Aikido
Balance,timing and
suppleness
in self-defense
By BARBARA POLICHETTI
Journal Staff Writer
Appeared in The Providence Journal 2000
CRANSTON - Moving barefoot around a padded floor covered with stretched canvas, Bob Connell follows instructions and steps behind instructor Frank Gallo to grab his arms. Connell is taller and broader and he exerts a strong grip as he yanks Gallo's arms backward in an attempt to pinion him. Big mistake. Gallo swiftly twists and turns, and for a moment the two men are face to face, locked in a strange waltz. Then Gallo continues to gracefully, seemingly effortlessly, move his body and within a minute Connell is tumbling haplessly across the room.
The scene, with slight variations, is repeated time and time again as various students assume the role of attacker or uke -with Gallo. It doesn't matter if they attack from the front, from the side, from behind. It doesn't matter where they try to hit with a hand or whether they are "armed" with a small wooden dowel that simulates a knife. It doesn't matter if they are taller or stronger. Uke always falls. And the harder uke tries to strike, the harder uke falls. This is aikido, a form of martial arts that is strictly self-defense, and its many tenets include the principles that an attacker never wins and size doesn't matter. Aikido is about controlling aggression nonaggressively," says Gallo, who with friend and colleague Don Capuano owns Rhode Island Aikido and Cultural Arts Inc., off Park Avenue.
Both are Cranston police officers and both gravitated to aikido after studying other forms or martial arts. One of its primary attractions, Gallo and Capuano say, is its philosophy - one of finding harmony within and using that harmony to deflect and defeat aggression.
It is a philosophy, both men say, that has influenced their lives and their work as police officers. "At this studio, we believe in spreading the philosophy of aikido, which is that you do not fight your opponent but you control them," Gallo says. "It overlaps with many of the same values that are important in law enforcement." Gallo, 34, and Capuano, 36, opened their own school, or dojo, a year ago and now have more than 30 students, ranging in age from 5 to over 50.
Aikido teaches balance, timing and suppleness, as the students use various moves to deflect and topple an attacker.
Unlike other martial arts, aikido does not employ any attacking moves, and at Gallo and Capuano's dojo the emphasis is on not inflicting injury on an assailant.
"What we are doing is sending the attack, and the energy of the attack, off where there's nothing," Gallo says. "In this way, aikido differs greatly from other forms of martial arts, which teach people to control aggression aggressively - in some of the sister forms of art the intent is to stop an attack by inflicting pain by punching harder or kicking harder than your opponent.
"In aikido there are not even any competitions, he says, because a competition requires aggressive moves.
"If someone doesn't attack, then aikido doesn't exist," Gallo says. A Cranston police officer for 14 years, Gallo has been studying martial arts since he was about 13, spending years in tae kwan do and full-contact kick boxing.
Capuano also excelled at other martial arts including kenpo karate and jujitsu. They studied aikido separately before meeting on the job and finding out that they both derived the same peace from the sport and wanted to share it with others as well as integrate it with their police work.
Gallo, currently assigned to the Police Department's training division, incorporates aikido in his defensive training program for police officers.
Capuano, who is with the patrol division, says that aikido helps him on the job every day. "One thing it has given me is great calmness," Capuano says. "And if I have to deal with aggressive people - which can happen often in this job - then I am relaxed. "And you find that if you don't meet aggression with agression, then often situations do not escalate."
The school is in an old industrial building off Park Avenue. Set in a hollow it is visible and accessible from the busy avenue in Cranston, but it is just over the city line, at 95 Hathaway St. in Providence. It shares the twostory complex with other businesses, including a gym, and on a recent night the clanking of weights and booming bass of rock music could be dimly heard through the thick brick walls.
All Western worldliness, however, quickly falls away when you step inside the dojo, which is decorated to look more like some-one's home than a place where martial arts are taught.Small-paned wood frames stretched with white fabric cover the large arched windows. There is soft lighting. A small table-top fountain, filled with rocks and water, gurgles from a shelf.
Vertical Japanese calligraphy hangings grace some walls, and there is a sitting area with a white futon folded onto a black frame.
