Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Jared Kirby, who is a fight director, stage and screen combat instructor at the New York Combat for stage and screen; a stuntman on the show such as Law and Order, The Equalizer, Bluebloods, and Gotham; Maestro d’Armi with the Martinez Academy; editor of the first published translation of Capoferrro and of the republication of Angelo’s The School of Fencing and of Vincentio Saviolo’s Of Honour and Honorable Quarrels. He also republished McBane’s The Expert Swordsman’s Companion, and has co-authored with Seth Duerr, Staging Shakespeare’s Violence. He was one of the founders and organizers of the International Swordplay and Martial Arts Convention, my first international gig back in 2001, which morphed into CombatCon, which he continues to run. Of course, his greatest claim to fame is that in the year 2000, he beat me in a longsword duel to win full membership of the Dawn Duellist’s Society, and what could possibly top that? So Jared, without further ado, welcome to the show.
Jared Kirby
Thank you. I’m super excited to be here.
Guy Windsor
It’s nice to see you. Just a bit of background for the listeners, Jared and I are obviously old friends. And we talk on the phone about once a year or so, so this is sort of like the continuation of a two and a half decades long conversation. So we’ll try and make it accessible to the layperson.
Jared Kirby
We both had so much hair back then.
Guy Windsor
Yes, we did. Alright, so my first question, whereabouts in the world are you?
Jared Kirby
In the New York City area.
Guy Windsor
Okay. What brought you there?
Jared Kirby
If we go back to when we first met, I had actually moved to Scotland to train with Paul and the Dawn Duellist’s Society and get some actual training because Tim Ruzicki and I had been kind of playing in Minneapolis for years. Because he had met y’all back in, I think ’96, if I remember, right? And then when he came home, he brought me a sword from Scotland.
Guy Windsor
What a nice man.
Jared Kirby
I thought so too. And it probably took me like 15 years to realize it was actually kind of selfish, because he wouldn’t have had anybody to play with if he didn’t bring me a sword. I still have it. I can, I can pull it out. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. And really, it’s just an Italian foil guard with an epee blade slapped together. And we look at it now and go, oh, what is that? And I’m like, it’s a precious memory.
Guy Windsor
25 years ago, that was what we had.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. And then to boot, he hand stitched a leather wrap around this crappy plastic Italian foil grip. I love that thing. And so yeah, so we had been playing around. But you know, it’s really not an art you can teach yourself. You need teachers. And so that’s one of the reasons that I moved to Scotland to study.
Guy Windsor
Although those teachers had actually taught themselves. Paul and I taught ourselves all of this.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, yeah. So in that way, at that time, it wasn’t this idea of, oh, I have to go seek out masters and all this. I just needed people who knew more than me. I had run into my wall, my personal limitations, and realised I wasn’t getting any better. And so I knew there were people in Scotland that knew more and this is pre really the internet. You know, we were just all getting started on the WMAW Yahoo group in 95, I think, and so off to Europe I went and thank God I did because I got to meet you and Gareth and Paul and all the boys and gals and we had amazing times and did stupid things.
Guy Windsor
We’re going to return to what we got up to back in the 90s in our foolish younger days. But what took you to New York?
Jared Kirby
Scotland is the important part of that because the ‘99 Paddy Crean event brought people to Edinburgh. They hosted the event there. And that’s what brought Maestro Martinez and Maestra Acosta Martinez over amongst other people. And that was the first time that I met them.
Guy Windsor
Was it really? I remember that Paddy Crean period where we had a whole bunch of extra sword people. Yeah. Okay, so what was the first time?
Jared Kirby
I think I had met them at the symposium in New York in that January. Just real briefly, but they definitely did not like me.
Guy Windsor
They don’t like me either, so don’t worry, you’re in good company.
Jared Kirby
Well, I was a very big personality back then. That might be a polite way of saying it. I’ve mellowed. And so definitely, yeah, I met them there. And so yeah, they came over for the Paddy Crean event. And that was the next time that I met them. But I had never gotten to work with them. I’d never learned anything from them. Just the New York thing was an exhibition. So I got to see stuff there. And really, we went because Paul was there. So Tim and I drove out with a few people and wanted to see him. And so yeah, it was at that Paddy event that I got to do a Spanish rapier class with the Martinez’s. And this was at the end of my work visa being up in in Scotland anyway. So I had been thinking about moving to New York as an actor, I’d been thinking about moving back to Minneapolis, and I took that class with the Martinez’s, and at the end of the class, I shook their hand and I said, thank you, this is amazing. I’m going to move to New York and train with you and walked away.
Guy Windsor
Let this be a lesson to the listener. If you go and you get a class that really rocked your world, it may have long term consequences, like move across the country to some other place. I have a student in Helsinki, who came to Helsinki for one of my longsword week long seminar things, it must have been 2010 or something, and met a girl and they are now married with two kids in Helsinki. So this kid from Singapore, I say kid, he was a youngish man then and is still a fairly young man now, that one seminar he’s been in Finland for the last, I think 15 years or so. Thanks for showing up to one class.
Jared Kirby
You never know.
Guy Windsor
It’s a dangerous thing showing up to historical swordsmanship, events, it really is. Okay, so now you’ve been publishing books, and you seem to specialized in producing republication and translations of, shall we say 16th and 17th century works. Is that fair?
Jared Kirby
I mean, you could say that. I would say that I have always pursued my passions with zeal. And so there really isn’t a through line so much as a wow, this is cool and I’m going to keep digging into this. And I’m going to hate myself for it. And I’m going to get it done. Right. So the Capoferro translation actually started, I was working on that in the mid 90s, because I had started off in stage combat. And then as I started to get into historical fencing, Capoferro was one of the few names that both worlds knew, like, wow, this man is amazing. And if he’s got that kind of, of legacy, I want to be able to understand what he was saying. And then as I started to get more into it, I was like wait a second. Now, his contemporaries were translated in that century into other languages. And yet nobody has ever translated Capoferro into a foreign language. What is up with that?
Guy Windsor
It’s crazy, yeah.
Jared Kirby
Meanwhile, even in sport fencing worlds, which I know very little about, I’d be in conversations they would know Capoferro and maybe not his contemporaries. So that just kept driving me to want to get a translation done. So I started when I was in university going to the Italian master’s thesis students, and saying, not only would this be an amazing thesis, I’ll pay you. I mean, I didn’t have much money. So maybe it was like 50 bucks or something. But I was like, I’ll give you something to do this as your project. And I had meetings with four or five different people, because they thought it was a great idea. Then they looked at the text, and went, oh, no. And I was like, what? And that’s when I realised, I wasn’t asking them to translate Italian. I was asking them to translate Shakespearean Italian. It is written the way Shakespeare is written. It’s that time period.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and also Capoferro is an astonishingly bad writer in many respects. I mean, there are Italian sources of that period, Giganti, for example, that is a breeze to translate. But Capoferro is twisty. He seems to think that no sentence is complete without at least six sub clauses.
Jared Kirby
You want to get the whole understanding. No. So yeah, it was interesting understanding that, and then I was like, all right, we’re going to have to do something. So I actually started, do you remember I think it was called the historical fencing translation project. HFTP.
