hi my name is gina kurtz and i am a brown belt at seven star women's kung fu seven star women's kung fu is a nonprofit women's martial arts school located in the central district we've been around for thirty years and we represent fo generations of women teaching women in the martial arts so we do a number of things to enable women to train we offer free childcare to moms we offer is sell interpreting scholarships for moms who are for any woman who can't afford to pay the dues sliding scale dues and we also offer free workshops self defense workshops in the community and that's really a part of our mission and what we do we set up all these programs in place so that we can enable women to train it's a community and so i've been a part of this community for eight years i also function as the school's business manager i train i work here it's a big part of my life and i really just want to share the joy of what this school is and what we're all tournaments we do demos demonstrations at various events in the community as i mentioned before we offer free self defense workshops and will also go to  at risk populations and do self defense that way as well i started because i was looking for a martial art and i was working at a really stressful job at the time and i was really looking for an outlet some you know some way to  decompress and at the time i was working with someone she sat next to me and she trained her she was a black belt here and she said hey you should just try a class and see if you like it and so i did i came and visited the school and then i try to class and i loved it and at the time i lived a couple blocks away from the school and so it was really convenient i loved it immediately i came all the time it was amazing and absolutely life changing i've gone from working in a really stressful environment to really working for an organization that i was of in value and whose principles i appreciate in the community that is thriving and it's inclusive and i have gotten pregnant i had a son and during that time i trained while i was pregnant and there aren't that many martial arts schools where you could do that and do that safely we have our chief instructor who is the head instructor of and then the actual governing of the school is through the steering committee or the board of directors that we have as a nonprofit a seafood michelle make made in has been training for twenty nine years and she's been head instructor of seven star women's kung fu since one thousand nine hundred five and her title has changed as fifty agree to chief instructor five years ago seven star women's kung fu was founded in one thousand nine hundred one by my first teacher and moon and i started in the school a year and a half after it was formed and i stuck around and i became the head instructor because i was the one who kept going and originally i talked my way into the beginner cycle even though it was two weeks past the open enrollment date and am moon was glad i did six years later when she decided to take a sabbatical and i was acting head instructor and till she returned and then we became co head instructors and then when she retired from teaching in one nine hundred ninety five i took over the school officially and now i've been promoted to fifth degree black belt by my current teacher barbara bones who was an moons teacher and so now i'm called chief instructor seven star practices a style called and that's a made up word made up of syllables that represent the five styles that the art is so it's  and what's different about them both from other styles of come through is it originated in hawaii and filipino and chinese men got together to try to make an art that was going to be the best art and could defeat any other art but the thing about it was it was created by men who are small and so it's a great style for women to train in and the other thing that's great about it is it emphasizes that you use whatever creativity and moves that work for you rather than going by rote something that might work for someone else so that's a great aspect that's something that is different than other classical martial arts we encourage women to go train in other styles whereas other arts might say you can only train here the other thing about because you can bow is it does street fighting and that is dirty fighting using your elbows and your knees close in fighting  so it's closer to realistic self defense then tournaments sparring which we don't practice at the school and we have been all women school since it was founded in one thousand nine hundred one and the reason we've kept it as an all women's school is even though that nowadays there are lots of mixed schools where women do feel comfortable training back in the one nine hundred eighty s when the school was formed most schools treated women quite differently they would say don't do pushups or sit ups because you might damage your reproductive organs no you can't fight with the men because you might get injured and they can't push us hard so the reason we've kept seven stars at all women school is that many  women who might have been abused or sexually traumatized in attack feel comfortable building their self esteem and interacting with other women in this atmosphere so it's pretty amazing to watch women come into our seven week beginner cycle and be transformed some women don't even continue training after that and they're amazingly transformed and empowered by doing  something that makes them feel strong in their body learning how to use their voice in a way that they can transfer to their real life to stand up for themselves in situations where they might not have been able to other way otherwise  and over the years as women continue to train and they start to feel themselves as a martial artist it's amazing to watch how they carry themselves differently their voice changes they learned to teach through our teacher training program and then even gain a natural competence and here at seven star we in the past have had a kids program for boys and girls but we haven't continue doing that because they have a sister school who has a great kids program teaches the same style here at seven star we allow girls age thirteen and older to join the program and girls age twelve and older and sometimes as young as eleven to do  our self defense classes and recently we started last year about a year and a half ago actually four weeks self defense program and we opened that girls aged twelve and older and in the community we teach self defense classes t ages and genders because we're an all women school we have always incorporated self defense into our comfort program so in the beginner cycle we focus even more on self defense than we do during