But I think something else is starting to coalesce. To get an idea of what it might look like, I think it’s worth turning towards the concept of “aliveness,” a term coined by Matt Thornton as a part of his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu pedagogy that is used to describe a quality of training. In Thornton’s formulation, aliveness consists of three aspects: timing, motion, and energy. In “alive” training, partners perform a drill or exercise with no static or preset timing or rhythm. They move together, as they would when applying a skill. And, finally, partners train with the amount of resistance and energy that reflects how they would apply the skill in a sparring context.

Reading Thornton’s definition, it might not be immediately clear how aliveness is a useful concept for tying. One would be right to point out that the end of tying, unlike the combat sports where “aliveness” has become an important concept, is not necessarily a competitive one. Yet, despite the fact that “aliveness” must look different in order to be legible within a tying context, the reasoning behind its importance remains applicable.

For Thornton, “aliveness” doesn’t just refer to the proximity of a drill to a fight or competition. Aliveness isn’t just about sparring. It’s about developing timing and sensitivity. Set patterns and forms may help someone memorize a sequence, but they don’t make it an applicable skill. They don’t teach students when and how to actually execute it. If anything, set patterns instill and ingrain bad habits by making students learn cues that aren’t realistic or by making them insensitive to incoming information altogether.

Against traditional forms of training like katas, sets of choreographed movements that are repeated alone or with a partner, Thornton posits his own “I Method.” The goal of the “I Method” is to spend as little time as possible sitting with what Thornton calls “dead patterns” or patterns that lack aliveness. Instead, what might constitute the entirety of training for a martial art like Tai Chi or the bulk of the training of a martial art like Karate is relegated to a small part of one phase of training. The introduction of a form might involve some patterns that aren’t alive. Students need to get a basic grasp of the movement. But that is far and away the shortest and least emphasized part of practice. If it takes up the majority of a practice session, Thornton argues, then students are being taught something that is too far above their skill level.

Once the introduction phase ends, students enter the second phase of the “I method,” the isolation phase. Here students focus on drilling and repeating a given technique, with progressive levels of resistance. The timing is not set and students are given the space to feel through things, fail, and make corrections. While the term “resistance” is not suitable for tying, it’s possible to turn towards other training methodologies for workable analogues. Here I’d like to argue for decisional complexity. You start adding more pieces in, more variation in what can be done in terms of actions and how they are performed. You move, more and more, towards the third the final phase, “integration” which involves incorporation and practice in the conditions in which a skill will be used.

Today, much of tying education looks a lot like the traditional martial arts training methods Thornton argues against. Students are shown set patterns, akin to katas, but are rarely taught anything beyond very limited aspects of a form. If we follow Thornton’s model, the way rope education leans towards the “introduction” phase is a problem because the introduction is only a stepping stone to get students actually using skills.

You are not developing sensitivity until you throw away the pattern. In other words, you cannot get and increased sense of “timing” from hitting a wooden dummy or a stuffed bag. You can get “sports-specific” repetitions in on the stuffed bag. And that will help you build the heart and muscles which propel the tool, and help you remember combinations. But it will never give you any type of “timing” because it is not Alive.

Sensitivity is nothing but “timing” applied to “tactile sense”. Again, you need another human for this. You cannot get sensitivity from a wooden dummy or heavy bag anymore than you can can get “timing” from a wooden dummy and heavy bag.

Most rope classes I attend at other venues spend much less time on how to tie than what to tie. Students are left on their own to figure out how to apply things. When they take what they’ve learned somewhere to perform or play with, it’s evident how little this model serves them. They haven’t learned or practiced what they want to do. They enter a scene just like an actor walking on stage who never rehearsed, who has perhaps has learned lines, but never the blocking, or who has never interacted with the other actors. Another way to look at aliveness might be to “practice skills as you will execute them.”

This formulation seems pretty apt for tying, especially when we understand that there’s something that tying shares with martial arts that it does not with most other kinds of performance. Tying frequently involves improvisation. A key skill for someone who wants to tie in the Japanese style is being able to recognize a moment and know what to do within in. So why are most classes the repetition of dead patterns? Why do we tie in class the way no one wants to be tied? Why is there such a separation put between “technical labbing” and “actual tying?”

The “get out there and use it” mentality of alive training dovetails well with what I’ve learned in physical acting classes. Don’t stand around and talk about what you’re going to do. Do it. Practice it. Improve it. Learn how it works and make corrections along the way. This basic structure is how Chicago Rope shapes most of its classes. Our Fundamentals I course teaches one simple pattern the first class, aisatsu shibari. The next three classes involve learning to use the individual components in increasingly more alive and complex situations, with more and more elements thrown in. At the end of the course, students are asked to devise, work on, and improve a small scene, using what they’ve learned. The introduction of the pattern itself occupies less than an eighth of the time dedicated to learning how to tie it.

Thornton does not have the final say in martial arts pedagogy, and there are places where I significantly differ from him. I think that “dead patterns” have their place and are often pedagogically useful in martial arts. I know I developed a great degree of movement flexibility from capoeira sequences and coordination form kali / escrima drills. Martial arts such as tai chi and judo mix “dead” and “alive” components in a variety of interesting and useful ways. Other sports, often those that require very precise movement patterns, have shown significant value in creating training programs that incorporate kinds of patterns that Thornton would not appreciate. All the same, effective training often means moving towards more and more complex scenarios that are under greater and greater pressure, and that constantly move closer to approximating the circumstance in which a skill may be used.

While it’s true that martial arts, sports, and rope differ substantially in their practice, “aliveness” as a concept provides a significant challenge to how tying is taught, and we all would do well to focus more on the “how” to tie than the “what.” Rather than insisting on only “alive” training methodologies, rope educators would do well to look for opportunities to add more live training components. Anything that is not alive and that does not approximate tying should have justifications for levels of separation and abstraction. Is a dead pattern that’s being used employed to developing coordination, help partners become attuned to one another, or break movement habit? That’s great. Is there a reason that limiting the aliveness of the pattern helps to that end? If so, sure. Go ahead with a dead pattern. But, if you’re doing so, be sure to provide a structure in which whatever is being worked on can be integrated into some kind of alive training. That is the best way to make sure it will become and integrated skill that can actually be used. Training this way involve a less radical shift than someone who has read Thornton may initially want, but taking “aliveness” into account at all, even if as something that should not always be aspired to, would represent a significant change in how Japanese Rope is taught. And I think going forward, it’s going to be an important change to make.

If you’re interested in hearing more, the intensive I’m teaching in Vancouver this month is going to be a long form exploration of how to start bringing alive training methods to Japanese Rope. This is also a topic I’ll be discussing at my workshops at Westcoast Bound.