Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

Much has been made of the role of play in traditional Thai pedagogy. Instead of more rigidly define skills taught mechanically, with precision, a great deal of Muay Thai in Thailand is developed in group experiences, through play and imitation. I've written about this a bit in these two articles: 1. The Slow Cook versus the Hack – Thailand Muay Thai Development 2. Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training And relatedly, Sylvie and I have talked about flow state in our Muay Thai Bones podcast, episode #2 This post is about metastable states, and the wobble. You can read the more complete quote from an essay on Simondon, sited at the bottom of this post, but this section below presents a beautifully simple illustration of what a metastable state is. A wobbling bowling pin. It is nether falling, nor stably at rest. It is neither, and in a sense, both. The thread linked at bottom is about Brain Criticality, and the theory that the human brain pursues and exists upon a line that rides between phases, a line of criticality, which is not that different than the metastability of a bowling pin mid-wobble. And, while a bowling pin will not wobble any important length of time, a living system, the human brain, may have evolved to ride on this line of wobble. This is when we get to deeper philosophical ideas, and more practical ideas in skill development. A reason why a system might want to ride the wobble, and not lay in an energy state of stability is that a sunken state of rigidity cannot take in events outside of its structure and framework. A system that has wobble can more readily incorporate unanticipated information, is more readily able to adapt. Buddhism tells us that life is suffering, and that nothing can stay what it is. Everything is in a line of decay. What is this other than the wobble of existence? The critical line of dissolution. The legendary Thai 19th century monk Somdet Doh likened living to falling from a very tall tree. If theories about brain criticality are correct, no matter how simplified you make your life, or complex, the brain will find a critical line in it, like the surfer's line in a wave. I suspect that this is the reason for so much simplification in Buddhistic practices of meditation. They simply experience, strip it down to such bare elements, in order to expose the Nature of that wave, the way the brain will find that line, that wobble. When life (and experience) becomes much more complex, it's much easier to blame (or credit) our states on dramatic moments or events...but, the same line of criticality is likely at work, we're taking the same line on the same kind of wave. This could mean in a very interesting way, that the ascension in fighting skill is a form of meditation. Meaning, it's about seeking that line, the surfer's line, on a narrowly defined wave, a wave that triggers fear, adrenaline, flight, amygdala, shame and pride, drawing on our baser instincts and social relations. The practice is full of techniques, practices, but ultimately what is being sought in that line of criticality. Its for this reason that while the training of specifically defined, and mechanically correct skill-sets (in drills) could very well be advantageous, this isn't really the practice of what elite fighting is. It's not about being able to perform memorized patterns under great stress. Ultimately, it's about finding that line of criticality, a line that embraces the wobble, the way that a fighter can be both stably unstable, such that it can be open to a great variety of information. This is something Sylvie and I talk about as "growing eyes". You cannot grow eyes without seeking the wobble, in your training. Because its about hunting the wobble, gaining a feeling for it, there must be a degree of uncertainty, and in fact often a very high degree of uncertainty...sometimes the bowling pin will fall. The shorthand for this is play. In this way we gain access, perhaps, to the artistic line that combat fighting realistically presents, and why we thrill when we see fighters find it.

We live in Pattaya which has a pretty different weather pattern than Bangkok, despite being only 2 hrs away. It's on the sea. Maybe someone living or experienced in training Bangkok can answer?

I suspect that this isn't a conceptual thing, a failure of communication, but rather a feeling thing. It takes time to feel comfortable with contact. An idea might be to create more acclimation friendly experiences to start out with? You can explain to them why closer is better, but until they feel it it won't be real. You can for instance modify the drills to include light punches on the arms, instead of the head, where the point is to actually feel (and give) the contact. Just developing a touch, touch, touch experience might open the door to more comfort.

A question on Reddit had me compiling a list of fighters or krus in the Muay Thai Library that had a shorter man's style. Here is a preliminary list for everyone: In the Muay Thai Library these are shorter fighters who fought taller opponents, or krus that taught a short man's style. Many of these are legends of the sport. Many of these are pressuring Muay Maat (punch-heavy) fighters. As a shorter fighter it is often advantageous to collapse the pocket, sometimes develop a low kick game: Arjan Metprik (kru of the very tough short FOTY Thanonchai): https://www.patreon.com/posts/48810277 Chatchanoi https://www.patreon.com/posts/57425804 Morakot: https://www.patreon.com/posts/47524832 Pairojnoi: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43891886 Samransak: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38992145 Rambaa: 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37838229, 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/26699042, 3: https://www.patreon.com/posts/13625213 Hippy: 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hippy-singmanee-7145938, 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/14697690 Chamuakphet: 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34875441, 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/22159245 Kongsamut: https://www.patreon.com/posts/kongsamut-sor-76-20147137 Kongtoranee: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18090011 Lakhin: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32055712 Samson: 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31628485, 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/samson-isaan-art-19485162 You'll see in a lot of these fighters they use a lot of weapons, attacking high and low, and try not to stand at distance. A good place to start might be someone like Kongsamut, or if more advanced, someone like Chamuakphet. and tons of Karuhat links here. He fought way up, though he is a very difficult fighter to emulate: https://8limbsus.com/muay-thai-forum/topic/1061-is-there-a-way-to-view-all-videos-by-a-trainer-all-of-karuhats-sessions/