the regular classes knowing that some women are just going to take that beginner cycle and not continue on with martial arts training so beyond that we teach a separate self defense only and that is not blended with martial arts that's strictly self  defense doing a lot of verbal scenarios learning to go for the eyes the throat and the knees specific self defense targets not martial arts techniques not kicking higher than the knees for instance not doing fancy kicks like in martial arts so our self defense program is a separate channel than our comfort program we have corporate self defense into our comfort classes well i actually study two kinds of fighting style and as i continued in my training i wanted more weapons work and i went to the pacific association of women martial artists and met my other seafood seafood h zeus i have studied culture can go for about three years that's my the extent of my martial arts history i had taken some boxing courses it's definitely a passion and it takes a considerable amount of dedication to continue to train i find that i really am excited about learning and continue to continuing to learn and ongoing education and i feel like this is  education that really isn't offered in a traditional sense elsewhere and yeah it's definitely a big part of my life it's part of my identity and it's also very practical like  seattle and that's not exactly a genteel neighborhood and i find myself using my self different skills all the time and that's not like punching out people or anything but just verbal  deescalation and i remember i used to get harassed a lot on the bus in public transit when i was in college and after college and now i don't because i know how to diffuse that situation better and i don't come away with it with a bunch of anger and you know hurt feelings like i did previously well one of the best things are usually come in train i come and train as much as i can but i usually train their weightlifting or try chior here right after work and there's a really important function for my life because i used to take my the stress of my home of my work home with me all the time and now it's like you can't think about the petty things that happen at work when someone's trying to put you this real grief in amazing transition when i after our training you know the days don't like everything that happened previously is gone i have other things to think about the best thing also this is taught me is but you don't want to ever feel if you've if you're in a violent  situation it's already gone too far in this is given me so many tools and so much inner confidence about me being able to handle things in a nonviolent way like if someone comes up to me like i had someone and i wanted that for myself as well and when i saw the flyer what really sparked my interest was that it was an all woman nonprofit organization and i just wanted to be a part of that  in i've always been interested in martial art i've been doing i've been a part of seven stars for four months now and i started at the beginner's self defense class and from that class  very first day i felt more powerful and i felt like i gained some skills for self defense and also some self confidence was well and having to yell out in class and be a part of of everybody else's learning process and how to defend yourself i i just fell in love right away what have really i feel have been a dramatic change for me was that being able to meditate and having that time because every every time we start class trees me start off with meditation and gathering yourself to be here present in class and that just sparked my interest a little bit more about meditation and i find ways of doing that more at home as well and i just find that i'm a lot more calm i work in a in a different a difficult neighborhood and there have been incidents and and things like that happening recently where safety was safety issues and i just that was part of the reason why i wanted to take the class and i feel a little bit more prepared for that a little bit i guess grounded seven stars is more than just martial arts i feel that there's a sense of community here as well and i've been so so lucky to get to know everybody and even higher ranked students are very welcoming and a place that it's not just coming to learn the art itself it's making friends and being able to build relationships so i've been studying kaja combo com for for about ten years i began studying with michelle miller velocity dance center she offered a course called martial arts for dancers at the time that i took the class i was recently out of a violent relationship so i was really looking for some ways to physically protect myself but also to gain more physical confidence so i had a background in dance and this was a natural flow for me especially taught from the dancers perspective i joined this school a few years later after achieving my orange belt and began training here and getting a more broader exposure to two kaja kemo is an art form the what's important for training for me has shifted over the years so i'm far less focused on simply protecting myself and much more interested in the more esoteric four parts of the art so the alignment of body mind and spirit and how it stays with me throughout my life so i find that many of the concepts that we have here that we might call fighting concepts are helpful for me in my work life so how my working with people how are we  solving a problem that might look like a sparring session so so many of those things i've found really inform my life in a different way and have been very enriching it is also made a huge difference for me in terms of my my dance art so i'm much more powerful in my dancing i have a different quality to my dancing that i didn't have before so those things have shifted now i was a dance teacher  before and so here at the school once you're a greenbelt you can begin that teaching experience and so i did have a draw to bring some of my dance experience forward into the martial arts so the body intelligence along with the fighting intelligence so that's one of the things that gets me excited about the teaching aspect and also i think something that we don't often experience in life is we really get to see people begin and grow so quickly in the art form especially as adults as we see that with children all the time they start and they advance and we're so satisfied with their teeny tiny little steps and i get to have that same experience but with adults so women coming in maybe they have a slightly you know a down demeanor or they're maybe not looking you in the eye and to watch them progress in a few months to be able to look you in the eye to be able to say no to be able to accomplish