Guy Windsor
I remember I backed it. Because I’ve got the spiral bound photocopy of the translation, which is what us backers got, because we got the translation. And then that got published by Greenhill Books.
Jared Kirby
Yep. So a bunch of people like you contributed $100 each to raise the money to pay a professional translator. Unfortunately, it was awful. The money got spent up on that awful translation based on really bad advice from the wrong people. And that landed me with a book contract already expecting a book and a translation that couldn’t even get the numbers right at certain points, missed entire paragraphs. And left me up a creek without a paddle. And when asked for it to be fixed, was threatened with lawsuits for defamation. So that left me in a horrible position. And that is when Ray and Jeanette stepped up to help save me.
Guy Windsor
They sort of they took the monstrously crap one and they tidied it up into something that could be published.
Jared Kirby
Oh, no, no, it was so bad. We threw it away.
Guy Windsor
Oh, so it was retranslated entirely.
Jared Kirby
I sat down at that table with them. And we started a brand new translation. When we got through the first translation of it, then we started again. And I don’t know why they put up with me, I really don’t. Because I had this religious zealous to keeping every word possible. They’re like, no, we can just say this. I’m like, no, you can’t because I don’t want any interpretation. I want this to be a boring, literal translation of exactly what Capoferro said.
Guy Windsor
Which is actually impossible.
Jared Kirby
Absolutely. It’s why I bring that up in the introduction to the Capoferro book. It is impossible. And I wanted us to do as close as humanly possible.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, honestly, when I translate, for example, Fiore, I lean towards that end of the spectrum. So if he puts the clauses in a certain order, and it’s not bad English to put it in the same order. That’s what I’ll do. And if a phrase is repeated in the text when it shouldn’t be, I repeat it in the text with a footnote saying this is obviously a scribal error. But I want it so that someone reading it, as far as possible, can go word by word or phrase by phrase through the original and see it in English and match it up and go, okay. He’s translating this phrase as this phrase, and with absolute minimum rephrasings. Because often the phrases are almost nonsensical. Or they are some kind of colloquialism, like Vadi has one “I’ll throw you to the ground.” You literally translate it like saying, “Hello”: “Como dire un ave”, which means, basically, in the time, it would take me to say an Ave Maria, which means extremely quickly. If you and I were going for coffee, and I was a bit late, I’d say I’ll be there in an Ave. That’s the expression. And it’s that but you have to translate what it actually says. And then footnote what it means in that sort of situation. So the reader can see what the person said.
Jared Kirby
There were several of those in Capoferro that I love going down that rabbit hole, you know, that “casting the visual rays,” and then I went down this whole research to understand how they thought people saw in the 17th century it was anyway.
Guy Windsor
Because Newton hadn’t been born yet and so they hadn’t figured out the science of optics.
Jared Kirby
But I love those rabbit holes. Those are some of my favorite memories. Also, it was a break. Yeah, so basically, we went through, we translated it three times. And we got up and we did every play and made sure that it all worked, and then got that that translation out. But I really would have been lost without Ray and Jeanette, doing most of the work. And then on top of that, my name is all over the book. I take all the credit. I don’t know why they put up with me.
Guy Windsor
Maybe this explains why you then went with the Angelo School of Fencing, the 1787 English translation done in the period of the 1763 original in French, and then Vincentio Saviolo’s Of Honour and Honorable Quarrels, which is already in English. And then McBane’s Expert Swordsman’s Companion – already in English.
Jared Kirby
So again, these are all, if I’m being honest, the Angelo book exists, because I needed an excuse to buy an original.
Guy Windsor
Ah, that’s a good reason.
Jared Kirby
I wanted an original and I was like, you know, I need an original if we’re going to have the art, which actually never manifested. I didn’t buy an original until years after the book was published. We were able to get the rights to images. But I love the book, and I love what Jeanette was able to add to it. Especially the appendixes. And then Saviolo only happened because Greenhill, Michael is an amazing man, love working with him. But he wanted me to write a book about duelling. He was like, we want to put out like a coffee table book about duelling. And it’s like, well, why would I do that? There are tons we could just republish, you don’t need me. That was like, huh, but you know, what is interesting? The first English code duello, the first code duello written in English. Now, that one’s interesting, and it’s an interesting guy that I had been researching anyway. Because why are we here? We’re here because The Princess Bride, if we’re pretty honest, right? Yeah. I wanted to know what Bonetti’s defense was. And that was some of my first historical research, only to find out there’s no Bonetti’s defense that we know of.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I mean, he was a fencing master but there’s no record of his actual method. He never write a book, damn him.
Jared Kirby
It seems like he was pretty busy.
Guy Windsor
Being a spy and a double agent and a triple agent and running a fencing school…
Jared Kirby
Fair enough, then moving fencing school, then dead in prison…
Guy Windsor
I right in thinking that you describe all the Bonetti stuff in the introduction to the Saviolo book? Yeah, I’m just floating that there so that people listening go, oh, I need to know more about Rocco Bonetti know which book to go and buy because this is what podcasts are for.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, most of the holdup in getting that book out was I wanted to prove once and for all where Saviolo’s school was located, because up to that day, we had no idea and every historical reference before my book is wrong. So I don’t know why people keep spewing Aylward’s stuff. It’s just wrong.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, the thing about Aylward. Now we’re talking about his English Masters of Defense book. Yeah. Great book. If you’re not too worried about factual accuracy. But it’s a fascinating book, but oh my god, like everything he says about McBane is wrong. I mean, it’s close. All of its close. But it’s bizarre. It’s like he never actually saw a book or something.
Jared Kirby
Well, I find that from the Victorian era up through that time period, there’s a lot of logic, apply this fact. So they go well, okay. For Saviolo’s school, for example, we know it was in the little street where the well is, and Aylward was able to find a well, that was somewhere in the Blackfriars area, and therefore that’s where his school was. Never mind, we have other data points that go well, that’s way too far away to actually be where his school is.
Guy Windsor
So when you did find it?
Jared Kirby
Oh, my God. I mean, I think I did. Because it was only in the 90s, that they dug up this area. And they found a little well, I think it was 92. There’s this great law in Britain, that would never happen in the US, where if you’re going to build new construction, you have to allow them to excavate the area for a year or two before you can do that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. If there’s any reason to suppose there’s an area of archaeological interest there, then you have to allow the excavation before you proceed.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, well, obviously, we’re not going to have that in America. Nothing 2000 years old, under whatever we’re building. So yeah, that’s where they found this well, and it fits the criteria. On the map, from the time period, you can see it’s in a little street. We know that that’s where a well was. And it was within a bow shot, literally and figuratively, of Belle Sauvage yard. The only other data point that I couldn’t find there is at the site of the Red Lion.
Guy Windsor
Well, yeah, the Red Lion is the most common pub name in Britain.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, there’s seven pages of reference. Yeah, I went through all seven pages, locating every one of them on a map to triangulate where they were in relationship to Belle Sauvage yard. Seven pages.
Guy Windsor
Pubs also change their name sometimes. So I mean, what was a pub sometimes stopped being a pub and started being something else. So yeah, it’s tricky.
