Many of our students have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons throughout the year with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which recently opened a centre here in Hangzhou.
Back in October, Zhang shifu kindly agreed to let us film him giving a complete demonstration of the foundational sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which the whole school endeavoured to learn in an introductory series of taiji lessons at the start of the year.
Filmed by Nick Berry and Hannah Hui
[We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. There's also a sequence Mr Murphy shot a couple of weeks earlier of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine, but in failing light. However, the routine is more readily digestible in this single clip of Zhang shifu which Nick Berry edited together.]
