Saturday, August 9th, 2003
En Garde
Sport of fencing can teach discipline, agility, strategy to all ages, body types

By Robin Heflin
Correspondent

As his family moves along, perhaps to browse the booths at Art on the Green, the toddler lags behind, staring over his s houlder. Clearly, he would like to linger to watch the people in white dress and screened facemasks fight with swords.

Bouncing on their feet like boxers, the fighters thrust and parry while striking dance-like poses. The fencers belong to Coeur d'Escrime Fencing Club and the fencing exhibition at the Art on the Green is their chance to demonstrate what their club has to offer.

People of all ages, from toddlers to senior citizens, stopped to watch. Fencing can best be described as a combination of chess, ballet and weaponry. It's both an Olympic sport and a martial art. For people who think they've seen real fencing at the movies, well, maybe they have, and maybe they haven't.

"We always see a spike in club attendance when a movie with a sword fighting scene comes out," says Jessica Brower, 25, a fencing club member.

Sword fighting on the screen is often bigger and grander--and sometimes more dangerous--than real fencing. In sport fencing, the goal is to touch your opponent within a specified target area of the body to score points.

In the movies, "they pick moves that look better on the screen. You're not trying to touch your opponent: you're going where the blade is. To a trained fencer, it looks like, 'Why is he going there?'" says Noah Buntain, 25, a club member who started fencing his sophmore year at Northwestern University in Illinois.

"Some of it is totally far-fetched," says Mike Winderman, owner of The Bookery bookstore, and a "classical" or martial arts fencer. "If you did it in real life, it would get you killed. Some of it, if changed a little, is good."

Winderman, 42, who has choreographed fencing for stage and practiced other martial arts, calls fencing a living history.

"It's an absolute blast to use techniques that masters wrote 500 or 600 years ago. I fight in the style used in England in Shakespeare's time."

Winderman does't just practice fencing, he studies it. He's always on the lookout for old fencing manuals to teach himself new techniques and studies anatomy and physiology to learn why fencers stand and move the ways they do.

Because classical fencing is a martial art and the stakes in the old days were very high, it's a very defensive game; the goal is to not get hit. That actually makes for a slower "bout," the term for an individual fencing "game."

Sport or Olympic fencing, on the other hand, moves faster because the purpose is to score points. There are three types of Olympic fencing, defined by the type of weapons they use and the target areas of the body: foil, epee and sabre.

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