Hello, my name is Liam Caines. I have had the pleasure of being a student of Sensei La Royce’s now for a little over a year. My journey with Karate has been a very segmented one, with it starting and restarting in three very different phases of my life: when I was 5, when I was 20, and now in my mid-30’s. Each time has been with a different style of karate and a restarting from the beginning. While flattered to be asked, I was at a loss at first regarding what I could contribute to this blog due to the infancy of my own journey with karate. The same year I started karate classes I also started taking ballet lessons, which unlike karate I continued with and have never stopped. What started as an after school hobby, ultimately transformed into a professional pursuit. I’m fortunate to be able to say that I am currently in my 15th season performing with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Ballet has been and continues to be a very big part of my life.
While the reasons I joined dojo’s over the years have changed, I can honestly say it has never been with a cross training purpose for my balletic aspirations. Having said that, I have recognised that karate has enriched and furthered my dancing abilities at all three stages of my journey. I have come to appreciate over the years how karate and ballet have many similarities in what they train, and I would like to share a few ways I have noticed that karate has helped me.
Karate and Ballet as a 5-year-old:
While I don’t remember too much in detail from these early years, I do recall hearing that teachers of mine would comment on how coordinated I was for my age: no doubt learning similar motor skills in different environments complimented each other. As a professional dancer, you want to have a diverse catalogue of movement qualities that you can pull from (athletic, slow and gentle, smooth, powerful, sharp, etc.). Early lessons in ballet will often start with a focus on moving very slowly with plenty of positions being held statically for multiple seconds to train precision of the student’s strength and technique. Karate’s vocabulary naturally came with more of a dynamic quality which helped me build the diverse foundation I would need in my dancing journey moving forward.
As a 20-year-old:
When I returned to karate in my 20’s, I was seeking an escape from the dance world. I was facing my final years of formal training, and the unknown of what the future had in store for my classmates and myself was providing a lot of stress and anxiety. Deciding I needed a hobby to get some relief from the world of tights and pirouettes, and wanting that hobby to be something active, karate quickly came to mind. I quickly realised that concepts such as generating and transferring power from one place in the body to another was very much the same in both disciplines. Through karate I was introduced to the concept that you need a balance of both relaxation and engagement of the muscles to optimize movement. Power does not come simply from “muscling” something, as the tenser your body is the slower it is going to move. This revelation for me quickly had me reevaluating many aspects of my dancing, including any repertoire that required faster movement. To have a fast punch, one’s shoulder and arms must be loose, yet there still needs to be a level of control and precision so the force you generate doesn’t pull you off your legs at the end. Whereas before to move faster I would try to engage more muscles, ultimately I was only slowing myself down and wasting a lot of energy. As I progressed in my career and earned more prominent and demanding roles, this lesson of efficiency would prove to be priceless.
…and now in my mid-30’s:
Restarting my journey with karate a little over a year ago, I was looking forward to discovering more parallels between ballet and karate. Now in my 15th season of performing professionally, I ignorantly assumed that there was nothing more karate had to offer that would further my dancing capabilities that I hadn’t already learnt from the 30-years I have spent in the dancing. Oh how I was wrong. Early in my dance training, I often focused on training individual parts of my body in isolation without consideration of how it related to the rest of my body. This inadvertently often would pull me off of my balance without realisation. I suppose this would be similar to putting all your attention towards the arm that is punching, and nothing regarding the arm that is drawing back. My focus slowly readjusted to think of the entire body doing the technique. If I was turning to the right, I was no longer thinking of just the right side moving back but also the left side moving forward with both equally rotating around my axis (often the spine). Enter karate. In many of my classes I was instructed to pay attention to how my feet were connecting with the floor. This focus when paired with gripping the floor to generate power made the supporting and stabilizing muscles in my legs engage differently in a new channel of linked-strength connecting to my center of gravity. It is not uncommon to hear in ballet classes the teacher give the correction to not permit the feet to “roll-in”. I thought the value of this structural correction ultimately was for the health and safety of one’s knees, and I never took the time to further explore its potential value. This tidbit of information has introduced a new concept of stability in my dancing. Often simply thinking of the relation between the floor and my feet will immediately align the efforts of my lower body and provide a much more solid and reliable base for whatever my upper body is doing (the part that most of the audience will be focused on).
While on the surface the art of self-defence and dancing may have very different intentions and applications, my life’s journey has been enriched by how they compliment each other. More and more I am finding that lessons and observations I’ve made in one aspect of my life are seldom limited in their application to just the source they originated from. Be it physically, psychologically, or spiritually, how has karate enriched your life?
Hisshou Karate 