The new Karuhat shorts we made are pretty incredible. There's something about them when they are right there in front of you that just is a bit electric, like how he is. In celebration of him, and these new shorts, we're giving away a pair of these. All you have to do to enter is write on this thread what is about Karuhat which makes him like no other fighter. You can writing anything from a breakdown of his fighting style, his techniques, to how he makes you feel as a fan of his muay, or what he means to you. If you follow Sylvie and me you know he means a great deal to us. Anything that substantively expresses or explains his specialness. Please only enter if you are a fan of his. There may be more than one prize offered, but first place goes to the answer Sylvie and I find the best or most interesting. We'll run this give away for about a week. Forums aren't too popular, so there will probably be very few entries, so you'll likely have a pretty good chance to win the shorts! This is in celebration of those who support our forum and longer forms of thoughtful communication. You don't to be fancy in your answer, just sincere and thoughtful. If you are new to the forum your first post may be automatically held for moderation due to anti-spam, nothing to worry about. The shorts are pretty amazing, you can find them here. 100% of the earned profits go to support him, so if you want to buy them in support please do! Below is a quick video of the shorts, followed by some photographs. If you don't know Karuhat yet, you can find all the links to video documentation we've done of him. He is very likely the most documented Golden Age Muay Thai fighter of Thailand, thanks to the support of the Muay Thai Library Project. You can find those links here: And, as always, I'll drop the Muay Thai Scholar footwork edit as a key introduction for those who don't know him. I've watched this thing 100x:

It's a very small, sweet set up. Yodwicha is one of the best fighters in the world and he's there, and an excellent teacher. He has lots of experience with helping westerners from his days up at Kem's gym. It will not be crowded, and the krus/padmen should be invested. Yodwicha's wife who runs the gym is really sweet, and speaks English, so in a small gym that's a big plus. The only question is the location which isn't in the center of BKK. If you end up there let me know how it goes, I'd love to know.

Parallel Thought This 4 minute quick edit below, of how Samart dealt with the Muay Khao invasion of the Fight Space by Namphon is a bit related to the above. Rather than illustrating the Fight Space aesthetically, it brings out a technical solution to the pressuring of the Fight Space, because Samart often liked to control the fight space with distance. You can watch the full 30 minute edit and discussion of the technical solution Samart used here: Samart's Attack and Control of the Groin vs Namphon | Kevin's Notes (30 min)

