There is Only ONE FIRST

There is only one FIRST in any venture or activity created by mankind.  In correspondence with 3 people over the past couple of months, it has become quite clear to me that there is some revisionist history in the making regarding my role and accomplishments in Modern Arnis.  In addition to being the FIRST and ONLY person in the USA and Canada to teach Modern Arnis for college credit, I am also FIRST person who organized and hosted a major Modern Arnis training event, open to everyone, after the death of the late founder of the Modern Arnis System, Professor Remy A. Presas.

In July 2003, I hosted the Modern Arnis Symposium at Erie Community College in Buffalo, NY.  It is a matter of record and verifiable if anyone wishes to check it out.  I am posting this statement so that those who want or might actually try to alter/revise history are put on notice that I was the FIRST person to organize a non-organizational specific Modern Arnis Training Camp.  My purpose back in 2002 when I first proposed the idea of hosting the Symposium was to:

1. Provide a venue where those claiming to be the “only legitimate successor” to Professor Remy Presas, could demonstrate their knowledge and skills in an open and public situation, thereby allowing those of us who did not know them, to judge for ourselves, the claimants credibility for ourselves.

2.  Provide a venue where any Modern Arnis instructor could present his/her version and
understanding of Modern Arnis in an open environment without having to defer to any
organizational leadership such as the IMAF, Inc., The MoTTs, WMAA, WMAC, Marppio
IMAF, IMAFP or MA-80.  All of the leaders of the groups mentioned above were invited
to participate at the Modern Arnis Symposium; several leaders accepted the invitation,
then withdrew or simply did not show up.

3.  Provide a venue where people le could meet and discuss ideas, concepts and training
methods with one another, share experiences they had with Professor Presas, examine
similarities and differences in training and make new friendships, in part because they
shared a common interest - Modern Arnis.

4.  Present some 2nd generation Modern Arnis practitioners to the general public.  If the art is going to survive and prosper, we need to develop a 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation of
students who will grow into instructors.  If these new people are not developed and
groomed the art withers and dies.

The first 2 objectives were only partially achieved because a good number of the 'succession claimants' did not participate in the event.  Objectives 3 and 4 were fully achieved and with  just a couple of glitches nearly everyone who attended deemed to the Symposium to be a positive experience.  Several of the presenters actually taught some Balintawak variations rather than Modern Arnis, but since Balintawak is one of the foundation arts of Modern Arnis, those sessions were well within the spirit of the Symposium objectives, in particular, objective #3.

In 2005, Master Dan Anderson, organized the 2nd 'post-Professor' major Modern Arnis Training Camp and he held the event in Brevard, NC.  The major differences between the Brevard Camp and the Symposium were:

1.  In addition to me issuing invitations to specific people, instructors could and did volunteer to lead sessions.  All who requested an opportunity to instruct at the Symposium were accepted.
Master Anderson, specificly invited people to instruct at the Brevard Camp.  To the best of
my knowledge he did not accept volunteers or requests to be included as instructors at his camp.

2. The second major difference between the Symposium and the Brevard Camp was that there was no ”stand and deliver” aspect to Master Anderson's camp.  His objectives were different from mine and that is neither a plus or minus in my opinion.  He was working from a point in time that was 2 years after the Symposium and the leadership squabbling had subsided to a significant degree.  There was no reason for him to follow in my footsteps with regard to an open Modern Arnis Camp mission.

Master Anderson, has stated that his camp was not as successful as he envisioned that it would be.  As I told him privately, these things never go exactly as planned and there is nothing that the host can do except roll with the ”punches” and build in a backup plan to handle as many of the unexpected things as possible.  A number of instructors who promised that they would attend, did not keep there promise as happened at the Symposium.  That is within the nature of hosting events and to be expected.

In July of this year, there will be a 3rd “post-Professor” Modern Arnis Camp open to all.  It will be held in West Seneca, NY, just outside of Buffalo.  The camp host has deemed this camp as a Modern Arnis Family Reunion and Healing event.  All of the instructors have been specifily invited and again it appears that requests to teach are not likely to be accepted.  The invited instructors are: 
 
Dan Anderson MA 80
Bram Frank CSSD
Chuck Gauss IMAF
Tim Hartman WMAA
Dieter Knüttel DAV
Rick Manglinong IPMAF and WMAA
Rich Parsons Independent
Edessa Ramos IMAFP / CSSD
Kelly Worden NSI
Brian Zawilinski IMAF

As you can see, the instructors represent a cross section of the various Modern Arnis groups in the USA , Germany and Switzerland (Edessa Ramos, representing the IMAFP and CSSD) from her adopted country).  A 3rd camp and a 3rd theme, as one might expect since each camp was organized by a different person.
One of my private correspondents that I mentioned at the top of this article, has portrayed the upcoming 2011 camp as being the first major Modern Arnis gathering since the death of Professor Presas in 2001.  I absolutely disagree!  The FIRST major Modern Arnis Gathering after the death of Professor Presas as the Symposium in 2003.  As evidence of this one should note that 4 of the first 5 people listed on the 2011 event were participants at the Symposium.  Those 4 people are:

Dan Anderson MA 80
Bram Frank CSSD
Tim Hartman WMAA
Dieter Knüttel DAV

When 40% of the people who are scheduled to make presentations at the Reunion-Healing
Camp in 2011 are the very same people who presented at the 2003 Symposium, it is exceedingly difficult to deny a direct linkage between the 2 events.  When the 2003, 2005 and upcoming 2011 events share the very same concept of being open to several factions of the Modern Arnis community it is difficult to deny a linkage between the three events.  The linkage does not require that the 3 events share the same format, philosophies or organizers.  There is a linkage because all three events were and are open to all Modern Arnis stylist rather than being limited to members of a specific organization such as the WMAA, WMAC, IMAF or IMAF, Inc or IMAFP.  Each of these individual groups have held numerous summer training camps since the death of Professor Presas in 2001. 