Jared Kirby
What was the magical is that I was literally in that the building of the Society of the Apothecaries where I was doing this research to find this, when I’m actually figuring out these data points, and the location based on the research that I went and pulled from the archaeology department, I was on the other side of the wall, to where that little street is, when I figured that out. I’m in the northernmost part of the building, which is where that little street was. It was so eerie.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the clashing of blades and Saviolo yelling at his students.
Jared Kirby
God what I wouldn’t give for a time machine.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Now, again, most people doing historical martial arts now have started sometime in the last 10 years. Which is after so many treatises have become available. So much has been done. But when I visited New York for the first time as an adult in 2001, I was staying in your apartment on the northern end of Manhattan Island. And I took a gigantic pile of comb bound photocopies to the local copier with your permission and spent an absolute fortune getting the whole lot copied. And that was, at that time, probably the best archive of historical fencing sources available outside of like specialist collections in posh museums that don’t let you photocopy anything. So how come you have had this gigantic stack of fencing sources in your apartment in 2001?
Jared Kirby
So obviously, I know you talked about Patri before. We would be nowhere without Patri Pugliese, a wonderful man. And he was the first one to go out and photocopy treatises, and make them available for sale. So he had this web page, one page with a whole list and the cost for them. And I bought up almost every one of them. And I thought that what he was doing was amazing. And so this was what I was doing in ‘97, ‘98, before I came over to Scotland. So my mission, upon getting over to Scotland was to build this collection. And so I was able to get into the archives at Leeds and start making photocopies. And so I quickly doubled my collection.
Guy Windsor
They don’t let you do that anymore.
Jared Kirby
I feel like it was such a wonderful window of time, because I had got connected with the curator. And he had been trying to get them to make one copy of every one of their books, for archival purposes, to have that copy. And they’re like, we’re not going to spend the money on that. So I came in and said, well, I’m going to buy that, I’m going to pay for it. So he could go back to the council or whoever and say, no, it costs you nothing. This man is going to pay for them. So he made a copy, and then made that second copy for me.
Guy Windsor
Right. The first copy is expensive, because it requires special scanning and all that sort of stuff. You’re dealing with a delicate, delicate book with a second copy. You just take a stack of paper and run them through a photocopier.
Jared Kirby
I have the credit card bills on this somewhere. It was not great.
Guy Windsor
It must have cost you a fortune.
Jared Kirby
So much. And but we were so hungry for it. You remember what it was like? I remember in ‘97, sitting down with Craig Johnson from Arms and Armor, and we’re like, look at this book! This is Egerton Castle. And he talks about all of these masters. This is an amazing history of fencing, because nobody had it. And so to be able to get these copies out of there, and then I was also able to work in a couple other libraries and get copies of them. I was able to get the copy of McBane when I was in Scotland, and that was huge. And then when I got back to New York, I started doing the same thing at the New York Public Library. So before Google Books ever came up, I had and still have hundreds of copies of treatises that I made available for sale, just like Patri did. I included Patri in my book list and pointed everybody to go to him if they wanted these books.
Guy Windsor
So you’re adding you’re adding to his collection, but you’re not taking any of his business because Patri was basically the godfather of historical martial arts. So we all we all worship him as an ancestor. He sadly died, was it in 2006? Quite a long time ago.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, five, six, somewhere in there. We immediately at ISMAC, we immediately started doing a fundraiser every year where we did different things to raise money to help his daughters in college.
Guy Windsor
I remember one of those auctions. I still have a dagger that I bought at one of those charity auctions.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. I’ll never forget shaving a tonsure in Stevie Fitz’s head.
Guy Windsor
People basically paid to see that happen.
Jared Kirby
We paid to do it. Christie Sharrone bet against me. And I was like, you can go as high as you want. I am doing this. I’ve known that man too long not to be the one shaving his head.
Guy Windsor
It’s also I think, maybe just worth reminding the younger listeners that digital photography didn’t really become a thing until the early 2000s and a digital camera from say 2003 was crap by modern standards. Nowadays, you can take your phone, point it at a book, go snap, snap, snap, snap, snap and photograph the whole book in 20 minutes. But back then a camera that would actually take a decent digital photograph of a page was a professional level piece of gear. The commercial stuff was rubbish. And phones did have cameras in like 2002, 2003. But I think they generated something in about 15 kilobytes per picture or something like that. There were these tiny little postage stamp pictures that were you could pretty much tell there was a person there. But that was about it. But yeah, this process of disseminating the treatises before the advent of all these digital scans and the worldwide web getting a lot more efficient. It was all photocopies of photocopies of photocopies and to the nth generation.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, I just kept doing it because I wanted to get the word out there. The motivation behind so many of the projects that I do, the seminars, the workshops, all of this stuff comes down to validity for this art. And what I always tell people is before I die, I want to overhear a conversation where somebody goes, well, I’m a martial artist. And the reply is, yeah, Eastern or Western?
Guy Windsor
Oh, I’ve heard that already.
Jared Kirby
Wow. Damn, good. I’m glad you have. I haven’t yet. We’re definitely getting there. And I’m happy to see it. Like people understand that we have a rich martial arts heritage in this European tradition.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Now, you have your own book, Staging Shakespeare’s Violence, and I must confess that I have not yet read it. Shockingly bad behavior on the part of a friend I know, and even worse on the part of a podcast interviewer. So just tell everybody what it’s about. And then we’ll go into some detail.
Jared Kirby
For many years, I couldn’t decide which I loved more stage combat and fighting for stage and screen, or historical fencing. And then I realized, there’s a lot more similarities than anybody ever shared with me. And so I started to bring those two worlds together a little bit more, and created the New York Combat for Stage and Screen as a company that grounds their fights in martial reality, and found other people along the way that shared that ideology like John Lennox, and Kyle Rowling.
Guy Windsor
Both of whom have been on this show.
Jared Kirby
Excellent. So that was kind of moving along. I was like, alright, there’s a way to bring these two things together. Now, as a young fight director going into Shakespeare, it’s extremely daunting sometimes. Because you just don’t know the plays well enough. Or, God forbid, it’s a history play. And you’re like, who’s this guy in York, it’s really hard to keep track of. And so for many years, I wanted a book like Staging Shakespeare’s Violence. And so for another decade or so, I told every fight director I knew to go and write this book. And none of them did it. And so finally, I was like, all right, it needs to get done. So I approached Seth Duerr, the artistic director of New York Shakespeare, because he is one of the most knowledgeable Shakespeareans on the planet. He’s also a very kindred spirit in the sense that and you’ll appreciate this Guy, he’s unapologetically knows what he knows. So he’s not going to be falsely humble.
Guy Windsor
It’s so tedious and tiring when someone who’s clearly got decades of experiences is like hmm, errr, no, you’re an expert now. Just tell me how it is.