One of the most interesting things that has developed through all our filming and review of the styles of legends of the sport, studying tape of their actual fights, and watching them correct Sylvie in live time, has been a sensitivity toward what I call the Fight Space. It feels like a very productive concept when thinking about fighting styles and energies, an order quite different than what often gets much more attention: techniques. The Fight Space for me is an imaginary bubble which exists between opponents, sometimes roughly equivalent to "the pocket", but not always. It's a kind of psychic space - without getting too woo about it - in that a lot of what fighting is about is body mapping, and the virtual way we project our body into the forward space, in the view of physical and emotional threat. A great deal of time is spent perfecting or regulating strikes (techniques), but sometimes less focus is on the Fight Space itself, and the fighter's relationship to it. If we are talking about the highest levels of Thailand's Muay Thai - mostly drawn from the Golden Age - what distinguishes that excellence is how those fighters engaged with the Fight Space. It's not just that their techniques may have been different, the myriad of ways, the styles of Fight Space engagement were special. And styles produced different approaches to the Fight Space. A femeu fighter like Samart may choose to control the Fight Space with distance, and lance it with punctuated attacks, a pressure fighter like Samson Isaan might smother and squeeze the fight space, cutting through it, while it in with blows, a fighter like Karuhat might press against it defensively, and them melt and liquefy himself along its edges, as if he's balancing an invisible yoga ball. Many fighting styles can be characterized by how they engage with and use the Fight Space. How long they stay in it, how they manipulate it, or leverage it. In addition to these questions, how one trains in Muay Thai also can create lots of Fight Space habits. These are invisible comfort zones that we practice in relation to learned techniques and fight actions. Sylvie and I have talked about before how lots and lots of padwork can create habits of padwork spacing, which not only groove comfort levels of specific spatial effectiveness, but also can make you quite vulnerable to changes in that space. The same thing can occur with lots of drilling with regular partners. We think about how techniques are being practiced, but we do not often think about how what is really being rehearsed are fixed distances and a narrow experience of Fight Space. Because a great deal of fighting is about engaging the Fight Space, this can leave a very skilled fighter vulnerable. All this is to say, I think a lot about Fight Space, and it's pretty much how I watch fights. It's also how I think about Sylvie's development as a fighter. It's one reason why we've moved away from heavy padwork and into much more sparring, because sparring - if you have the right partners - presents many more Fight Space problem solving. Part of this had been pretty regular sparring with Yodkhupon for the last year. He's not ideal in that he's about 12 kgs bigger than Sylvie, but he does have Golden Age rhythms, which means, he poses Golden Age Fight Space puzzles. What I'm really talking about here though is a different way of looking at Fight Space that involves watching sparring rounds in a different way. The video below shows this. The video is degraded through high contrast, almost to an abstraction level, and speed WAY up. The idea is to zoom out, away from any technique choices, and notice patterns within the basic movements and responses. In a certain regard, it shows the Fight Space (as the constant between opponents), and how a fighter is relating to it. This is just experimental, but it is really interesting. As a matter of this case what was happening is that we noticed that Sylvie was developing a habit of jumping out after landing strikes. You CAN do this, but it presents a very different narrative and relationship to the fight space. It leads to more point fighting. It has been kind of an unconscious habit, because he's just so big, and it's not altogether bad. In fact, its good to know if this is what is happening. In the video below we have two compressed "give ground after scoring" rounds. The next 3 rounds were the next day when Sylvie committed herself to NOT giving ground after landing. This goes more in the Muay Khao style of using pressure on the Fight Space as tool against your opponent, an invisible tool. We've talked a lot about this quality of Muay Khao fighting, you can check out our analogies with Persistence Hunting in this article here: Muay Thai Aesthetics, Keto, Persistence Hunting and the Shape of Time. Just the same, in this example, I believe you can see the difference in the 3 final rounds, in terms of the Fight Space itself, as well as rhythms and energies. Neither of these energies and patterns (1st two rounds, last 3 rounds) are correct or wrong. Each requires a different skill set: If you are going to be scoring and retreating - in traditional Muay Thai - you need to be quick with defense and repositioning, read the fluctuations of the present score carefully, and be timely in your punctuated attacks. If you are going to be persistence hunting you need to develop fast eyes for close range counters, be more closed and intelligent in your short range weapons, and develop a nose for your opponent's fatigue and decay. But, you can see in this example that this kind of zoom-out on sparring gives a perspective where these things can be thought about and improved upon. Part of this as well, is about developing awareness of unconscious patterns of comfort and movement. If your fighting style is composed of lots of unconscious movement patterns you can be taken off your game quite significantly by simply being forced to move in ways that aren't in your groove. When this happens you can get a sense that "nothing was clicking" or that your opponent is moving in ways you can't anticipate, when in fact it's just a change in the Fight Space, and the unconscious ways you like to deal with it. In the video you'll see, for instance, Sylvie's circling left a lot. This is because we've found that she has an unconscious pattern to drift to the right, related to a bunch of less optimum positions. So...go Left is a thing for us. It makes your choices more conscious, and develops skill sets and perceptions in areas of the Fight Space map that would be otherwise less explored. The change in the rounds below which involves holding ground after a score is the same sort of thing. A retreat on score was growing as an unconscious habit, so consciously mapping the "stand your ground" after strikes that land is about becoming more conscious, more present. In the video you can see the difference in energy, and in the way that Sylvie is contesting the Fight Space itself. Generally, this is pretty good because she's a Muay Khao clinch fighter, even though she's been broadening her vocabulary and style a great deal over the last year. This is about investigating your own style, becoming aware of the shape of you as a fighting artist. These are things that you can of course see in real time, if looking for them. The sped up, contrast abstracted video is just an additional tool in how to aesthetically present and experience them as a viewer. Conceptual knowing only go so far.

An interesting gym to look into is Yodwicha's gym. It's located a bit further out from the center, but it's small and you'd get good attention. We sent someone that way a few months ago and they seemed to be really enjoy their time: Sylvie's walk around: I'd just start with regular training and see how you can handle it physically and mentally, and then add in privates if it seemed like it is something you'd like, just playing it by ear. No need to plan that way in advance on this question.

Adding to the concept family that could support Brain Criticality is the metaphysics of Simondon, a largely forgotten influence on the Philosopher Deleuze. His appeal to Dephasing and Metastability to understand how things become individuated in the world matches up with much that has been discussed in this thread. A great overview article is here: Gilbert Simondon An Excerpt:

The above photo is of Arjan Yai, instructing during a filming of a coming Muay Thai Library session. The photos that follow are also part of that photo series. What I'm interested in this post is the way shallow depth of field, and also lens "compression" (I know it's not a real thing) can be used in situational Muay Thai and other sports photography, to bring out the psychology of what is happening, and less the structure of a scene. In the above photo I'm struck by just how sculptural the face becomes, as the focus falls off, how the eyes and some features come forward, and dominant, expressing the emotional state of Arjan Yai. He's a proud man, speaks from authority, and somehow facially those aspects kind of float in the space in a really interesting and powerful way. Below are other photos from the series, you can see how the depth of field plays out in those scenarios, what may be communicated. Of course shallow depth of field means many more misses than hits when photographing, which makes captures during sport contexts more precarious, but I think something important is possible in this. You can see my photo essays, that are also examining this use of shallow depth of field here: Muaynoir Behance.

