Shaolin Warriors

On Sunday night, the Shaolin Warriors brought the Mondavi a show rich in the Shaolin kung fu tradition, a centuries' old martial arts practice developed in feudal China to defend the temples from marauders.

For my husband, this night would go down as history as the night he tried unsuccessfully to pry a stainless steel bowl from the stomach of a monk in a state of great physical and spiritual concentration. Not an experience known to many.

Neither is the experience of watching another monk chop what appeared to be a whole head of Napa cabbage on his stomach, using his belly as a cutting board. "Cutting-board abs," my husband joked. Later, several of the Warriors broke metal bars over their heads with defiant shouts.

The monks weren't all flash and pain management though. Their feats of strength and more importantly, their martial arts are grounded firmly in Buddhist practice and in mindfulness. The show followed the stucture of the seasons in the monastery, letting action rather than narration tell the story. The ease with which the masters and their students performed their work was stunning, particularly that of the bearded priest (who often weilded the priest's staff) and of the two acrobatic young boys, monks in training.

At times the recorded music was slighty stilted, but the monks made up for this in their tremendously inventive choreography. One of my favorite parts of the show was the demonstration of each of the major kung fu animal traditions. My husband and I counted tiger, frog, snake, crane, monkey and mantis. There was also a weapons demonstration, featuring the use of the iron fan, whips, tiger hooks and other unusual or improvised (brooms, for example) weapons. The drunken master style, in which the martial artist acts drunk in order to appear off-balance and thus vulnerable to attack, was also fun to watch, and got a lot of laughs from the audience.

There is a poetry in such fighting, combining our delight of motion with our amazed disbelief. I feel this in good kung fu movies, in the Matrix's "bullet time" or while watching parkour too.