Originally Posted by
GLW
That is a common statement made - Contemporary form vs. traditional. Many will base there opinion on a statement that Sun Jianyun made about not liking the competition form and how the person that was demonstrating it did not understand Sun Taijiquan.
Taking each comment with the last first : How many of the new generation who demo forms for video actually DO understand Taijiquan or other styles anyway. This is the old thing of having many people who learn a routine but not the underlying concepts. This is an indictment of the person and the way they learned the set and not anything directed at the set. In fact, when the original video was made for the Sun competition set, the person doing it had not been doing it that long. It was one of those things where an athlete is chosen and then told "Learn this routine, you will be doing it for filming next month..." This is simply how many things are done with new routines - if anyone remembers how much craziness there was back when all of the compulsories were redone for IWuF and how the written sets did NOT represent the same thing as the filmed ones...
As for the routine itself :
The competition routine IS shorter. It was designed to fit in a 6 minute competition time frame. However, the main changes were to remove some of the repetitions in sections. There are also some sections that are there but swapped around....meaning in the traditional set, the come in a slightly different order.
Now, there is NO truth to the idea that this or any of the other forms have to be done in a certain order to "build Qi". Bottom line, there are sections and a section may have ideas in it...but aside from that, they are often composed in a certain order because of aesthetics - as in martial ART.
The competition routine is roughly if memory serves - 53% right sided and 47% left. Compared to the traditional which was in the mid 60% area right sided...so the competition set is more balanced...and this was mainly achieved by removing extra repetitions from the right side...so, if something was done 3 times right and one left, it was changed to do one and one. Not a big deal.
The other comment from Sun was that she did not like the jumping kick in the competition routine because it was not that way in her father's set. Hmm...the wording was as close to hers as I can get from memory.
Now, ANY stepping kick CAN be done as a jumping kick in any form to add difficulty. THAT is why it was made that way. The level of competitor in competition is high so they wanted to add difficulty. However, if you simply do NOT jump, it is the same section as the traditional set....with the mixing around that was done.
If you learn BOTH of the sets, the differences between the two become less and less important. The concepts for each are - or are intended to be - the same.
But if you only do the routine and never ask the questions of "What is this for...?" you end up with empty movements - regardless of which set you do.