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. Through Filipino martial arts (FMA), they can analyze self-protection abilities and their ancestry’s history and cultural background.
It makes the experience that Yancovitz and Cabildo use of FMA (also referred to as Arnis, Eskrima, or Kali) to educate women in self-defense abilities because the records of this martial art are rooted in resistance and survival. This history goes back even earlier than the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the Philippines in 1521. Local Filipinos created fighting techniques for centuries to combat attackers from neighborhood tribes and overseas lands, including Spain, America, and Japan.
That’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 through 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. 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 exceptionally 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 points out that many Filipinos aren’t familiar with the Philippines’ “warrior bloodlines” records, which also had ladies, warriors, and main Filipino businesses 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. “With little girls, as an instance, after I paint with six-year-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 during their jeepney rides (a form of public transportation within the Philippines). Last 12 months, Survival Arts moved to Los Angeles, where 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 useful for ladies to fight off large, bigger attackers,” Yancovitz says, explaining why PTK is convincing as a form of self-protection. “I use the techniques that I believe are the most important in PTK when a female is in threat.” In the past 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. 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 brought 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 brings us all collectively, no matter where we come from. There is a sisterhood this is built, and it’s stunning and increasing.” According to YanCovitz. Survival Arts may also expand in Southern California, the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, and Manila within the Philippines.