Just some associative writing on the subject of poetry, brought on by @Tyler from Florida's thoughts on poetry and meter. Last week we were filming with Chatchainoi, a fighter called The Man of Stone in his day - you can see my photo essay on him here - and there were several moments when he would interrupt training and make corrections which really seemed musical. This in the sense, he objected to the rhythms and beats that Sylvie was making, and in fact at one point started making the fight music sounds, on a pretty quick tempo, to indicate what he was teaching. Get on this rhythm. Now, there are a lot of rhythms in Muay Thai, and many ways of fighting within them, off of them, but Chatchainoi has what I suspect is a very old rhythm. He was a very small fighter who pressed his opponents, had heavy hands and knees, and was always in the fight space. He had been with the Dejrat Gym since the 1990s, you can see him pointing to his photo here: His trainer was Arjan Surat who still is the owner of the gym, now at the age of 70, and they teach a very old Muay that they trace back to Arjan Surat's Arjan, a Muay Chaiya fighter. They don't "teach" Muay Chaiya (a Southern Style of Muay Boran), but somehow the dark root of their Muay, the Muay of the gym, goes down into that earth, still training very good stadium fighters. It's a hard, defensive, pressing style. All this is to say, Chatchainoi had a rhythm for fighting in his mind, unlike many other Thai trainers. You'll see this in the Muay Thai Library session if you watch it, but there is a point where Sylvie and he do a kind of leg kick battler in sparring, and he was very demonstrative in objecting to how Sylvie was "getting him back". She was getting the point back, but in completely the wrong way. I've been in all these MTL sessions, and around lots of high level Muay Thai, and even though I was there I couldn't quite feel what he was talking about. Sylvie felt it. What this brings back to my mind was back when I had a great passion for Greek Tragedy, and taught myself Ancient Greek, and begun translating the great tragetists. This is all metered poetry. And there are ostensibly 3 great authors. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. When you read Sophocles in the Greek you are just almost awestruck by the complexity of the writing. He makes full use of the twists and delays that are possible in Greek, and has an incredible dexterity in his language. It's really something. But, for me, when I read Aeschylus, thought to be less sophisticated, less evolved than Sophocles by many critics, his language was just earth-shaking. It has a stoniness, and oldness, a rigid power that Sophocles's flowing ribbons and wordplay just does not. It's closer to the earth. It feels like its of a time when a tragic play was also a rite, a power. This is what I felt when watching Chatchainoi's rhythm, the one in his heart that he insisted on. It was older. It did not have the dexterity or sophistication of perhaps another fighter, and I'm pretty sure he was criticized as "low IQ" for how many strikes he purposively took back in the day (a common thing to say about tough, derning fighters), but what I learned in filming that session was that his rhythm, his feeling for what is right and proper poetry as a fighter had structure, a structure of heart and sinew that you learned and conditioned. And, it was not the same as that Arjan Surat had, who trained him. It was his own. But the family of the techniques of that gym were Aeschylean.

Another very interesting fine art parallel, beyond poetry, is that of dance. In this hour conversation I talked with Thais about the ways in which Thailand's Muay Thai sheds light on dance, and even more the case, how dance helps us see into western pursuits of Muay Thai, the development of styles, the role of techniques, pedagogy, and projects of expression.

I kind of marvel at this paragraph, so much is in there. I love the references to the iambic beats, and the heartbeats. There is inner rhythm - its not just rocking back and forth, the rock sets the metronome so that every variation can ribbon off from that. Like thinking music is just a baseline. But, if you don't learn these rhythms, or even learn to look for the feet of a poem, its true, it just looks like stuff. Maybe cool stuff, oddly beautiful or styled, but its intricate, sophisticated manipulation of an opponent, a stage. You are right, so much as to be known to even be able to read what is going on. Not just technical facts, but cultural facts. The why of retreat. The why of taking an extra measure. Arts of course can always risk becoming too courtly, riding towards inefficacy, playing toward pure aesthetic, those who understand codes. But somehow - though BKK point fighting can be a thing - Muay Thai over the decades has avoided it, enriching itself from constant influx from the minor literatures of rural parlance, dialects of fighting styles far from any palace, and the fact fights are engaged in such full-contact brutality, that works to correct with consequence anything too stylized, too abstract. Muay Thai has always had this highly tensioned dialectic between BKK cosmopolitan sophistication and up-country / down-country labor and creation, which makes it unique as a historical document, and incredibly rich as a fighting knowledge. I think you are very right though about the anxiety of influence, because when you are touching Muay Thai proper, you are actually reaching across and touching a whole culture, or an array of subcultures. And when you change Muay Thai, you are changing the fabric of something more than a sport.

