Interview with Tony
Wolf
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| Mr. Wolf in a defensive cane pose |
For this installment of our interview series, we have a bit
of a coup. We have an interview with Tony
Wolf, one of the major forces involved in the reintroduction of Bartitsu, a
lost mixed martial art of Victorian England.
For more information see the last article. Tony Wolf has to his credit the editing of
two compendiums of Bartitsu as well as co-directing and co-producing the
documentary Bartitsu: The Lost Martial
Art of Sherlock Holmes. He has
worked as a movie fight choreographer, and has the unusual title of “Cultural
Fighting Styles Designer” for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Jaredd Wilson: Thank you for your time in doing this
interview. First off could you tell us what your martial arts background is?
Tony Wolf: I started out training in WTF Tae
Kwon Do in my hometown of Wellington, New Zealand around 1978. I spent
roughly the next ten years deeply immersed in TKD and various other styles -
capoeira, Filipino stick and knife, freestyle wrestling, etc. and ended up with
a twin career teaching scenario-based "padded attacker" self defense
and moonlighting as a professional wrestler. The pro-wrestling led to
movie and TV stuntwork and fight choreography, and thus a strong interest in
historical European martial arts - fencing with two-handed swords and
so-on. That was my main focus for about another decade, until I switched
historical gears and dedicated myself to reviving Bartitsu.
JW: Could you explain what bartitsu is?
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| Bartitsu Cane Wrist Strike |
TW: Bartitsu is essentially a cross-training
method developed by a fellow named E.W. Barton-Wright, who was among the very
first Europeans to train in jujitsu in Japan. He returned to London in
the year 1898 and started promoting what he called the "New Art of Self
Defence" - the name "Bartitsu" was a portmanteau of his own
surname and "jujitsu". Barton-Wright also defined it as meaning
"self defence in every form". It was basically a combination of
koryu jujitsu, some judo, elements of European wrestling styles, the old
"fisticuffs" style of boxing, kicking and a specialized system of
fighting with a gentleman's walking cane or lady's parasol, which were very
fashionable accessories at the time.
Barton-Wright established a club called the Bartitsu School of Arms and
Physical Culture in London's Shaftesbury Avenue and he brought in instructors
from Japan and Switzerland to teach the various component styles of
Bartitsu. The Club eventually attracted an interesting clientele of aristocrats,
soldiers, athletes and actors. Barton-Wright gave interviews and
lectures, wrote magazine articles explaining some of the theory and techniques,
etc. He also set up challenge contests in which the Bartitsu Club
instructors took on wrestlers from other styles. Basically Bartitsu was this
very novel idea that was, as it turned out, at least 70 years ahead of its
time, but he was riding high for a few years right at the turn of the 20th
century.
Then in early 1902, for reasons we still don't fully understand, the Club
suddenly closed down. The instructors dispersed and Barton-Wright seems
to have abandoned self defense instruction in favor of his other great
interest, which was physical therapy. Eventually Bartitsu itself was
almost forgotten, except for a cryptic reference in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Empty House", which
explained that Holmes had used Bartitsu (misspelled as "baritsu") to
defeat his arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, in their fight at the Reichenbach
waterfall.
JW: How did you become
associated with bartitsu?
TW: I'd been intrigued by Bartitsu since I was a kid, but in those days it was very
difficult to learn anything about it. I'd come across a random reference
in a book or a martial arts magazine once every couple of years, and that was
about it. Then, of course, the Internet happened. In the very early
2000s I became one of the sub-editors of an online academic journal called the
Electronic Journal of Martial Arts and Sciences, and we received photocopies of
some of Barton-Wright's original articles which had been discovered in the
British Library by the late judo historian, Dickie Bowen. To those of us
who had been wondering about Bartitsu for decades, it was like finding buried
treasure. EJMAS started to get Barton-Wright's material online, and
within a few years we had formed the Bartitsu Society, originally just to
co-ordinate research into Barton-Wright's art. By about 2005, interest
started to grow in actually reviving it.
