By Nick Evangelista
lacking in any significant relationship to modern sport. And, yet, as Maestro William
Gaugler points out so aptly in his article in this issue of Fencers Quarterly, (fall 2002)
function -- or the skillful application of a foil, sabre, or epee - flows out of proper form.
Classical fencing form can aptly be viewed as a "fine tuning mechanism" for fencing.
"best" form would be one that produced a balanced, measured condition in a
fencer, so that he or she often achieved an expected, successful result.
Anyway, a sensible person might think that.
Since classical form was developed in an age when men still fought to the
death with sharp swords, we might say that ideal form would, by necessity, be
that which insured a good chance of survival in an aggressive combat
situation. Being able to hit the opponent, say, without being hit would be a
critical issue, since a tie with deadly weapons would not be good. There
would be nothing fanciful, extraneous, or meaningless in one’s form, for these
attributes would get someone killed very quickly. All rational fencing folks
would shrink rapidly from such behaviors. Also, it would not be good business
for fencing masters to teach anything but good form -- since it would produce
dead non-paying students. It is from these realities that fencing’s cause-and-
effect arise.
If we look at the random, off-balance, cramped pokings of many modern
fencers today (as often illustrated in another well-known fencing magazine),
the absence of clear clean outcomes on the fencing strip, and the increase
in injuries both self-inflicted and those dealt to others, we might infer that
something important is missing in this new fencing game. We might call this
novel, absent ingredient control. Control, of course, comes out of a
purposeful fine-tuning, a focusing, of the fencing process. The ability to do
this is the deliberate mastery of that process.
Classical Thought
But, to achieve mastery, you need something to anchor you, to give you a
center from which to move with efficiency and an economy of motion. This is
form. Or, more to the point, classical form. In fencing, it is a way to employ
the body that has been developed over the past six hundred years. Today,
there are those who have arbitrarily deemed this classical form, fashioned
through experience, as pointless. Why? Because they do not understand the
value of classical form. Form, to the ill-informed, is just something some
other people once did.
Explaining Fencing Form
In the rest of this article, and in a series of future articles, I plan on taking a
single component of traditional fencing form - the sword arm, the free arm,
having bent knees in the on guard position, hand supination versus
pronation, lining up the feet properly, the central axis point for the sword
hand - and explain its relevance to obtaining personal control on the fencing
piste. I might add that I will be discussing this subject primarily from the
standpoint of Classical French School of Fencing (which is my expertise).
When I am discussing its antithesis, I will not be discussing Classical Italian
School of Fencing, but rather modern sport fencing, which is the antithesis of
all traditional fencing. So, what part of the fencer’s form should we start off
with? How about something simple and "unimportant" like the free arm? The
classical use of the free arm.
The Fencer’s Body - The Free Arm PART II
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