Jared Kirby
And so that comes with also, like, I know what I know, and I’m not going to apologize for knowing that I’m very good at what I do. On the flip side, when I get into a situation where I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m the first one to raise my hand and ask questions. I’m not going to pretend I know what that is. So Seth is great that way. And he was always wonderful as a director and an actor to work with, because he’s very collaborative. But he has very strong opinions. And our opinions clash many times. But there’s this old thing. It’s called an argument. We need to discuss an argument because people don’t understand it. It is when two people who respect each other, and that’s an important element of an argument, disagree, and then wait for it… they actually throw out facts at each other, and both listen, and maybe even change their mind based on the information that the other person introduces. So this old idea of an argument is something Seth and I do often. And so we made sure to include that in the book. So when you pick up Staging Shakespeare’s Violence, not only do you get all of the violence in Shakespeare, you get Seth and I arguing with each other throughout the book. So we’re color coded because sometimes we agree and when we don’t we both say our piece because I’m right. So is he.
Guy Windsor
And when there isn’t a definitive fact that the demonstrates one or the other, then yes. I remember, when my friend Steven Hand, who’s also been on the show, he came to do seminars for me in Helsinki. We started with a sword and buckler workshop on the first weekend, and then he did a George Silver workshop on the second weekend. And throughout that sword and buckler workshop I was sort of watching. Okay, I can see that. Oh, yeah, that’s interesting. And then for the next couple of days, we will be like, discussing sword and buckler back and forth. On the Wednesday night, we did a class for my students, where we taught the students what Stephen was going to change, having seen what I do, and what I was going to change, having seen what Stephen does, and where we still disagree. Entirely collegial. I was like, yeah, okay. So we’ve met, and we’ve compared our interpretation, or whatever, and we both come away with better stuff than we had before. But we’re still different in these other areas. It was lovely. It was good for the students to see that disagreeing with someone does not indicate disrespect.
Jared Kirby
It can be done respectfully, right? And it comes down to what is the goal. So when you’re presenting this art, for example, I went and did a Capoferro seminar at a school. One day of the two that I was there and the lead instructor after we were done with that workshop, shut down the Rapier program. He said, I’ve got to start again from scratch. I’m not doing this anymore until I revamp it. Well, I did. I didn’t ask that, all I did was present Capoferro the way that I have pulled this out of the treatise. And so I in turn anytime that I do a Capoferro seminar, I am presenting his words. And I’m always eager for people to bring up well, what about this? And what about that? So that I can say, well, here’s what I found. And here’s why I don’t do that. But also I’m done with a conversation. For example, there was somebody else, I think this was late 2000s. And the gentleman was big into Capoferro and he went on guard, and his feet were at 120 degree angle in the guard. And I was like, well, that’s interesting. I was like, you can’t really do that though because then there’s no way to pivot your rear foot on the lunge, because your rear foot’s already in the position. So you need your feet at a 90 degree angle in the guard so that you can pivot and he was like, yeah, but this is more comfortable for me. Okay. I was like, all right, but don’t teach that as Capoferro, then.
Guy Windsor
Right, exactly. There’s nothing with teaching variations or adapting the art for the individual needs of a particular student, that’s normal practice. But the book says this, we’re doing this slightly differently for these reasons is fine. But you can’t present something that you know to be not the book as the book. That drives me nuts.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. And so it was like, at that point, that conversation is over for me, because this isn’t someone that’s digging into the material, they’re going on guard in a way that’s comfortable for them. They’re teaching their students that and calling it Capoferro.
Guy Windsor
Also it may not be comfortable for the students because for me personally standing on guard with my feet at 120 degrees is horrible.
Jared Kirby
There’s a reason he says to be at a 90 degree angle, just saying.
Guy Windsor
That’s right. Yeah, and it’s funny I’ve watched Capoferro classes given where I’ve seen people are interpreting the turn off the back foot in the lunge differently to the way I do it. And I’ve had a perfectly useful discussion with the instructor about the difference, but the thing is, Capoferro doesn’t say how to do it. He just says I think it’s the letter M in his illustration of the of the lunge. Hang on one second. And of course, I’m just fetching my actual 1609 printed Capoferro. It’s L. Listeners I’ve just completely ostentatiously and pridefully swanky about with my original Capoferro, which I said it’s printed in 1609. Because this particular copy, Jared, this will blow your socks off. This copy of Capoferro has the colophon page underneath basically, it has a 1609 colophon page. That is 1609 MDCIX. And the Frater Gregorius Lombardellius who is a professor in 1610. Here he’s only a doctor. He hasn’t been promoted yet.
Jared Kirby
Hold on listener.
Guy Windsor
Jared is racing about in his house. I’m not sure what he’s fetching, but it’s going to be something to do with this.
Jared Kirby
Yes, it is. Okay, but I’m taking it back downstairs before we look at this.
Guy Windsor
Welcome to the all action version of this particular episode of the show.
Jared Kirby
We’ll leave it to the stunt man to add action into it.
Guy Windsor
I know we will get on to stunt stuff in a bit.
Jared Kirby
I’m now opening my original copy of Capoferro.
Guy Windsor
Good for you, sir. Good for you. Well played.
Jared Kirby
Which is definitely not as nice as yours. Okay.
Guy Windsor
My text says “Ego Frater Gregorius Lombardellius de Senis S.T. Doctor, et Consultor Sanctissimae Inquisitionis in Civitate Senatum vidi praesens opus, in quo nihil inveni quod sit contra fidem, aut bonos mores, qua re mihi videtur ut possit praelo mandari. Imprimatur Fr. Archang. Inqui. Senarum. Fabius Piccolomineus Vic. Cosmus Talias Audit.” And then at the bottom it says “Senis anno a nativitate iesu christi. M.D.C.IX. Venundatur in aedibus nobilis viri Camilli Turi.” Okay, for listeners, I will put pictures of my colophon page and Jared’s colophon page in the show notes to compare for yourselves. But yeah, so the mystery is, why is this 1609 colophon page pasted into the back of my book, because it’s pasted over the original colophon page, which is I think the same as the 1610 one but I can’t actually see it, because it would require me to actually be able to see through the paper which I can’t quite.
Jared Kirby
Huh. That’s very interesting. 1609. So it’s already done, and then something changes.
Guy Windsor
So just to recap. So your copy has the standard 1610 colophon page. Mine, I think has the standard page, but the 1609 colophon page is pasted over it, which makes no sense. It would make more sense to be the other way around. But there’s no question looking at it that it is not a forgery in any sense of the word. The printing is the same, the paper is the same. The manner of it being pasted down is correct for that period. It is a mystery.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. So I was going to say, this is for the listeners, this is a reason you need to buy the originals, and not just the Google Books, I’m serious, because you will get a glimpse into history that you can’t know any other way.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Although, although hang on, it’s not strictly fair to require the listeners to go off and spend the cost of a small car on a book.
Jared Kirby
No, no, that’s so stupid. Don’t do that.
Guy Windsor
Very, very stupid. I’ve only ever done that like three times. Of course, I can write it all off against tax, which really does help. And I think we’re probably in the same position. But there are places you can go where you can see these sorts of books. So for example, if you’re in the UK, the national fencing museum run by Malcolm Fare, who was on the show, actually Jared, it was you that put me onto the National Fencing Museum. Thanks to you I went there, and my mind was blown. And then I went back with a friend James Hester, and a good digital camera, and I photographed like 25 of the best of the collection, and all of those photographs are generally available to the public for whatever purpose they want to put it to.
