In Los Angeles, Jamie Yancovitz trains her students at parks beneath swaying palm bushes; meanwhile, in New York City, Kristen Cabildo trains hers inside the backyard of her brownstone apartment. They’re two ladies on two different coasts but with one calling: to create a secure space for other girls, mainly Filipinas, inside the diaspora. They can analyze self-protection abilities and the history and cultural background in their ancestry — throughout Filipino Martial Arts (FMA).
It makes the experience that Yancovitz and Cabildo are the use of FMA (also referred to as Arnis, Eskrima, or Kali) to educate women in self-defense abilities because the records of this martial arts are rooted in resistance and survival — a history that is going returned even earlier than the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the Philippines in 1521. For centuries, local Filipinos created fighting techniques to combat attackers from neighborhood tribes and overseas lands, including Spain, America, and Japan.
It’s why FMA consists of a couple of fighting structures developed with the aid of local Filipino families or tribes from distinct areas of the Philippines. For example, Cabildo is educated in near-region knife combat thru Inosanto Kali and Sayoc Kali, and Yancovitz is also trained in near-zone combat. Still, via Pekiti Tirsia Kali, or PTK, all three are unique preventing patterns primarily based on the Philippines’ traditional blade art. And all FMA patterns include blade, stick, and empty hand strategies.
Today these combating systems, each with a grandmaster to carry on their legacies, had been tailored to be practiced as martial arts using FMA as its umbrella period. Still, PTK is the simplest one presently used by army forces inside the Philippines and the USA, says Yancovitz. Because of the relationship to the phrase “navy” in “martial arts,” Yancovitz prefers to call FMA “indigenous combating arts,” as it exceptional describes what she and others like her are educated and working towards.
At her Survival Arts Academy, Yancovitz, who has been schooling martial arts for 25 years and currently PTK underneath Grandmaster Tuhon Leo T. Gaje Jr., hands herself with blades and books — the former as her equipment in education PTK and the latter as her resources to train her students approximately this identical Filipino history. She factors out that many Filipinos won’t be familiar with the Philippines’ records “warrior bloodlines,” which also had ladies, warriors, main Filipino businesses to face up to colonization.
But on the pinnacle of the training and academic discussions, Yancovitz starts offevolved with cultivating simple ideas of consent, appreciation, and barriers to her college students as young as five years antique. “With little girls, as an instance, after I paintings with six-yr-olds or 5-year-olds, the primary thing I teach them is how to say no,” she tells Bustle. Yancovitz based Survival Arts inside the Philippines in 2013 as a reaction to the assaults young women have been dealing with at some point of their jeepney rides (a form of public transportation within the Philippines). Last 12 months, Survival Arts moved to Los Angeles, in which Yancovitz says they are persevering with their work “to empower ladies and girls against sexual assault, rape, and all forms of violence.”
“Our [fighting] system is solely combative, which makes it surely useful, handy for ladies to fight off large, bigger attackers,” Yancovitz says, on why PTK is convincing as a form of self-protection. “I use the techniques that I believe are the most important in PTK to use when a female is in threat.” In the one 12 months, due to replanting Survival Arts in California, Yancovitz has trained over three hundred women and children from groups of coloration and the LGBTQ community. And the fantastic responses from her individuals have her trying to unfold Survival Arts by using growing chapters all over the usa and the Philippines led by Filipino women teachers.
Last March, Yancovitz visited New York for a -day Survival Arts retreat co-facilitated by the multidisciplinary artist and educator Jana Lynne Umipig who brings her old healing paintings on the New York City bankruptcy of Survival Arts. “As ladies, our motivation [to learn] is to hold ourselves, to protect our bodies, to protect our youngsters, to protect our own family,” Yancovitz says. “That motivation is what brings us all collectively, no matter in which we come from. There is a sisterhood this is built, and it’s stunning, and it’s increasing.” According to YanCovitz. Survival Arts may also be expanding in Southern California, the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, and Manila within the Philippines.