something physically that they couldn't do before very very gratifying one of the interesting things for me is that i do focus on the art in the martial art and for others that can be less of a focus and something that they strive for and so the way that that comes about for me is really what is art so there's a performance quality to art specifically to  dance so there's this lovely combination that i find in that crossover from dance of being specific about technique really understanding how something is done but then how do you make that blossom into something that's greater than the sum of its parts so from the performance aspect certainly when we see forms these choreographed dance like fights there's a lot of material there for me to work with but even when we work in fighting what i love it's very similar to dance is the ability to partner partner with another body so my background is predominately in contemporary dance and so lots of partnering sharing of weight with another body and so in our exercises like punch attacks or even when we're fighting in street there's a place where i'm in contact with another body and it's telling me something so i really enjoy that aspect of it and looking for again that greater piece that performance piece or that artistic quality that is there within martial arts so along the lines of integration or how that shows up in martial arts into life or art into life is being able to see those concepts those things that we study show up someplace else whether that be in another our form so it could mean that it's informing dance or some other art form but it can also make my life more artful my name is alice and riley and i have been training here at seven star next year will be my twentieth anniversary of when i took the beginner cycle and michelle's sci fi michelle name to me assistant head instructor approximately two years ago i started training strictly for self defense i didn't actually realize i would be learning kung fu it didn't occur to me even though i i had grown up as a child of the seventy's in northern california and my family we used to go to the drive in movies on saturday night and watch bruce lee films and to this day briefly is still my favorite martial artist ever i mean he's the best still i mean you know jet li's great jackie chan is awesome but still you know  is the best so i knew that i should learn some self defense and at that time i was twenty four years old i lived on capitol hill which is very very different then that it is now the same but different  and i didn't try actually i didn't even have my driver's license i walked everywhere and frankly i was you know a twenty four year old party girl and used to hang out at the calmer comet tavern and often walked home late at night more than a little drunk at times and high heels and so i thought you know i really should learn self defense it was right around the times that me as the pot i was murdered she was the lead singer of the band the big it and and i knew that could easily been me she was walking home from i believe the comet tavern and the bad guy got her and she was raped and killed and i i knew that that there but i would say there but for the grace of the universe that could have easily been me i went to learn  self defense and also started learning kung fu in real life that i just really loved it even though it i was i was probably would have been voted least likely to succeed as i put it so when i teach the beginners now and i've see that these young women old women all different types of women have a really hard time with it it's them the moves are not easy for them or it brings up emotions i can identify the i had never been a and i literally didn't really i really didn't know my left from my right so the movement was very hard for me to learn but i'm stubborn and i i really wanted it but she as you may or may not know is the universal life energy you know if you watch star or star wars right you know let the force be with you but it's basically that that the idea that every living being you know whether it's plants or animals or humans we emit a a life force you know an energy and when you when you train in martial arts the whole idea is that you're bringing together you're getting an alignment of the mind the body the spirit that it all comes together it's not just guess that word k i a i translate as spirit meeting and that's literally where your spirit comes out to be delivered through your technique or as you receive a technique you'll often key i really good a key i if you're going to receive a found sick of this is my art you know i was it meant was it meant to be a painter or a performer per se though when you perform a form a time here we do we'll do demos and that sort of thing i mean that's a kind of performance of putting yourself out there and and so yeah this is this is this is my art form so certainly being a martial artist you know it's something you carry through your life and it certainly comes into play as a parent you know my daughter actually is out there by while we're taping she's grown up coming to seven star i trained through my pregnancy up until about my seventh month and then i knew it was time to take my maternity leave i actually came back to train about three weeks after charlotte was born partly it was just something that i really wanted for i wanted to get my body back i wanted to get back to my art and and establish my reestablish my identity of who i am aside from just being a mother so that said you know i think motherhood is the best and the hardest thing i've ever done ultimately make in a killing are we do learn issue down through the art  by the time you reach by the time you test for the advanced rank we ask you your philosophy behind injure maimane kill because we teach you killing techniques and you also need to have the ethics that go along with that it's very very important i started martial arts about twenty eight years ago and it was after taking a self defense class in graduate school i moved to seattle and asks if anyone knew something similar and they said hey you should come and try check out seven star womens come through and when i saw it i thought oh my gosh that's what i've always been wanting to do my entire life and didn't realize it i was so drawn to the movement and i knew that i could do it so i talked my way into the beginner cycle as i had mentioned before and never looked back never thought oh i should check out other styles loved the seven stars community and the teachers soon became a teacher myself and it transformed my life if i left graduate school and became a kung fu instructor and a self defense instructor and that's what i've done as my main job for the last twenty years