The problem with Koryu Kata is that there is not window of opportunity to put the time in to teach/learn them on a regular basis. Here's a hypothetical problem: If 1 in 10 students make it to shodan, then it takes a 100 students and 2 years to make 10 koryu ready shodan. From there you have to figure on your Black Out rate. If they " Black Out" which means they quit upon getting shodan that means you have 1 or 2 shodans out of the 100 original students. These shodans would spend most of their dojo time working with lower level beginning Ukes. No wonder we seldom advance further than 35 basic techniques, with The Koryu being just a vehicle for promotion instead of mastery. No wonder we only do 2 koryu.
I think that its time someone in the Tomiki World grew a pair of pedagogical nuts and started teaching the Koryu movements. You noticed that I said movements and not Kata. What I'm proposing is looking koryu kata across all six kata, and putting movements into related sets. I guess you could call them new kata if you had the balls. But you could call them sets and avoid a lot of arguments.
The most obvious set of koryu is the suwari waza, or sit on your knees techniques.
If your knees can handle it get on them and use them. It's taken me four years to get a basic comfort level with knee work. Western folks should expect to suck at suwari, and suck for a long time.
Anyway, we have Ichi kata suwari waza. These probably provide the most basic concepts, but all suwari are basic by nature. . The first thing I noticed is that suwari techniques feel exceptionally strong and effective. My hypothesis is that this trains an kinesthetic expectation of all other techniques.
the first minute of this clip has 5 very important movements, ideas, concepts. I've wrote about these before, and I think they provide a different perspective of aikido apart from the 17 and releases.There are eight here in San Kata. Seems to be a lot of Atemi concepts woven into Old Boys version that I havent seen over here in Texhoma country. I dig it. Its the probably the Daito Influence
Here are some Go movements, some are similar, but some look like they are touching on different principles or concepts.
Here are some Roku movements, it looks like suwari release techniques.
So there may be 12-20 Suwari waza once you sift out for redundancy, if there is redundancy which I'm not so sure there is. I think we need to look at the Koryu as a whole, and start classifying the techniques into sets. It's worth doing. Nick Lowry has mentioned a lot about keiko and Renshu. That's shut up and do it versus talk a lot, do a little. We might as well use these concepts as instructional guides too. Renshu=reps. Keiko= familiarity
Here's a talking out of my ass curriculum /ranking proposal.(remember I'm a 400 hour shodan so take this with a grain of bullshit) Remember ranking was originally used for matching purposes. It came from that Japanese checkers game GO. Non-competitive Aikido folks should use the ranking for instructional/training purposes. You could still have your rank demonstrations, but the rank means what you work on with dojo time, and how you should approach your training.
Rank 1- Ukemi_renshu
Walking part A(renshu)
Walking part B (keiko)
releases 1-4 renshu
5-8 keiko
17- (1-5) renshu
(6-10) keiko
Koryu set 1 (part A) keiko
Rank 2
ukemi_renshu
Walking (renshu)
releases 1-8
17- (1-10) renshu
(11-17) keiko
Koryu set 1 renshu
Koryu set 2 part A keiko
Rank 3
ukemi_renshu
Walking (renshu)
releases 1-8 renshu
17- (1-17) renshu
B10 (1-5) keiko
Koryu set 1-2 renshu
Koryu set 3 part A keiko
Rank 4
ukemi_renshu
Walking (renshu)
releases 1-8 renshu
17- (1-17) renshu
B10 (1-10) renshu
Koryu set 1-3 renshu
Koryu set 4 part A keiko
You can see the pattern I'm talking about. It's about about dojo work. Its about putting the Koryu kata back into our Aikido practice. It's just cool shit, folks. And people shouldn't have to wait for years to fiddle with it. I think that the 17 and releases should be taught as quickly as possible in order for people to have a Physical Vocabulary for understanding the Koryu. Yeah, certain things will look and feel a lot shittier for a while, but its got to look and feel shitty before it gets better.
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