We’re ready to announce more details for the VISS 2017 intensive workshops!
The Vancouver International Swordplay Symposium has always been about the pursuit of mastery. That’s why we set up the intensive workshops, a chance to spend nine hours with a single instructor over the course of three days. These intensive workshops represent our desire to help you move beyond the surface of the arts we love.
This year, our intensive workshops come with a theme: “This vs. That.” Our goal is to more deeply explore our martial arts through the lessons of contrast and comparison with other disciplines and in asymmetrical environments. We’re not asking which martial art would win; we’re exploring the many different solutions to the problems of combat.
This year we have eight intensive workshop tracks. Each track is paired with a matching partner. The partners are related disciplines, generally the same (or similar) weapon but with a different historical or cultural background. The partner tracks will run in parallel for the first two days (in the morning or the afternoon) and then meet on the last day in a combined session led by both instructors.
The eight intensive three-day workshops include:
Longsword intensives:
German longsword with Christian Tobler
Italian longsword with Devon Boorman
Rapier intensives:
Italian rapier with Tom Leoni
Thibault (Destreza) with Matthew Howden
Grappling intensives:
German wrestling with Jessica Finley
Italian wrestling with Marco Quarta
Single-handed sword intensives:
Bolognese swordsmanship with Ilkka Hartikainen
British swordsmanship with Paul Wagner
In particular, we are proud to highlight the single-handed sword intensive, taught by two well-respected instructors from overseas. Ilkka Hartikainen comes from Finland and Paul Wagner from Australia. Ilkka is one of the best-known practitioners of Bolognese swordsmanship, while Paul is a leading instructor of British martial arts as well as medieval German sword and buckler according to MS I.33. It is quite a rare opportunity to see either of these two instructors in Vancouver, much less at the same time!
The rest of the weekend will be filled by standalone workshops, lectures, and of course the Saturday night gala! More details will be available shortly, and you can always see examples of our past VISS schedules over at our past events page. Please note that these schedule details are still subject to change.
To join us, head on over to our registration page. Register before January 1 to receive a 20% early registration discount!