Some additional background on Sirichai. Lots of people know him from our Muay Thai Library session with him teaching Long Clinch, a really unique use of a clinch technique that is often only transitory. Below is the free trailer clip: You can watch the full hour with him in the Muay Thai Library here, it's one of the best and most interesting clinch sessions in the entire Library: As a sidenote, I strongly suspect that his unorthodox Long Clinch use, which involves a low head, was eventually shunned by his first BKK stadia gym Tor. Pran49. If you lose doing unorthodox things in the stadia it can make the gamblers angry. Lots of experimental techniques and approaches get pruned by this fear of angering the gamblers. From what I recall they tried to make him more of a puncher towards the end. Because Kru Diesel has his own system, is famous for locking fighters, and Sirichai has a very good lock since he was young, I suspect we won't be seeing much Long Clinch from him now. That being said, we are thankful for being able to document his Long Clinch technique, and even writing an article about it and editing together this film study of his use of it through the first years: you can read that article on his Long Clinch here As Sylvie says, we've known Sirichai for such a long time. He was incredibly self-driven, disciplined and quiet. If you want to know just what he was like as a fighter, we even filmed these two rounds of him destroying someone in the clinch at a festival fight 8 years ago. As you watch his fights today you can stare back at the skills and techniques he used back then, and see a continuity. And, now that he has one of the great Muay Khao krus of Thailand, we can also see what Kru Diesel's hand can do with such a diligent fighter, that already has a strong foundation. Sometimes fighters just have to find the right trainer to grow their possibilities. Here he is clinch wrecking 8 years ago: We filmed with Kru Diesel and with Sirichai for an upcoming Library session only a few weeks ago. While there Sylvie interviewed Sirichai about his upcoming first fight. It gives a glimpse into what he is like as a person.

Above are cover photos for six of my photo essays that are now on Behance. You can see my profile and them here. I've written a Twitter thread on why I made this move to Behance, and what its taught me as a photographer, you can read that thread unrolled here (quick screenshot below). It tells a bit of my story of how my Instagram account just completely vanished one day, with no recourse or even a real explanation, something that gave me to try Behance, and Adobe sharing platform for artists. My experience with Behance opened up larger thoughts about photography in the digital age. One of the great challenges of a photographer, whose work is essentially to freeze time, lock it up in a frame, is that increasingly the life of the work then depends on putting that frozen chunk of Time into a faster and faster moving stream. Perhaps that was always the case, if we thinking about the stream of capital, investment and flows of photography commerce, but the work itself once lived, presented, in isolated places. In books, or in galleries and shows if fortunate. The frozen moment lived selected out, in a fixed place, a viewing context. Sometimes this was part of stories being told, in a magazine article, flipped between pages, or in a Newspaper, but the frame's relationship to stasis, a fundamental aspect of what Photography is, felt primary. With social media stream becoming a fundamental dissemination and viewing experience this relationship to stasis has changed. And it becomes a real challenge to give your selected out stills a place withing the living stream. Right now Behance's storyboad-like projects are really interesting. Not so much as final homes, but in a way the creation of your own gallery, which could become a dialogue in editing. A secondary path I've experimented with is using video to then create a more personalized stream, in the sense of recording a viewing experience in Behance. You can see one of this shorts here. Tempo and timing is introduced into the presentation, without submitting the images to the rushing waters of a social media platform, which is pretty counterproductive aesthetically: It feels as if Photographers will need to creatively engage digital possibilities in order to create the kinds of spaces, the kinds of relationships to stasis, that are necessary for the character of their craft. We need to find boxed frames and small streamed experiences which bring out the stasis we create. I ran into this very interesting one called Spatial on the Apple app store. It's a digital gallery I believe oriented toward NFTs, but open to non-NFT work. It recreates the viewer experience of a gallery, remarkably delivering the concrete aspects of a digital version of art (change of angle, atmospherics, changes in light, etc) in a virtual way. Here we can see how stasis and flow (and viewer agency) can work together. A screenshot of Tweets of a digital artist I follow: For photographers of action, like fight action, this kind of kinetic representation makes even more sense, as the images are displayed in a volume and the viewer is given and almost bodily agency over the view. Also, the richness of increasing powers of resolution that are coming to photography are given a space to breathe, instead of compressed into a tiny square. The aesthetics of size are embraced, which matters a great deal when even thinking about the sale of photography and it's place in personal and public spaces. Because photographers freeze time, how people experience photographs in relationship to Time becomes of paramount importance to just what photography is.

