A Kung Fu workshop at a festival has one trap: people expect the film. Try to show them in an hour what they saw on screen and you get an entertaining circus and nothing else.
Our approach is different. You cannot learn a martial art in an hour - but you can experience what one is made of. That turns out to be far more interesting than it sounds.
What we show in an hour
- Standing and structure (10 minutes). Where the weight sits, how you stand, what happens when someone pushes you gently. That simple partner test is almost always the strongest moment of the workshop - people grasp immediately why a stance matters.
- Basic movements (15 minutes). A strike, a transition, a turn. Slowly, repeated, without force.
- A short form (20 minutes). Four or five movements linked into a sequence. This is what people take home and try to show their friends the next day.
- Partner work (10 minutes). Cooperative, without resistance, with clear limits. Nobody hits anybody.
- Winding down and breath (5 minutes). The ending people least expect from a martial art and most need.
What we deliberately leave out
Spectacle. No board breaking, no flips, no feats of strength. If you want a demonstration we can do that separately - but it is not a workshop.
Self-defence in sixty minutes. It cannot be done, and promising it is unfair to the participants.
Contact work. At an event where people do not know each other and many are tired or have had a drink, it is simply a bad idea.
The soft overcomes the hard. The gentle overcomes the rigid.
Who it suits
Complete beginners of any age. We have run workshops for groups of fifteen to a hundred, with ages from ten to seventy in the same line.
It also works for mixed groups of parents and children, who are in fact the most rewarding audience - the children move straight away, and the parents relax once they see nobody expects perfection.
What we need
Space: a flat meadow, a tent or a hall; about two square metres per person. Grass is best, because the stances are low.
A slot: afternoon or early evening. Unlike morning Qi Gong, this workshop needs people who are already awake.
A PA for more than forty participants.
Water. The workshop is more physical than people expect - low stances tire the legs within ten minutes.
What people take away
Three reactions repeat almost every time.
“I did not know it was this hard.” Ten minutes in a low stance changes the idea of what a martial art is.
“I did not know there was this much breathing.” The most common surprise, and the one that most often brings people to look us up afterwards.
“I could do this.” The aim of the workshop in a single sentence.
Combining with Qi Gong
At multi-day festivals the best arrangement is Qi Gong in the morning and Kung Fu in the afternoon. The same participants get two very different impressions of one tradition - and only together do the two show what that tradition is.
How to arrange it
Send us the date, the expected number of participants and the space you have. We reply with a programme suggestion and a price. We are based in Ljubljana and run workshops across Slovenia.