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| Mr. Barton in "Gi" (love the socks) |
JW: You said that he studied as a Jujutsu in Japan, is there any indication
of which school of Jujutsu Mr. Barton was privy to?
TW: Yes, he trained at the Shinden Fudo Ryu
dojo of sensei Terajima Kuniichiro in Kobe for about three years, and also said
that he had taken some lessons from Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of
Kodokan judo.
JW: Right now is there any kind of structure to
Bartitsu, do you have a rank or title in the system? Is there an agreed
upon system, style, or curriculum?
TW: As far as we know, there were no ranks
in Barton-Wright's original art. We also found that we were accomplishing
everything we wanted and needed to by simply co-operating as colleagues, so
after a while we just didn't see any point in setting up a formal hierarchy.
On that basis, the Bartitsu Society doesn't legislate anything; there are no
dues to pay and no formal structure. People tend to decide their own
"stations" on the basis of their enthusiasm and contributions.
Likewise, individual Bartitsu clubs and study groups can devise their own
grading systems or choose not to, as they wish. There is also a lot of
diversity in terms of aims and goals. Some people concentrate on street
practical self defense, some on historical recreation, etc.
There is a consensus that, in order for it to make sense for a revivalist
approach to describe itself as Bartitsu, it should include Barton-Wright's
original material, which we think of the Bartitsu canon. The canon is
highly detailed in some areas, but we only have clues and hints about
others. Thus, in order to bring the art back to life, we must
extrapolate, also drawing significantly from the sources produced by
Barton-Wright's assistant instructors and their students, dating up into the
early 1920s. We think of that process as "neo-Bartitsu", and it
allows for a good deal of individual interpretation. There's an element
of deliberate anachronism in there, in that without that focus on that
particular time and place, neo-Bartitsu basically turns into Dog Brothers-style
sparring, Jeet Kune Do, MMA, etc.
JW: What in particular, piqued
your interest in Bartitsu? Especially since you had been studying other
Asian martial arts? Was it the fact that it was European, the fact that
is was an extinct system that could be resurrected, or something else?
TW: Basically, we consider Bartitsu to have
been a fascinating experiment in martial arts cross-training that was abandoned
as a work in progress when Barton-Wright's Club closed its doors in 1902.
The purpose of the revival is to continue that experiment and try to figure out
where it might have gone if that Club had continued to thrive for, say, another
ten years. That double curiosity about the history and what Bartitsu
might have become is my own main motivation for wanting to revive the art.
JW: In
your view as a practitioner of Bartitsu, how does it differ from Asian martial
arts that people may be more familiar?
TW: Asian martial arts are so diverse in
themselves that it's difficult to draw meaningful technical distinctions.
The way I teach Bartitsu, though, might be
considered unusual in that I place a very heavy emphasis on experimentation and
improvisation. For example, we will very frequently perform the canonical
stick fighting set-plays or jiujitsu kata exactly as Barton-Wright recorded
them, but then use them as conceptual "springboards" for neo-Bartitsu
experiments. A central exercise in my own Bartitsu classes is to allow
the "opponent" to spontaneously defeat the "defender's"
pre-arranged responses, forcing the defender to improvise solutions. This
type of pressure testing drill also provides a useful bridge between the formal
set-plays and free sparring.
JW: One of the first things
someone sees when they look up Bartitsu on the internet is that it was, as you
mentioned previously, the "Martial Art" of Sherlock Holmes.
Being that there were two blockbuster movies on Mr. Holmes, and he was shown
doing martial arts is what was shown representative of Bartitsu, or was it
relying more on Mr. Downey's own martial arts background?
TW: The "Sherlock
Holmes" fight choreographer (Richard Ryan) is an old colleague of
mine and we sent him copies of both volumes of the Bartitsu Compendium during
pre-production of the first movie. As a professional fight choreographer
myself, I knew that whereas verbatim historical accuracy isn't a high priority
unless you're shooting a documentary, the more sources of inspiration a production
team has, the better.
There are strong technical similarities between Mr. Downey's Wing Chun and the
style of boxing that was dominant in Europe during the late 19th century, and
the grappling of Brazilian jiujitsu is also very similar to the eclectic
"British jiujitsu" that was introduced at the Bartitsu Club.