the illustration above is of Karuhat done by graphic artist Luis Pinto, layered over a Van Gogh At bottom of this post is a segment from a ways back where Sylvie and I touched on some thinking I've had that placed Muay Thai, the art of Muay Thai, as one of the great Art Forms of our time. After reading this you can see the live thinking between the both of us on this. I for some time have tried to position Thailand's Muay Thai - and the all art forms of combat sports as well - in the context of other traditional fine art forms such a poetry, painting, dance, fiction, etc. The two bookends that we extemporaneously covered in the video below were the idea that Muay Thai (and full contact fighting arts), unlike almost all the others, is done under great duress. I think dance can be considered to be under something of intensity which is akin to duress, and we could talk about that as a special case, but the fighting arts, in so far they are arts, involve duress and bodily fear as the material, the paint and canvas, with which they paint. There is something quite special about this, I believe. The fighting arts are heroically expressing themselves at, in and on what can be thought of as the most base, or perhaps animal, in what is human. This canvas and paint is unique. The other bookend that is brought up below is that the art form of something like Thailand's Muay Thai, and maybe western boxing of the past when it was more composed of communities, is a Way of Life. Which means that it expresses something more than techniques, or excellence. It comes out of lives, values and culture, in a weave that makes it incredibly rich. Rich in an artistic way. I compare it to something like Fishing, which may be considered a craft, which also traditionally is a body of practices and techniques which are embedded in a Way of Life which might express the lives of an entire village. I'm purposely blurring the lines of craft and art here, largely because "art" usually resides in the hands of the privileged, and as we move along the spectrum towards craft we encounter the knowledge and practices of a people. How much of qualifies as Art is part of the question as to whether Muay Thai is a great Art Form, or even an Art Form at all. Given enough historical perspective individual art is understood to be an expression of a people in a historical time, such as the art of the Incas, the tragedies of the Greeks, the Impressionism of late 19th century Europe. Core to this perspective is raising an appreciation for what combat sports is, the position they have within a society, and laying some claim to the importance of the aesthetics of the combat sport performance. This dimension of fight aesthetics is what elevates fighting to an Art in the societal sense, I'd suggest, in the same way that painting or poetry can possess inherent expressive value, to the culture itself. This means that western boxing, the world's MMA and other combat sports have a claim to artistic value, even though they also ride hard the lines of commerce, popular culture and arguably the role of sheer spectacle, in the "bread and circuses" sense - see Noam Chomsky for that perspective. Perhaps like cinema, the fighting arts in sport operate between entertainment and art, which isn't to deny film or fighting its real value as an Art itself. This post just wanted to spin out some of those developing ideas, and in thinking about Thailand's Muay Thai explain why I believe it may be the greatest art form in the world. This isn't to say that it is better than poetry, or dance...or better than western boxing or Karate, but rather in a specific way see all the differing threads that it brings together into a single rope, that make of it something that is extraordinarily rich. That we raise up the importance of fighting arts themselves along with this discussion is also a benefit. To start with, one thing that arguably separates out Thailand's Muay Thai are the firm aesthetic demands that it places on scoring. For some this might make Muay Thai somewhat unreal as a fighting sport, because it's not all about the damage - though it clearly is one of the more violent combat sports on the planet, its full-rules version not even legal in many countries. Muay Thai has a unique combination of very visible violence, but also strong aesthetic guidelines. Things like fighter posture, displays of balance, self-control figure heavily on the scorecard, as well as the ability to express oneself narratively throughout the 5 rounds - narrative itself is the real of many of the fine arts (for more on narrative time in Thailand's Muay Thai see: The 6 Core Aspects of Muay Thai). Fighting in Thailand is expressly, even in terms of score, storytelling. (I believe fighting is also storytelling in other combat sports, in terms of audience appreciation, but this valuation is not expressly embedded in scoring criteria). Muay Thai advocates might say that these aesthetic principles in scoring are actually encoded guidelines for real fighting prowess, so that if you excel in balance, posture, artful dominance, narrative, you become a very effective fighter in the raw sense, but, it is really that there is a strong aesthetic demand that allows Thailand's Muay Thai to ascend up the pyramid of combat sports, as an Art. It is, or has a strong artistic aspect. And if it has a differential of artistic quality from some combat sports, it also distinguishes itself from more "traditional martial arts" that went through long periods of development apart from large volume full contacting fighting, in the hands of masters or teachers who perhaps somewhat aesthetically carved & preserved fighting skills. Thailand's Muay Thai exists pretty much baby bear between let's say western boxing and 1980 Korea's