Description
Greg Mele of Chicago Swordplay Guild
The title of this class comes from a quote by the often misunderstood, and decidedly maligned, George Silver. Here, Silver’s tactical advice is to always press towards the opponent’s weapon-side to constrain his ability to attack or counterattack. Silver was hardly alone in this: the contemporary Italian master Docciolini writes his entire fencing treatise on just this topic, but is himself echoing a strategy that stretched back to Fiore dei Liberi in 1409.
In this class we will look at how the asymmetrical zogho largo (wide play) crossing shown by Fiore begins a process of “walking dangerously”, with each following action continuing either a domination of the inside line, or forcing the opponent to over-parry, leaving them exposed on the outside line. If you can walk and a diagonal line, you can do this!
Greg Mele is best known within the Western martial arts community for co-founding the Chicago Swordplay Guild in 1999 as formal venue to study historical European swordsmanship and its adjunct arts. In October of that year he also organized and hosted the first Western Martial Arts Workshop as an attempt to promote these arts amongst practitioners throughout North America. The oldest and most respected of workshop of its kind, WMAW now draws participants from three continents.
