Is It Just Vancouver or Are Other Places Like This?

[wengehuaren]

I recently moved to Vancouver and started looking around for a good Chinese Martial Arts school, the scene is much bigger then when I lived out East. Anyhow over the past several weeks I have visited a fair number of schools and one thing I have noticed is a lot of the schools here seem to be kind of mixed and I wasn't really sure what they were teaching as in traditional Kung Fu or Modern Wushu. Some of the schools are focused on just traditional Kung Fu and some are just focused on Modern Wushu but several of them it's hard to tell what they are teaching, it kind of looks like bits & pieces of this and that. One club the instructor teaches a few traditional Southern & Northern style forms and then a couple of Modern Wushu forms but doesn't appear to teach any complete traditional system. Another school that I visited I couldn't tell what they were teaching as some students were doing traditional and others Wushu (and both rather poorly I might add). Not that any of this really matters as I will probably eventually settle on a school that is more focused on one or other.

So my question is this, is this something that is prevalent in cities with a larger Chinese Martial Arts community or just Vancouver?

[David Jamieson]

Here in T.O the big traditional clubs teach:

1) the style the sifu has

2) modern wushu curriculum

3) san shou

All the larger clubs are members of one organization or another that want to unify and standardize traditional chinese martial arts teachings and they get that through teh wushu and san shou and as icing, they also propogate their traditional style. the traditional style is the one that is taught to those people that have something beyond the "i wanna fight" or "i wannabe jet li" attitudes.

If you want, you can also find off the road non commercial clubs where you can learn just a traditional system. this usually requires a face to face meeting and agreement or a refferal out of one of the other clubs.

[Three Harmonies]

If you visited my teacher than you saw no modern wushu at all, just traditional Mantis. www.sixharmoniesmantis.com
Cheers
Jake :)

[wengehuaren]

Thanks David, regarding TO I was aware that this is the case with the Sunny Tang club but didn't know other clubs were following this trend, interesting. So it is not isolated to Vancouver then. Which other clubs in TO do this?

Three Harmonies - I haven't made it out to the traditional Mantis but will soon enough, thanks!