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These four video parts make up part 1 of my Conversation with Kelly Creegan. You can check out the blog post article for part 1 here. It's the the camera rolling as we sit and have a chat. The 2nd part of the Interview should be up next week. Kelly is a member of our forum here and it was great to finally meet her. She's been at Sitmonchai Gym for a while now, a quiet, family-like gym a couple of hours out of Bangkok, and is moving to Eminent Air in Bangkok later this summer. Kelly, sorry for that still on the 2nd video, YouTube just does what it wants!

Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Round 5 Caley looking fast and strong.

Girl Fight: A Muay Thai Story

Dana Hoey aka threeoaks has a video installation of Muay Thai sparring opening at Mass MoCA this weekend (5/23/2015). It's part of an exhibit called Artists' Choice: An Expanded Field of Photography. Another photo still of the exhibit: threeoaks casually mentioned this in the training and work thread and she private messaged me after I asked for more details. I was super excited to find out this museum is close to where I live so I can go see her installation in person. I asked threeoaks permission to start a thread and also checked with Emma and Sylvie find out their policy on promotion/self promotion of forum members and they both agreed that self promotion is a good thing.

I've written before about the troubles I've had with a kind of Style (the post takes a while to load, lots of GIFs), and being forced into a style that wasn't "me", or at least that I had a really hard time bringing forward. I just wasn't an evasive, tricky, or dodge-y person. It wasn't until I discovered that there was a different style, a forward, space-eating style that I was set more free. I remember the beginning of realizing this was something that Andy Thomson said: "There is not one Muay Thai, there are 1,000s. Each person has their own Muay Thai." The yesterday I wrote about the Things I'm Working On and a lot of them have to do with my style, and how to best bring it out. These things involve body punches, overhands, clinching hips in, taking space, not rushing. I wanted to post here because a lot of us feel like we want to measure up to "a" Muay Thai. We want to do it "right". There definitely are right and wrong ways to do things, but there is not the one way to do a particular thing. You don't need to be a fighter to think about style. What is your style, and what are you doing to pursue it?

Before I started getting to know the Thai culture, more specifically the Muay Thai culture I never knew why the Wai Khru was performed and what it even was. I even though it was a bit funny. After learning a LOT (mostly thanks to Sylvie's insightful posts on her blog about Thai culture) I know and understand the meaning of the Wai Khru. So this is a topic for those of you who train/had started training Muay Thai in the "West". I'd like to know when and where did you learn your Wai Khru in the Western gyms? Is it as important as in Thailand to perform it? Who taught you the Wai Khru and who initiated it (in other words: did someone said "now you will learn the Wai Khru" or was is you asking to learn it?) Who do you learn the Wai Khru from if your trainer doesn't want to teach you? Is it wrong to learn a Wai Khru from youtube? How long does a Wai Khru has to be in the West?

When I say this is an amazing Thai soap opera there has to be a qualifier. Thai soaps are notoriously unwatchable, at least for me. Full of huge Thai stereotypes, silliness, sound effects, and at times offensive forced sex (rape) scenes, big rambling drama, they really push the patience meter, even when in Thailand there may be nothing else on TV. We don't watch them. But for us we kept running into this one which seems brand new, and were shocked to see Muay Thai being portrayed as a central theme in the soap. When we found it on we watched for few minutes, if only as a kind of observer, to see what stereotypes would surround pop culture, soap portrayals of Muay Thai. It wasn't until we sat down and binge watched 3 episodes that we found all kinds of pleasure (and information) in this innocent soap. We actually found ourselves laughing, repeatedly, at the portrayals (that were meant to be funny), and the surrounding story lines, as best we could follow. The plots are not complicated, and even though I had the aid of Sylvie jumping in, I think I could follow them despite having almost zero Thai myself. Whether it would be worth it for you, I don't know. Our 3 years here may have softened my resistance to some of these portrayals, and made watching things in a language I don't understand enjoyable, but I found it both hilarious (slapstick style, and I'm not a fan of slapstick) and oddly illuminating. As far as I can tell the story follows Phet, a young man who is the lead in his family's Likay troop. Likay (lee-kay) is a traditional form of Thai Folk Theater (this Bangkok post article fills in some details). Phet, through circuitous events finds himself wanting to join a Muay Thai camp (all of this in Isaan?) which is run by several women. The most prominent female is Pim, who also seems to be the star fighter of the camp. The title of the soap is Likay - Matsang (Folk Theater - Directed Fist), and it balances a tension between Phet's traditional dance theater troop - and its attendant (effeminate) almost boy-band masculinity - and the Kai Muay which is run by women. The camp emphasizes female fighters to a surprising degree. The stereotypes abound, and much is being said about Thai masculinity, of course in endless silliness. Also, the portrayals of the camp, with the men all training in clean shirts and discordantly in white sneakers (is it transgressively low class to see men hitting bags topless?), create a kind of Muay Thai fantasy space, that is half a cleaned-up Bangkok upper middle class, and half low-class and provincial mash up. Muay Thai figureheads like Khaosai Galaxy and Somrak appear in it, and the adventures are off the charts mad cap at times - the razing camp shower scene, leading to a near naked run through the camp at night has to be seen to be laughed at. But if you are someone who loves all things Muay Thai, and loves all things Thailand, I can't help but feel that at the very least it deserves peak. One of the more interesting things is the lead character of Pim, who could have stepped out of the Sud Suay Muay Thai campaign, aimed at making Muay Thai much more amenable to the middle class, and in particular middle class Thai young women. Her position and experience as fighter (and she fights two ridiculous fights in the first few episodes against a giant opponent named "moo daeng") gives her a strength, aggression and confidence in social situations which does not seem to have to be balanced by overly "feminine" qualities. Not knowing Thai to check her language, she seems like a woman who is just empowered by her fighting and Muay Thai, which makes for an interesting case of public image making. I'm not completely sure what the juxtaposition of Likay and Muay Thai is supposed to serve, but I am sure that it has resonance. Muay Thai and traditional dance performance (like lakhon) actually hold a very long history together, going back hundreds of years, each performed for royalty in celebrations. And now both Muay Thai and Likay performances can be found in the same festivals that countlessly dot the countryside and serve as the bed of Muay Thai in Thailand. And it isn't just in Thailand. Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema (1970s) was born out of the acrobatics and storytelling of Chinese Peking Opera as well. Fighting and dance go together, as any Ram Muay will tell you. You can find all the updated Likay Matsang episodes here streaming. Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 This is the first part of the first episode. If you can get through this you'll be more entertained later.