Jared Kirby
It’s amazing. I went there that after noon, and we got to talking and we were so engrossed that I didn’t even realize I missed the last train. Neither of us did. And so I ended up staying the night, he was so kind of put me up because we were so back and forth. And his copies are so amazing.
Guy Windsor
Just beautiful books. So yes, there are places you can go to see them. And some of those places like the National Fencing Museum, where if you behave like a reasonable person, there’s a very good chance he’ll let you actually handle them.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. It’s only in handling different copies of the original books that you get these tastes of history, like my copy has 17th century Spanish notation. And the only parts that they’re really translating, this is just a help to tell you how similar Spanish and Italian were, especially 400 years ago. More often than not, he’s translating things that may be difficult, you know, funny, like stringere, that maybe it’s difficult to understand.
Guy Windsor
How does he translate stringere?
Jared Kirby
A S I N D E B E N I R A M E D I D A
Guy Windsor
My memory is not good enough for that. Tell you what, Jared, I charge you, in the name of all that is historical fencing, to photograph every page with an inscription on it, or annotation on it, and post it somewhere so that people can see it. Because that is useful. Do we have reason to believe that the annotation is period?
Jared Kirby
Just from the script. So I’ve shown it to several people are familiar with handwriting, period handwriting. So I mean, if you look at this, it’s definitely very old.
Guy Windsor
In which case, you have to photograph every page with an annotation, and put it online.
Jared Kirby
Some of it isn’t hard. And so I don’t know why. I initially was like, oh, it’s just the hard concepts. But like, I’m this page instead of in “due manieri”, above that, he goes “dos maneras”.
Guy Windsor
Right, that’s pretty straightforward. In two ways.
Jared Kirby
So yeah, not sure. Anyway. So that’s one of the reasons I like actual old rare books.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And the annotations are just fantastic. Okay. Now, I think it’s probably getting a little frustrating for the average reader who doesn’t have an original Capoferro sitting on their lap right now.
Jared Kirby
Oh, is anybody still listening?
Guy Windsor
Probably not. So, tell us about fight direction and how you got into it?
Jared Kirby
Yeah. When I was 15, I saw a human chess match at the Minnesota Renaissance Fair. And it’s this ridiculous thing where humans are the chess pieces. And then it’s all staged and choreographed, which you don’t necessarily know at the time when you’re a young man from a small northern Minnesota town. And so instead of knight takes pawn, they clear the board and the knight fights the pawn. So you get to see this big fight. And then whoever wins actually gets the square. So if the pawn somehow wins. It’s again all choreographed and always ends in a big melee. I mean, I don’t know how I got my jaw off the ground.
Guy Windsor
It does sound fabulous. The only way to play chess, really.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, so I went up to one of the performers afterwards and was just saying how amazing it was. And they told me about stage combat. They’re like, oh, yeah, it’s all choreographed. I was like, okay, I’m going to do that. So I didn’t know at the time that I was saying that there’s nothing where I was at. So I had to move down to Minneapolis, St. Paul. And I actually started training with the fight director that choreographed that trained all year, and then was cast and actually performed in that very same chess match, I think four years later. It was so full circle. But again, I just couldn’t get enough of it. And I actually ran into him again in New York here five, seven years ago, he was in town teaching a seminar, Michael Anderson. Amazing man. And I didn’t realize at the time that I think a chunk of my passion for historical fencing came from him, because he was the one who had like Thibault’s diagram. And I remember him showing me that he had it tattooed on his arm. Also, he showed me Capoferro, he was interested in these historical references also. And he started bringing in people like, the first time I met Brad Waller was in ’98 because Michael brought him into town to do a Marozzo Prezzo seminar. I had no idea. I didn’t realize until I saw him again, how much of an impact he probably had in my direction that way. So I just loved it. I kept doing it. And when I got to New York, I trained here. Actually, when I was living in Edinburgh, if I wasn’t fighting with you and the DDS, or working at the Old Waverly, I was on a train down to York, doing a BA DC certification with Ian. I would take the train down to London and train with people down there. So like Richard Ryan and Brett Young, and I met people that have been lifelong stage combat friends down there. So yeah, I just never stopped.
Guy Windsor
So what makes a good fight director?
Jared Kirby
For me, it is all about storytelling violence. I think that violence is one of the most underutilized storytelling tools we have. And let me qualify that. I don’t mean underutilized like, we don’t have a lot of action out there. Not what I mean. I mean that action is a way that we can reveal character in a way that words never can.
Guy Windsor
Right, yeah. Someone who comes up behind somebody and punches him in the kidney is not the same as somebody who comes up to the front and then punches him in the face.
Jared Kirby
Exactly. Right. And making those character choices makes your character stronger, sometimes just the threat of violence and the way that a character does that can reveal character. So I love to this day after over 25 years of doing it, I love exploring how we can express character through violence and make sure that the violence matches the tone of the piece. And that the violence comes from a place that the characters have to fight. And then it seamlessly flows out of that. So most of the time, I don’t want anybody to realise I did anything. They should never stop and go, oh, what great choreography. Well, then I failed, because they recognise that it’s choreography. They know they didn’t really get slapped, but they should never stop to think about it, because there’s so engrossed in the story. And that’s what I love about the art. The other part of that I call action porn. As a performer, I love doing that. I love fighting for fighting’s sake, and then kind of tying a story around it. It’s a lot of fun to do, and it can be fun to watch. But you got to know what you’re going into. And that’s why I call it action porn. If you pop in that movie, because you really want to see the pizza delivery man deliver that pizza, you’re going to be sorely disappointed by this film. But if you’re in the mood for some action fun, great, you’re going to have a great time.
Guy Windsor
And the quality of filmed violence, in terms of the balletic choreography has improved so much in the last 25 years. And what the performers are able to do with these amazing jumping up in the air and get your legs wrapped around the person’s neck and then flip them on the ground, all that sort of stuff. It’s fantastic. I mean, none of it is how people actually fight. It just looks amazing.
Jared Kirby
And that’s the beauty of that. Because we’re able to do more with that, especially because of CGI. So we can be in harness and do a lot of wire work and do these crazy things. They can erase the wires in post-production. And yet, there are also just some superhuman people out there that can actually do some of this stuff. But here, you have to consider the world you’re in. So if we’re in a fantasy world, and I consider every Marvel film a fantasy world, now we can have this heightened violence. And we want to see that. So as long as there are, and John Lennox wrote this years ago, 10 fight director rules, right? And those are just pretty solid, as far as does the violence serve the story? And another part of that is, are we staying within the realm of the world that we’re in, you shouldn’t do anything that breaks the rules of that world. So as long as you continue to do that, it’s fine. We know when you go into a Marvel movie, they’re not going to bleed, that they are going to take beatings that no human could ever survive, even though they’re human characters in there, no human could survive that right. You’d think. And then Jeremy Renner goes off and still lives that after this snowplow incident, and you’re like, all right, maybe the man could take that much.
