Fencing is a game of distance.
That was my main takeaway after I observed nearly two hours’ worth of instruction at the Mississippi University for Women early Monday afternoon.
It was most clear as Christopher French walked students through a basic exercise about how to attack from various ranges.
“He’s good as long as I’m a wall,” French said after backing away from a student’s lunge. “But as long as there’s a centimeter between me and the tip of his blade, that weapon is useless.”
It was a simple lesson: As long as an opponent didn’t move — and French didn’t as he instructed the student to give a few thrusts of the blade to demonstrate proper form — a fencer was more or less guaranteed to score a touch. However, as he pointed out when moving students to practice “realistic” attack distances, it’s rarely so simple to hit a live human as it is to simply thrust the blade forward and strike a wall.
French, a fencing expert from Champaign, Illinois, visited the university Monday to give an introductory lesson to any interested students or faculty.
Kristi DiClemente, a visiting associate professor of history, set up French’s visit to MUW as part of the university’s Medieval and Renaissance speaker series. DiClemente is a former fencer herself, and used to fence with French. The university’s fencing club has long been inactive, but a surplus of old equipment — enough for 15-20 people — helped make for an easy set up for a fencing lesson.
DiClemente said the lesson could provide a connection of sorts to the past, and more importantly, offer a new experience for students.
“It’s good for what I do, and in fact our Shakespearean scholar is also in this mix and her students are here,” she said. “It allows students to experience history and experience a new sport, which is important in college — to experience new things.”
Understanding the sport
French covered the basics for much of the hour-and-a-half I spent watching his lesson in the Pohl Gym. Once the dozen or so people on hand were suited up in fencing jackets, he walked them through a basic overview of the equipment. First, the suit: knickers, shoes, an underarm protector, the fencing jacket, a body cord and electronic vest called a lame — both used in electronically-scored fencing — and of course, the fencing mask.
French then introduced the sport’s three weapons — foil, epee and sabre — and the basic rules for combat with each.
The gist, without getting too complicated, is simple. The foil and epee are thrusting weapons–you can’t score with cuts or slashes. With a foil, the target area on the body is, generally, from the chin to the groin, excluding the arms. In epee fencing, anything is a target. A sabre can score with a thrust or a touch, and the target is anything above the waist, arms and head included.
None of this was new to me — I’d fenced for a few years in high school and during my undergraduate days at Mississippi State University. It’d probably be an understatement to say I’m rusty now, but it didn’t take much for the old lessons to return to mind as I watched French teach.
He took students through a few basic exercises to limber up and introduced them to the basic en garde position, then fencing movements such as a proper advance, retreat and lunge.
If the introduction was familiar, so too were many of the corrections French offered as I followed him from group to group after the students split into pairs to practice the basic thrust, advance-thrust and lunge-thrust maneuvers.
One such lesson: keep your front foot out in front of your body weight as you lunge, rather than leaning forward to try to squeeze out a few extra inches of reach. It’s a natural thing to want to do, French explained, but it actually slows your recovery and leaves you open to a counterattack — a riposte, to use the proper term — if the attack fails.
Avoiding the blade
If fencing is a game where a centimeter can mark the difference between victory or defeat, then precision is one of its key components.
French affirmed this to me when we talked before the lesson began. He said one common misconception people have is that the fighting is grander, or more cinematic, than it really is.
“With foil fencing, since you’re being attacked with by a thrusting weapon, the defense that you need is compact, not very wide,” he said. “You’re not taking attacks from the side. This makes the action nice and linear and also nice and fast.
“Once people get started, what typically happens is they will start clanging and clanging and clanging the foil blades together — probably reenacting Princess Bride-type theater fencing,” he continued. “But it turns out you get to the target by avoiding the blade, rather than trying to batter the blade. Attack the man and not the blade. It takes a while to get the focus on the target area and off the blade.”
That turned out to be as true in practice as it was in theory.
As the students broke into pairs to practice attack movements, I watched a pair break into an impromptu bout that was perhaps more “The Adventures of Robin Hood” than modern fencing.
But they were having fun, and who was I to blame them?
Alex Holloway is a Dispatch reporter who covers city government.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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