Wing Chun, it’s not secret but almost! To access Master Ridha Lhiba’s class, which is located on rue Notre-Dame next to a famous toy store in Nice, you have to climb a staircase, take an almost hidden door, go down a few steps, cross a small courtyard, and then climb two more floors to reach the goal. No warm-up necessary then to hear the advice of this Tunisian in his late thirties, “married to an Austrian Catholic,” as he likes to point out, who leads this evening class combining self-defense methods and martial arts. Facing each other in pairs, about thirty participants from various backgrounds, ages, and religions (mothers, medical interns, teachers, and students…) practice the principles of Wing Chun: a combat strategy based on a model of behavior and decision-making following the principles of the famous Chinese General of the 6th century BCE, Sun Tzu. According to him, there is no need to engage in combat if it can be avoided. In the mind of the Chinese strategist, this equates to having defeated the opponent’s blatant aggressiveness without needing to fight.
The instructor, always smiling even when delivering the most vicious of blows and assisted by his son already trained in higher degrees, mainly emphasizes one point: during a physical aggression in the street, initiate the conflict on a physical and verbal level (raise your voice, harden your gaze…) as long as the aggressor hasn’t “violated the vital zone,” a sort of magical area that maintains a certain safety distance. Otherwise, as they say, you will have to “go into the thick of it.”
But even there, Wing Chun offers two phases… but not three movements because that would already be too late for you! Anticipation – a reaction to the violation of the vital zone without executing an attack – aims particularly to strike vital points that, out of modesty, the master does not wish to describe in the brochure but explains more clearly during training. The concept of defense completes this range with more sophisticated techniques. Nonetheless, the most surprising aspect remains the handling of “sticky hands” or “Chi Sao,” a series of accelerated reactions purely tactile and manual designed to prevent the opponent from having the last word with possible parries: which gives, as seen in some films, these successions of “hand games” where every attempted blow finds its immediate counter… and so on. All of this is so fast that when performed professionally, these “sticky hands” nearly require slow motion to understand their multiple articulations. In this quest for the “reversible KO,” which relies on knowing how to exploit the strength… and the folly of the other, the aim is obviously not to kill but to leave the opponent dazed on the mat, merely, as the master says, “to have time to skedaddle”: certainly a practice as ethically as physically acceptable to all involved in this training.
Wing Chun Kung Fu
The art of “sticky hands”
Classes: Monday and Thursday from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
16 avenue Notre Dame, 06000 Nice
Website: www.wingchun.fr
Email: wtridha@hotmail.fr