They have held training sessions and promoted students without the involvement of other organizations as one might expect since the death of Professor Presas. There has been only 3 training camps organized around the idea of being open to most if not all members of the various Modern Arnis organizations and these three were the Symposium, Brevard and the Reunion, since the death of Professor Presas. 

The different structures of each individual open camp in no way invalidates the connection/linkage between the three events.  The Symposium, Brevard and Reunion Camps are further linked by the fact that a number of the same people declined the invitations to participate at the Symposium, Brevard and the Reunion-Healing camps, most notably, Remy Presas, Jr., Demetrio Presas, Mary Ann Presas and Jeff Delaney.  It should be noted that the first three people are the adult children of the late Professor and the 4th is the person who claims to be the appointed successor to Professor.  He broke ranks with the “Masters of TapiTapi” (aka MoTTs), who as a group claimed to be the collective leaders of the art after Professor's death.

Like it or not, and as noted above, there are direct  linkages and/or connections between the Modern Arnis Symposium, Brevard Modern Arnis Camp and the soon to be Modern Arnis Family Reunion-Healing Camp; however, there is no denying that the Modern Arnis Symposium was the first open to all training camp of the post-Professor era.  We can argue the relative merits regarding success or failure of each event, but it is not possible to proclaim one event as being better than another because each camp had a very different agenda as well as organizer-host.  The camps are linked/connected but there is not a linear progression between them with each camp leading directly to another.

Personally, I want to extend, in advance,  my best wishes to Tim Hartman, the host of the upcoming 2011 event and ALL of those folks who be participating as presenters or payees.  Modern Arnis practitioners need to come together and should come together  in order to advance the art as well as the memory of the late founder.  Given the fact that Professor Presas passed away 10 years there are people now learning as well as instructring the art, who never met or trained under the founder of the very art that they are practicing.

There is a very interesting prologue to the upcoming 2011 Reunion-Healing Camp.  Unlike the Symposium and Brevard Camps there has not been highly vocalized opposition to this camp as was faced by the two preceding camps in 2003 and 2005.  This vocal oppositions was insidious, incendiary, incredulous and incredibly self -serving with regard to one person in particular.  Yet there has been none of that kind of behavior invoked since the first public  announcement of the 2011 event.  So far as I can tell, Mr. Hartman has not had to deal with the likes of “Bloodwood”, “Arnis Princess” and “Red Blade” yakking and yammering about the supposed shortcomings the events and camp hosts.  Those folks and several others were quite persistant in their opposition to the Symposium and Brevard.  Given the difference in time and tone between then and now Mr. Hartman has been provided with a smoother run-up to his program than Dan and myself  experienced before our camps were held.  

Perhaps “enough time” has now passed since Professor Presas' death for most people to accept that reality, move on with their lives and they can now envision working on the preservation and new growth within art without Professor's direct presence.  Perhaps enough people are of the opinion that 10 years has passed since Professor's demise and the “right person” is organizing the 2011 event.  Such was not the case in 2003 or 2005 when myself and later Master Dan Anderson organized our respective programs.  It was stated by a number of people associated with a particular organizational leader that Dan and I had organized our events “too soon” after Professor's passing, nor were we the “right person(s)” to  hosting those events.  Yet, in reality, no one else had attempted to organize a Modern Arnis event of the kind that Dan and myself had done. 

There has been a 6 year gap between Dan's Brevard Camp and the upcoming Reunion-Healing event of 2011.  It seems to me that the negative nay-sayers were reluctant to stand up and deliver a product as we had done, but they quite willing to denounce and demean others who were willing take chances on and for Modern Arnis.

No matter the outcome of the 2011 event, in the final analysis, it is merely the 3rd attempt to produce and host an allegedly open-to-all Modern Arnis event since the passing of the founder and Grand Master Remy A. Presas.  Dan Anderson, organized and hosted the 2nd camp and I held the 1st Modern Arnis Camp aimed at bringing people together to talk, train and share ideas with one another.  Our events reached across the internal Modern Arnis divisions/organizations.

There can only be one first.  The Symposium was the first 'post-Professor' Modern Arnis Camp that sought to bridge some of the internal-internecine differences within the larger community of Modern Arnis practitioners.  There can only be one first and the Symposium was that first event of it's type within Modern Arnis.  Some are going to try to deny that reality in one way or another, but then some people need to belittle, demean and deny the contributions of others in order to appear more important than they really are within the Modern Arnis community.

Respectfully yours,

Jerome Barber,
Mataw Guro and Grand Master,
Independent Escrima-Kenpo-Arnis Associates
Hamburg, NY
April 11, 2011