In the room where aikido is practiced, a taut canvas - which students sweep with whisk brooms after every class is stretched over a padded floor.The room is a contrast of white floor and deep-red brick walls. At the front of the room, track lighting illuminates a shelf where a calligraphy hangs and a spreading bonsai tree stands near a picture of Morihei Ueshiba, the Japanese monk who formulated aikido.
According to Gallo, aikido is one of the youngest martial arts, created by Ueshiba in the early 1940s after he had studied and mastered other, more combative forms of martial arts.
A Shinto monk, Ueshiba had grown concerned by what he saw as mankind's shift away from spirituality, Gallo said, so he used his training to create a new form of martial arts that was based on internal harmony, respect for oneself and respect for others.
Although the classes taught by Gallo and Capuano, who carry the title of "teacher of sensei," are physical with very little talking, the message of aikido is underscored subtly. "Why do we try not to hurt our attacker?" Gallo asks a group of youngsters gathered for an early evening class on a recent Monday. "Our teachings include the approach that we want to be good people and treat others with respect."
A quote from Ueshiba that Gallo has chosen for the cover of the school's brochure states: "To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace."
The children, just like adults who are beginners, start their lessons by learning how to fall. Time and time again, they take turns tumbling over a wooden e stick that Capuano holds over the matted floor.
Knowing how to fall, Gallo explains, not only protects a student from injury, but in the more advanced classes, allows them to create shields of time and distance from their attacker.
The adult class, which follows the children's class, also starts with practice falls after a brief warm-up session. Wearing loose-belted white kimonos and loose white pants - an outfit known as a gi - the students create a fluid, swirling pattern as they circle and tumble.
The only sound is the soft swish of bare feet on the canvas and an occasional command from Gallo or Capuano.It looks peaceful.
It looks like dance but, as the evening's lesson progresses, some of the power of aikido can be seen and heard.
The more energy an attacker uses, the harder the attacker falls, and the students' bodies hit the padded floor with a loud slap. There is also an increase in speed, as Gallo demonstrates increasingly complex moves.
He pivots and bends like a tree in the wind to take down attackers with easy, flowing motions. In doing so, he demonstrates the combination of geometry, balance, gravity and grace that is aikido.
Because there are no competitions in aikido, students advance and earn different-color belts by passing evaluations where their skills are tried by their teachers.
Gallo and Capuano's school is internationally accredited and a member of the Aikido Association of America. The adult students include a credit investigator, an accountant and a Providence police officer, and they all say that through aikido they have found more than a martial art that they enjoy and that keeps them physically fit.
On a recent Monday night, several of the adult students talk about how the sport has affected almost every aspect of their life.
"I used to have a really short fuse, and this has totally changed the way I deal with people," Tom Ausley, 29, of Providence says. "In eight years, I have never found a situation - mentally or physically - where it didn't work." A manager for Federal Express at Boston's Logan International Airport, Ashley says that he is now able to keep calm in even the most stressful situations - and there are a lot of them during his work day. Also, he said that he has had occasion to use aikido for selfdefense; he found it to be a very effective way of "convincing someone that fighting with you is something that they do not want to do.
" Ron Thompson, 40, is hoping to reap the same benefits. Although he is about 6 feet, 3 inches tall, younger and smaller students were tossing him around like a rag doll and he didn't mind a minute of it. Having previously studied karate, Thompson says he is now interested in the challenge of the control and soft movements of aikido. "I'm also looking for other benefits like getting in shape and losing a little weight," says Thompson, who is a credit-card fraud investigator. "I also think this is going to have a great calming influence in my life and help keep me in a better frame of mind.
Robert Boehm, a sergeant with the Providence police department, says that aikido is not just for self-defense, or physical fitness, or to help him on his job. "If you get this," he says, "it is for life itself."
Gallo and Capuano say that those types of holistic responses are exactly what they are hoping to impart to students. And, even at their advanced level, they both say they are continually surprised by some of the benefits from the sport. "It can be so simple, yet surprising sometimes," Gallo says. "Someone can be yelling at you and you find yourself doing what you do in aikido - moving your center of gravity and getting out of the way. "What we are constantly trying to do is to take agression it just send it off to where there's nothing. "We like to send aggression off down something we call the avenues of emptiness."