Guy Windsor
It’s funny, because I actually get really bored in those incredibly long set piece fights. I mean, like the Superman versus Batman one, and they’re having this great big fight at the end. I was just bored out of my skull.
Jared Kirby
I tried to watch the Justice League. I was like, everybody’s raving about this four hour thing. It took me five days and fast forwarding. And I’m like, no, this is not working for me.
Guy Windsor
If people listening, if that’s your jam, then enjoy your jam. You know, no criticism from us. But as violence professionals, in a way, I do find a lot of the stuff in the movies these days, it just goes on too long. Fights shouldn’t take that long.
Jared Kirby
I think again, it depends on what is happening. If we go back to that ‘Cliffs of Insanity’ fight, that’s really long, on purpose.
Guy Windsor
But it’s still a couple of minutes. But by Marvel standards, that’s a short fight.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. But here’s the difference. Every layer, every 15 to 20 seconds of that fight, you’re learning something new about the characters. It is constantly revealing more about the characters. And that’s why you can have a five minute fight scene that is amazing and will keep you interested. But I guarantee you the ones you’re talking about that are not interesting to you have revealed no character within a 30 to 42 second chunk of that fight. You’ve learned nothing new about that character.
Guy Windsor
It’s just variations on throwing concrete at each other, basically, or throwing each other at concrete, either way.
Jared Kirby
Now then you move into something like, have you seen the new John Wick?
Guy Windsor
No.
Jared Kirby
Oh, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I loved the first one.
Jared Kirby
The first one’s great. You can skip two and three. They were wonderful. I had a good time with them, but they weren’t the caliber of one. And four is actually right up there with one. Still not as good. But really, it was so much fun. But this is also going to be exhausting. But I think that’s the point. Like you actually get to feel his exhaustion because you’re exhausted.
Guy Windsor
I’m not sure that’s what I want in a film. Okay, I’ll give it a go. But okay, you’ve actually done quite a lot of these stunts yourself.
Jared Kirby
I’ve done a chunk. Fight stage combat in actors fighting on film is different than stunt work. They’re similar, but they’re very different in the sense that, for me, this is the way that I break it down now. If you’re an actor fighting on film, or stage or stage combatant, when you’re done with a fight, you should be in the same condition that you started in. Just really tired, right? When you’re a stunt person, you may be bruised. You may be bloody, but you shouldn’t be broken. That’s the rules. So I have taken bottles to the head, oh yeah, those breakaway bottles. Yeah, they’re synthetically made so that they look correct, but they’re meant to break. So a beer bottle, even a wine bottle, coffee cups, I’ve done. Those are fine.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, Jared, this explains a lot.
Jared Kirby
This is well after all the insanity. I was definitely dropped on my head. So but on Bluebloods, I took a decanter to the head. And even though it’s a breakaway piece that has to be made thicker than a regular bottle. And so that one, definitely pieces cut me up a little bit. So there’s a little bit of blood, did it twice, little more blood, it again, it’s all superficial, and it was all just put a little ointment on it and move on. But in stage combat, that should never happen. Because these are the actual actors, the primaries that are doing it, so they should never be injured in any way. They should never be even bruised. But as stunts, we have to have this skill set to know how to take those kinds of things. And then also build skill sets that stage combat people don’t need, like, I’ve been doing a lot of stunt driving now. Which is so much fun. Fire burns. So you can see in my stunt reel I’ve done burns. You’ll get to see. I don’t know if I included it but I did a fire sword fight against a staff guy and then he lights me up with that. And falls, we consider anything that’s lower than 30 feet to be a low fall. I’m only comfortable up to like 15, 20 feet falling off something.
Guy Windsor
Up to 30 feet is a low fall. 30 feet is probably taller than my house. I live in little two storey house.
Jared Kirby
Yep, that’s a low fall. So high falls are 30 feet and higher.
Guy Windsor
So how do you survive a fall from, say 20 feet?
Jared Kirby
it’s important to land on your back and flat. So the two biggest dangers are called piking. So if your butt goes in first, because you’re in kind of a V, or if you’re not landing properly.
Guy Windsor
But presumably you’re landing on something designed for that.
Jared Kirby
Oh, 100%.
Guy WIndsor
I mean, if you were actually jumping off the house, you want to land on your feet and hope for the best.
Jared Kirby
Yes and no. So if you’re ever actually jumping off something, and you need to save yourself, what you want to do is you want to land on your feet. But at the moment of impact, you want to go into a roll and dissipate that energy before, if that energy goes straight down, you’re going to shatter your legs, pelvis, like everything is going to break depending on the height of the fall. But if you tap the ground with your feet and immediately go into a roll, then you dissipate that energy.
Guy Windsor
Right. Okay, for stunt falls, you’re landing flat on your back on a prepared surface.
Jared Kirby
Yep. Pads. Based on the height of the fall, there’s a minimum amount of padding that you’re going to want.
Guy Windsor
What is the most dangerous stunt you’ve ever done?
Jared Kirby
A fall. I haven’t done big huge things. But the one that I did on a show was an eight foot fall in an elevator shaft. And so the fall wasn’t a concern, an eight foot fall, not that big a deal. But because the elevator shaft is only seven and a half feet deep, you cannot actually fall the way that you want to, or you’ll crash your head into the wall. So you have to know how to take some distance out so that you can fall in a straighter line. But if you take too much distance out, you fall straight on your head. So it was this balancing act where we had to go through the rehearsal. And thank God, we did it on a stage, they built an elevator shaft to look like the location. And for filming purposes, they actually had a fake wall in the back. So for rehearsals, we were able to open up that wall and make our mistakes. And yeah, definitely, there were two of us that had to do that fall, and there would have been injuries. So we did the rehearsal, and we figured that out. But then for shooting purposes, they had to have that wall closed.
Guy Windsor
That’s funny, because as everyone would have thought, what’s the most dangerous stunt you’ve ever done: either a really high fall or being set on fire or something like that. But no, it’s an eight foot fall, but because of the constraints, you can’t do the usual falling technique. That’s fascinating.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, that’s where it gets interesting. So a lot of stunts somebody once put it at as calculated risk. So we go in, we look at it and go, here’s everything that can go wrong. We solve for all the problems that can be solved for. You don’t do anything that you think is going to hurt you. Like nobody, no stunt person goes out there and goes well I’ll do it anyway.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it will just be a broken leg, I’ll be fine.
Jared Kirby
It’s insane. But realizing that everything is lined up and as safe as possible, and something could go wrong. And it’s usually something unforeseen.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Now, we do have to discuss historical martial arts events because you’re one of those few people who have actually put on historical martial arts events consistently over quite a long period. So how did the ISMAC, the International Swordfighting and Martial Arts Convention begin?