Combined with walking stick fighting (as seen in the "Game of
Shadows" movie), the overall effect is an excellent cinematic
representation of Holmes's martial arts. The impact on the Bartitsu
revival has been entirely positive, in that millions of people now positively
associate martial arts with late-Victorian London. We used to joke about
Bartitsu becoming cool on the assumption that it would never actually happen
...
JW: If someone was interested in learning
more about Bartitsu or studying it themselves, what would be your suggestion?
is a very accurate source for the basic history. The Bartitsu Society
website
JW: What have you learned from
re-discovering Bartitsu?
TW: I'd say that my interest in Bartitsu has taught me a great deal in three major
areas.
First, I've learned a lot about the history of the Western world during the
period circa 1900, which has been very interesting in that so much of the
"modern" world was essentially invented during that time.
Second, the process of the revival has been hugely instructive re. how ideas or
memes are spread and developed via the Internet and other media. 12 years
ago only a handful of people had ever heard of Bartitsu, let alone took any
real interest in it, whereas today it actually has some pop-culture currency.
Third, it's reinforced that's it's possible to create a successful
"system" without imposing a formal structure or a top-down
hierarchy. The Bartitsu revival is deliberately an open-source
phenomenon.
JW: Does Bartitsu have a
deeper meaning or philosophy associated with it?
TW: Barton-Wright
never recorded anything that could be described as a philosophy of Bartitsu,
but there are certain ideas that are inherent to it, significantly a kind of
open-mindedness and willingness to experiment. He was very much the Bruce
Lee of his time and place, and we sometimes describe Bartitsu as
"Edwardian Jeet Kune Do".
JW: Who was the most
impressive martial artist you ever trained with and why?
TW: It's a tie between Dan Inosanto, who
made the martial arts I'd been doing up to that point look about as
sophisticated as thumb wrestling, and Brad Waller, a combat biomechanics genius
and the first man I ever met who had fully mastered a "revived"
historical martial art.
JW: What kind of difficulties
have you encountered in re-establishing a "dead" martial art?
TW: Barton-Wright was very clear in his
written explanations of the various formal kata and set-plays - I think his
engineering background helped - and he had the advantage of photographic
technology to record them as well. There will always be minor differences
in interpretation, but in essence the "canon" is quite easy to
recreate for people with solid cross-training backgrounds.
The greatest challenge at the technical level has been to "fill in the
blanks", as is required in neo-Bartitsu. For example, we know quite
a lot about the jujitsu and stick fighting aspect of the Bartitsu curriculum,
but not much about the "modifications" he made to boxing, apart from
some somewhat cryptic hints. Likewise, there are implications to the
cross-training process that he never directly recorded; for example, what to do
if an opponent seizes your walking stick. My own approach to solving
those puzzles is to pressure-test them via sparring drills and so-on,
attempting to keep within the spirit and detail of what we know about the rest
of his curriculum. Most important, though, is the attitude that we are
picking up where he left off; continuing his experiments, rather than trying to
(re)create a definitive version of the art. That process is designed to
be open-ended and on-going.
JW: Have there been any
techniques that you couldn't figure out from the descriptions or have you
encountered any resistance from other martial artist, or martial arts purists?
TW: There
has only been very minor "resistance", almost always in the form of
online commentary by casual
observers
of the revival process who make inaccurate assumptions about our goals. I
understand the objections; from the
traditionalist standpoint, it's highly unorthodox to practice a martial art
that doesn't have a direct
teacher-student lineage, etc. I suppose it comes down to subjective
opinions on what constitutes
an acceptable degree of "accuracy", "legitimacy",
etc. I would actually have anticipated more criticism along those lines, but I take the fact that
it hasn't happened much as a tribute to our success at explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it.
JW: What would be your
long term goals for bartitsu?
TW: I'd like to think that it will
continue on its present course, which seems to be as an open-source, niche
alternative for creative and somewhat eccentric martial artists.
There are still a number of historical mysteries about Bartitsu that I hope
will be resolved one day.
