Cupertino Demo--Without Mats!

On Saturday April 30th we did a demo for the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival. This included children, teens, and adult members of Aikido of San Jose. Now the mats are important for demos in general. And it is easier if they are provided as opposed to our shipping and carrying them ourselves. So there was a confusion as to whether or not the mats would be provided on the other end. Always much simpler. But in this case there was a misunderstanding and they were not.

So we had a 30 minute gap to fill. My personal sense is that sometimes opportunity knocks in strange ways. So we had to be more creative in how we represented the art. Sometimes it is easy to just give a physical/athletic demonstration of the art. So to talk about the history, the philosophy, is important as well. Sword and staff presentations can be good. Having the children and teens was good as it demonstrated that aikido is not just for a particular age group.

Having done countless such demos and then trying to watch and listen to myself after on video, I actually enjoyed this presentation and think we did a very good job. The video is about half. And I will put the other half online soon.