Jared Kirby
If we take people back to, I think ‘95 is when Ken Frenger started the Western Martial Art Yahoo group. And that’s how a lot of us met first. That’s the first time I talked to Stefan Dieck, Steven Hand, William Wilson, a lot of these people that I started to get to know. And we were comparing talking, it was a great forum. And so through that, Greg Mele, Mark Rector, everybody was on this. And I think it was through that forum that Greg decided to have the Chicago Swordplay Guild gathering in 1999. And this is what we now look at as the first WMAW. Didn’t have the title at the time, but it’s definitely the first time we all got together in person and got to meet and fight and learn. And there were already some interesting, colourful folks there that have long since gone. But yeah, it was a wonderful event. And one of the people that I met, there was John Lennox. And you cannot imagine my surprise to find somebody else who was also a stage combat person into historical fencing, and thought that the martial integrity of a fight mattered. You shouldn’t just be making up fantastical stuff, let’s actually ground it in reality. So we connected right away. And we had such a great time at this event that we’re like, this is great. We should do something like this, but also something like Paddy Crean. So the Paddy Crean event was a stage combat event that included historical martial arts, and the WMAW was a historical martial arts event. So we wanted to do kind of the flip side of the Paddy Crean coin, and have a historical martial arts event that had stage combat as well. And that’s where it started. Because John said, well, I teach at a college, I could get a space. And I said, well, I know the historical fencing people that I would want at an event. So I’ll do the teachers, I’ll create the schedule, you figure out the space, you make sure we can do this, then we can have an event and it did happen. It was wonderful. It’s funny to think of it now because at that time, we had two tracks of classes. So when you came, you could choose Class A or B.
Guy Windsor
Wow, revolutionary.
Jared Kirby
Crazy, right? Just to fast forward to CombatCon now. You can take a 11 classes at the same time, typically. Or be in tournaments or do that, it’s just such a different world. And so yeah, so we did. We did ISMAC that way for, I think, three, four years where we were bringing the worlds together, but really the stage combat and stuff like that it just wasn’t sticking and wasn’t fitting as well. So I think it was around 2003/2004 that we started to concentrate just on European Martial Arts.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So I remember 2001 I had just started my school and I thought I needed to get out there a bit. And so I contacted you long after the event was basically already organized. Because it was in July, I think, and I started my school in March. I probably contacted you in like April or May and said Jared, can I come and teach a class at your event, please? And you’re like, well, Guy our budget is done and we can’t give you any money for flights and stuff. But if you get here, you can definitely teach a class. Right, fine. Okay, so I flew to New York, and that’s what I got your photocopies and whatnot. And then I went to Lansing, and had a fantastic time. And at the end of the event, you came up to me and said, Guy, we actually made a profit. So to help you with your flights, here is our profit and it was $50. Thank you!
Jared Kirby
Yeah, my goal was I wanted to take care of all the instructors. There just wasn’t ever any money in these things.
Guy Windsor
Sure, but, one thing that ISMAC was absolutely brilliant at was you guys looked after us instructors superbly well. Like that one time when you had polled the instructors, we were all in a room together and the organisers said okay, so what can we do to make this better for you guys? And I just said, well actually I need someone to carry my bags and a concubine. And so the next time I went to a class, somebody came up to me and said, Mr. Windsor, I’m going to carry your bag. And they carried it to the next class. Then when I got to my hotel room that night, there was a fluffy sheep in my bed.
Jared Kirby
We aim to please.
Guy Windsor
You took me at my word.
Jared Kirby
That same year, somebody said a cappuccino maker. And a next year we had a cappuccino maker in the green room.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff we got up to in the evenings are my favorite memories.
Guy Windsor
I’m not sure how many of those should be aired, but there were definitely pranks of a legendary level.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. The pranks. I mean, that is a whole show. But I just remember making up a song about you while I was drinking. I only got the one verse out, which was that something like, this is a song about Guy. And then I cracked up laughing because I had to explain it to everybody. I was like, you see, it’s funny, because his name is Guy. And he’s a guy.
Guy Windsor
Oh, and he’s the British Finnish Guy.
Jared Kirby
Oh, that’s what it was. It was the British Finnish Guy. Yes.
Guy Windsor
For some reason, you found that hysterically funny. I’m not sure how much company you had in that.
Jared Kirby
Oh, yeah, probably very little. But I also don’t remember noticing.
Guy Windsor
I also seem to remember that there was some fencing with sharps in the hotel lobby at one point. Not sharp swords. But like, 19th century sharp where you have like a one centimeter blade sticking out the end of your foil?
Jared Kirby
Oh, no, I think it was thumbtacks.
Guy Windsor
Thumbtacks. There we go. That was it. Stick a thumb tack on the end of a foil and play with that.
Jared Kirby
Through a rubber button. Yeah, I can imagine people doing that. Because we were also doing the horse and rider single stick.
Guy Windsor
But also, but more seriously, I remember John did a pirate combat thing on an actual ship. In the middle of Lansing.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, he wanted to do boarding actions. And I was like, yeah, but it’s not boarding actions if it’s not on a ship, you have to get a ship. And I was like, whatever. And then he went out and he got an actual boat that does events down the river. And they let us come out there and do the whole boarding actions class on a boat that was moving down the river. Amazing.
Guy Windsor
That’s genius.
Jared Kirby
We tried to approach the Treasure Island and Vegas to do the same thing in CombatCon. They didn’t return our calls.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Jared Kirby
The second volume of staging Shakespeare’s violence.
Guy Windsor
Okay. What is left to say?
Jared Kirby
Well, it’s a two volume series. So 20 plays are in this first volume that’s out and we have 20 more to do. So, my co-author has done all his work, and I’m driving him insane with taking little chunks of my part of it out. I am way behind deadline. Which par for the course for me?
Guy Windsor
Well, I mean, you do seem to get quite a lot done. I mean, you have several books out and it’s not like you can’t finish things. So what’s stopping you finishing this one?
Jared Kirby
A lot of it is the focus on stunts right now. That’s actually been paying off and the training time, I’m training with a group of some people now where, I mean when you can see palpable growth every month, I can look at a video from just a month ago and go, wow, I’m so much better. And I still have so much to do. That excites me. I learned a very valuable lesson in COVID that I am more of an extrovert than I realised. I always identified myself as an introvert. I love my friends, the people that I already know, and that I’m comfortable with, small groups, wonderful. Big groups, not so much. Strange being a performer, you think I would love a stage. But I don’t. But what I realised that I missed was the process of getting it, of learning. And I realised that that’s what I love about being a teacher. I love that moment where a student gets it, and they’ve grown. And they’re better at it because of that. And then I realised I don’t care which side of the coin I’m on. I love that experience as a teacher. But I love that experience as a student when I’m the one having that growth. So there’s a lot of that right now, CombatCon has just grown into this big beast. So many heads and so many things that need to be done. So that takes up a lot of time. And then these other really interesting ideas come up and I have to say yes. So for example, the week before CombatCon, Simone Belli, Italian stunt coordinator, and I are going to work with Anthony de Longes, and we’re doing a week long, Old West stunt experience. So we’re going to be living and training at the top of a mountain in California for a week. At the end of the week, we’ll be filming some stunt shorts. Simone had this idea and I was like, yeah, I have to do that with you. That’s wonderful, let’s do it. But then coordinating that, setting up the schedule. My stage combat company here in New York, we’re now running four classes a week, we have a summer intensive coming up where it’s a week-long training that culminates in live performances in New York City.
