stances, so you need to know how to connect your technique to your stance and your root. But exactly how your system goes about doing that, and how it trains that skill and how that training is manifest in the practice, may be unique to your system. So for someone like myself to suggest "do it THIS way..." is a reflection of my own experiences with in the system that I train. As such, any advice I offer you could be a direct confict to how it should be done in Baji. I just don't know and am not willing to take the risk of leading you astray if Baji is what you want to work on.
If you get interested in Tibetan White Crane, well then you and I can talk. But for Baji, to be correct for the methods of Baji, don't do it like others from different systems do it, because it just might not be the same. Sometimes "similar" is even more dangerous, because if fools you into thinking you've got it right, but there might be critical differences that are really important in getting it right for Baji.
some things to think about.
