Re: "experienced" students
At our dojo we don't do "style for style's" sake Aikido. Our forms represent what we consider to be a particular ideal energy print and its corresponding response. Thus, our subjective applications of forms come to a unified expression but only out of an intent to match that ideal energy print with its corresponding response. In the end, we all look the same and/or try to look the same - for the reason offered above. In this way, variation from this orientation is either noted as "doing something different/not working what we are working on" or it is noted as "wrong/not 100% in providing relevant details." For this reason, when senior students are doing something "different" they are instructed to please work on what we are working on or they are corrected so as to help them more closely resemble the ideal energy print and its response in all of its details.
Because of the role seniors play as examples to junior students, we never stray from this paradigm during forms training.
our take,
dmv
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