Guy Windsor
You’re not going to be doing any writing during that period.
Jared Kirby
So yeah, basically, from July 6, oh, July 6, I think, we haven’t solidified this. But speaking of this changing people’s lives, a pair met in my fencing class 13 years ago. And they just reached out because they’re now getting married. They asked me to officiate the wedding.
Guy Windsor
Oh, wow. Fantastic.
Jared Kirby
And it just lands perfectly. It’s the day before I leave. And then I’m gone for five weeks. Yeah, so that’s definitely getting in the way. I have about a million other ones. If I had a month, and the second book was done, one of the projects that I want to dig into because my master’s thesis for the Martinez Academy was on di Grassi’s system. And so what I love about that period, and I want to delve into so much more, is that era of sidesword, of comparing his approach and then, you know, going right down the line with Viggiani, dall’Agocchie, Marozzo. So those are the big ones that I want to really do a deep comparison and contrast and, you know, a deep dive.
Guy Windsor
So there’s actually quite a lot of best ideas you haven’t acted on, because you’ve got too many things you are acting on.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. And that’s what makes all of them take so much longer.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, fair enough. Okay, if I was to hand you a million dollars, or similar, enormous sum of imaginary money to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide, how would you spend it?
Jared Kirby
I even had time with this. And there’s just too much. One of the things that I find interesting what I would love to get back to, part of the money would go into the social media platform you just built. I think it is brilliant.
Guy Windsor
Jared is talking about swordpeople.com. To which of course, all listeners are sword people, and therefore should join, just saying, carry on.
Jared Kirby
Because the idea is to try to get back to what we got to experience with these kinds of forums early on. Which was civil discussion. And human beings who are actually interested in the information and know what they know and know what they don’t.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And the two keys to that is, there’s no anonymity on the platform. You don’t have to use your name that’s on your driving license, but you have to use a name that you are known by in the community. So if you have an SCA name, then you can use that, for instance. But people have to know who they’re talking to. And there is absolutely zero tolerance for any kind of misbehavior. And because it’s my platform, if I need to, I can just throw people off, and there is no recourse, there is no mercy. It’s like you behave like a dick, you’re gone. As yet, it hasn’t happened. I have had to ask a couple of people to actually put their names instead of just their initials on their profile. But those are the only things that have come up. And you know, and a couple of things. Somebody who’s using English as their second or third language has said something in a way that could be read as a bit unpleasant. But with a bit of context, and whatever, it is clear, they weren’t trying to be a dick, so that’s fine. But it’s like moderation, active human moderation, and no anonymity. And suddenly, people behave like nice people.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, it’s, it’s funny, I just saw this quote. And I love it so much, so simple. But it said, “your beliefs do not make you a better person, your behaviour does.”
Guy Windsor
That’s good. That’s very good.
Jared Kirby
And that’s it. Getting back to where people’s egos are not a part of the discussion, where it’s about the information. And the goal is to learn, not to showboat, not to aggrandise. So if everybody has that goal, personally, I’m interested in more specific individual training times. So like I was saying, I would love to have and create these environments for people that are well versed in a subject to get together and compare notes and just be a part of that. And if it’s on a subject that I do know a lot about, then I’ll be a literal part of that. But like I was saying, I love learning.
Guy Windsor
So you’d use the money to sort of organise, amongst other things, some way of supporting more advanced practitioners to get together to actually advance the art.
Jared Kirby
Yes. Because if you go back, I started running major events in 2000 with ISMAC, and it’s 2023. Right? I’m still not good at it. I’ve just learned a lot along the way. But the goal has always been to increase exposure to the public about what we do. And that’s why ISMAC had to morph into CombatCon. We needed a bigger platform, a bigger stage, because that growth potential it kind of fizzled off, even though it was a wonderful event. So now we’ve got this big thing in Vegas to help spread the word. Now I used to think I just want everything translated. And now I understand I don’t want everything translated. I want everything translated well. There’s a lot of bad translations being done and put out there now.
Guy Windsor
And some of them are contemporary. I mean, like, the translation of di Grassi into English in 1570, was it? When you compare it to the original Italian it’s like, oh my God. But it stood as di Grassi for English speakers for 400 years.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. It’s amazing. So yeah, I think it would be about at this point, the explosion has happened. And so now I think it’s time to get back down to curating and cultivating the material so that we don’t end up doing what the Victorians did. Where it’s just, it’s fine if it’s hearsay, people think that they are doing a system of fencing because they’re watching five different people’s videos on it, who all agree, and then that must be the answer. Now they’re engaging in arguments without ever opening a primary source. No, we have to get back to actually having that knowledge and engaging with that foundation under you.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Back to the original sources.
Jared Kirby
Yeah, that’s what makes it historical.
Guy Windsor
It’s the H isn’t it? The H in Historical Martial Arts.
Jared Kirby
If you’ve gotten your information from Google and YouTube, you’re not doing a historical art until you’ve done that digging.
Guy Windsor
Or you might be doing a historical art, but there’s no way to know.
Jared Kirby
Yeah. And again, it’s not a judgement when I say that. That’s part of what I love about CombatCon, there are tons of things happening there that I’m not interested in, personally, but I love that people are. And what I really want is for everybody to find their expression. If you want to fight in tournaments, and you want to win, no matter what the treatises say, you’re not interested in that? Great, go and compete because you know yourself.
Guy Windsor
We’ve had guests on the show who are tournament fencers with no real interest in historical sources. And people who are very much into the test cutting side of things, and people are very much into the stage combat, but not so much the historical stuff. We’re all, at the end of the day, sword people. And we overlap in all sorts of areas. To my mind is basically it boils down to trading standards. Are you describing what you’re doing truthfully?
Jared Kirby
Do you know that what you’re doing is what you’re doing?
Guy Windsor
Someone’s doing SCA heavy combat, and they say I’m doing SCA heavy combat, that’s true. Not that I’ve seen this, but if just as a hypothetical situation, they are doing their armored fighting with a rattan stick in the SCA fashion and they present that to the public as actual medieval combat. That’s where I’d have a problem. It’s a different thing.
Jared Kirby
What I found, for me, especially at CombatCon, there’s so many different kinds of people. And what I realised is that, if you’re walking around and you think you’re cool, because of your sword geekery, you’re already wrong. We are all just geeks who take this very seriously, like my traditional martial arts that I teach and train people all the time, I take very seriously when we’re training. And I’m extremely passionate about that. But it doesn’t make me cool.
Guy Windsor
No. It just makes you a fan, basically. It makes you a Capoferro fanboy.
Jared Kirby
We have this event called The Time Traveler’s ball is our big party at CombatCon on Saturday nights. And what I love about that is that that is the time when everybody comes and sees that they’re all just passionate geeks about what they are. And at our core, that’s our similarity. That’s where we’re all the same. And I don’t care if you hit people with steel or plastic or plastic that lights up, you’re just a sword geek and that’s cool if you’ve embraced that.
Guy Windsor
I think that is a brilliant place to finish. It’s been great talking to you Jared, thanks so much for joining us.
Jared Kirby
This was wonderful, thank you.
