The nice thing about gradings is seeing your friends, after a great deal of stress beforehand, put themselves out there, 100%, in the moment, often performing better than you've ever seen them perform. So it was a great pleasure to attend a weekend of gradings and to give our support to our good friends Renata and Marcos as they demonstrated aikido at 5th kyu and 2nd dan levels respectively.
Aikido Harmonia dojo is part of the Uniao Sulamericana De Aikido, an AikiKai organisation of Brasil. All gradings (including kyu gradings) are done here in São Paulo, at the head dojo of Kawai Sensei, who was the first teacher to bring Aikido to Brasil 40years ago. His dojo is large, with an elevated stadium-like seating area for spectators, which was completely full on Saturday and almost full on Sunday.
Saturdays kyu gradings started with a class. I trained with one Sensei 4 or 5 times who was as soft as a KiSociety yudansha - quite a surprise! Also had good experiences with a couple of kyu grades who had nice aikido and more importantly, nice attitudes. Also trained once with Márcio, one of Kawai Sensei's ushideshi (although I didn't know that at the time) who did nice, big leads and had effective but soft technique. I mention all this because I was suprised. I had heard that Kawai Sensei was "hard", or atleast, harder than Bueno Sensei, so I was imagining tough students, techniques from static position and lots of breakfalls. I experienced none of this. Obviously I need to get out more...
The kyu gradings followed. There must have been atleast 100 of them. There were three "panels" of Sensei's across the mat, or maybe I should say "judges" as, unlike Aikido Yuishinkai, you don't automatically pass if you are asked to grade. After each grading each Sensei passes a "yes" or "no" paper and a democratic vote is made. Not everyone passed that day... Two of the panels had two gradings running at the same time, so there was usually 5 gradings happening at once. Towards the end, Renata was finally called and did a lovely little grading. There's a video of her grading here if you want to take a look. The gradings were followed by demonstrations from the Sensei's with a finalé of course by Kawai Sensei.
Sunday started with another class, which I didn't attend this time because I wasn't feeling well. Because Sunday was the yudansha gradings there were mostly black belts on the mat, so it was a great opportunity to take some photos. There were many, many shodan gradings and just a handle of nidan gradings so Marcos was one of the last on the mat. The nidan gradings consist of about 8 tanto techniques, 2 futari techniques, followed by "Jyu waza", which is where the person grading takes ukemi from Kawai Sensei. Marcos did a great grading, he looked relaxed and in control. Paul was his main uke which was special honor for him.
Videos of Marcos' grading are here:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z2unV_Vu8E
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPjlL4U3Hc
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWEyZktUMng
Gabby