TKD. The product of 100,000s of full contact fights - determining its grounded efficacy - while maintaining an expression of the culture and the people out of which it has sprung, purposely. It is Buddhistic and artistic, but also it is quite reality tested, made from the lab of full-contact physically clashing, highly trained bodies. It's important to understand because people in combat sports, and traditional martial arts like to argue about which fighting form is superior, in some kind of abstract, almost technical way, as if you could take a blank fighter in art x, and a blank fighter in art y and come out with which art is better. Aside from that being not very close to how real fighting knowledge works, this is not what this is about. And, this is not about badassness, or technical proficiency. Nope. It's thinking about the Art value of Muay Thai, and other fighting sports and arts in general. And in terms of Thailand's Muay Thai, thinking about all the ways that information, distinction, criteria, belief, aesthetic ambition and experience come to be expressed through it, in real world fighting stages. Like other arts, fighting arts are staged. In a way, it's about all the influences of value that are poured into the expression of Thailand's Muay Thai, let's say over the last 100 years of its modernity. Its how much variation and richness, and portrayed human efficacy can be packed into a fighting art and its real world practice, so that we value it artfully, such that a comparison with the Fine Arts becomes interesting. In my mind, in the modern era, the West's culture of boxing say between the 1930s and 1980s is the closest thing I think of, a performed knowledge and rite, flowing out of specific communities & micro-economies that reached very high levels of skilled excellence, somewhat in parallel to Thailand's Muay Thai. The main difference between the two, in terms of Art Form evaluation, is perhaps the aesthetic dimension of Thailand's scoring criteria, the way that its Muay Thai reaches deeper into performance as art, explicitly, though it would be very interesting to talk about the evolving, often unstated aesthetic demands of boxing throughout its history in the West. There is a deeper dimension of the argument towards an Art, which I've begun talking about in this running short essay series (just below), which attempts to uncover some of the deeper cultural reasons why combat sports themselves carry so much meaning in a culture. They are not just "bread and circuses", but following the thinking of the sociologist René Girard - wikpedia here - who has studied the logic of Sacrifice and victim, they may serve a powerful purpose in equalizing and stabilizing a society or subculture. Much as older rights of sacrifice may have purged a community of inherent violence, combat arts that necessarily produce losers may very well be fulfilling a much older human sociological need. You can read into that possibility as it applies to Thailand's Muay Thai in my unfinished series here: This is explicitly not to say that Thailand's Muay Thai alone might fulfill this role, in fact almost any sporting event that produces losers (and winners) might be performing this role. But, it is to add importance to the kinds of things that are being expressed by the fighter/artist in the ring, an importance that the writers of history gift to the Fine Arts of the academies. Art is supposed to be transformative, expressive and illuminating, with roots into human rite and ritual. It may very well be that combat sports indeed are creating some of these same values, but perhaps in an older way. If we add the aesthetic dimensions that Thailand's Muay Thai folds back in, we can see the unique nexus of kinds value that may be braided. It is the very agonistic nature of the performance, the way that adrenaline, blood, fear, Amygdala, technique, self-possession, Buddhism, pain, recovery and respect mix that make of this art and sport at the very least a spectacular art. It's woven of extremely diverse strains of what makes us human, from the very lowest to the most high. And, as mentioned up top, it is not a rarefied art held by "masters". It exists in a living sense in households, community centers, in family relations, in circles and roots of micro-economies, a thick web of a turf of Life, perhaps how fishing or sailing as an art and craft might inhabit a coastal peoples for a century, expressing them. Filled with practical, hard-won knowledge, and also meaningfully imbued practices, the things that cut off the "artist" in the prototypical sense, are re-grounded in the lives of people, and all their beliefs. It's true. The Muay Thai of Thailand is changing. It could be said that the fabric of which it is woven is unraveling, however slowly or quickly we may not be able to tell, but it is still there before us right now, a certain kind of inheritance. It's the inheritance of a people, the Thai people, but it also I believe the inheritance of the world, because so much of Muay Thai has involved deep international influences, starting with Western Boxing and to a lesser degree Judo at the birth of its modernity in the 1920s. For a 100 years this art form has been catching the strands of the world's fighting arts and woven them into the tapestry, as well. It's okay if it's not acknowledge as the greatest Art Form in the World, but I do want the very idea of Art Form to be expanded to include the fighting arts, and for aesthetic concerns in a fighting sport to gain some weight when we think of the value of what is being done. It may mean something to us to understand that the fighting arts are performing something primally important to us, and that they are doing it both artfully and brutally. The Muay Thai Bones segment:

We could maybe do that. We have several new things in the pipeline, but its a possibility once we get those out. Thanks for the suggestion.

I don't completely understand the question, can you elaborate a bit?

Possibly another chapter in this evolving discussion of gym owners rights, today Teerawat Chukorn head of Kiatkhamthorn Gym in Bangkok whose fighter is Kongklai AnnyMuayThai Gym, wrote about people trying to book his top fighter for promotions without contacting him, which in Thailand is way out of bounds. One could guess that these are non-Thai promotions? A suspicion is that what may be driving this is a proposed fight between Captain (the ONE Champion) and Kongklai (who is expected to become a Thai Fight tournament champion), basically pitting the two biggest Entertainment (style) Muay Thai champions against each other. His post is basically WE take care of the fighter, we have the contract, we pay all the expenses, you contact us! This may relate a little bit to the OP in the sense that Entertainment Muay Thai may be exerting pressure upon the traditional structures of authority and control. https://web.facebook.com/keatkhamtorn/posts/5014932155203263 This seems like something that would not normally have to be said, let along posted on Facebook about, but it does seem that Entertainment Muay Thai is abutting the traditional power structures in some way.

Sylvie said she thought he was maybe 18-20? We really don't know the legal structure of prosecution of cases like these, but because jail is a possibility it does read as a criminal matter. Usually if I understand it, aside from legal (jail/fine) issues, a fighter is often banned from the entire BKK stadia circuit.

For even more context on this, Sia Boat is kind of the big next generation promoter and gym owner of today's Muay Thai. He's been very active trying to foster a new unity image of the sport, and this move to embrace Fahwanmai, who maybe typified what many, broadly in the country may feel is wrong with Muay Thai, the nakleng, the gambler. By taking Fahwanmai under his wing he was symbolically offering refuge to a class of people who had been under great scrutiny ever since the Muay Thai community took the huge hit of a blame for the initial COVID cluster (which centered on Lumpinee stadium). Lumpinee shut down, the military also permanently closed two important uncountry stadia under the auspices of ridding its of gambling influence, and the new Lumpinee promotions are taking very stark - but perhaps unsuccessful? - stances against gambling, at this point even barring cell phones on the grounds. It's enough to say that Sia Boat's bold, symbolic move to "save" Fahwanmai took a terrible turn with this thrown fight. Yes, pretty much everyone agrees that gamblers have too much influence on fights, able to move the odds during the fight, and nearly force particular wins and loses, but, the act of gambling on fights is deeply woven into the culture and passion of Muay Thai. Sia Boat was seeking a way to embrace a possible future that includes the cohesive powers of gambling, while minimizing its very public abuse.

I really don't know how France tends to score Muay Thai fights, so I'm only guessing. But...France does seem to have probably the closest, longest heritage to traditional Muay Thai, so maybe they take pride in being more traditional? The one clue we might have is that the ref in the ring ran the fight VERY much like Golden Age fighting. More traditional than current day Bangkok stadium reffing. I really don't know though. We had a fight where the ref in the ring, and both fighters fought in a very traditional way, which was pretty surprising. I have no idea about the judges at ringside. I would say though, an org like the WMC can't really impose how judging is to be done. They can say how it is to be done, but people read with their eyes. I'm not really saying the scoring was right or wrong, given it was in the West. If you read my original post I tried to cover that. No, just like with a kick, the "open side" (the side and direction the belly button is pointing) is the higher scoring point. If you are in orthodox, if you take strikes coming from your right, they score higher. This is for strikes that are unblocked by the shins.

In traditional scoring narrative is one of the most important criteria. Yodwicha was ascending moving from 2, 3 and 4, and each round matters more than the last, with the exception of the 5th round. It's not points added up on a calculator. Also in clinch it matters more which side you land knees on (open side or closed side), and if you land with the point of the knee rather than with a slap of the knee. And yes, body language and what Thais call "ruup", which is your posture vs your opponent's posture, also matters. Traditionally, you can't just add strikes up. But, Vienot seemed to perfectly understand - AND fight - this fight from a traditionally score perspective. The 5th round was fought more or less exactly how it would be fought in Thailand. A 5th round in the West you'd find both fighters pressing hard trying to outscore the other, adding up strikes. In Thailand the fighter who has the proverbial lead retreats and defends his lead. The trailing fighter then advances, which is largely a public acknowledgement that he is behind on the score card. It is up to the advancing fighter to do something dramatic, or at least take a dominant score to reclaim the lead (depending on how big of a lead there is). This is exactly how both Yodwicha and Vienot fought, which placed the entire fight in the context of traditional scoring (which to me was kind of surprising, and admirable). This would mean that narrative really matters. And, given how the 5th round was fought, basically with Vienot conceding, you'd expect Yodwicha's camp to be shocked. This was, especially with how the last round was fought, what in Thailand Sylvie and I call "a close blowout". Once the fight plays out where it is clear and acknowledged by both parties WHO has the lead, and then nothing happens to change that, that's a blowout...because there is no question, but, the fight might also be closely fought throughout. It's like a largely close footrace, and then both runners both let up at the tape. It might have been close much of the race, but the let up shows that both runners know who has the lead, the one breaking the tape.

He doesn't have the title. By this description the title would be vacant. A fighter doesn't have an obligation to fight for an org he isn't happy with.