Serak^® Djurus Volume I  

This is the first of the Instructional Series and a must-have for all serious KunTao Silat practitioners.  The breadth and depth of kuntao and silat lore that Pak Chas Clements relates is staggering.  You will see the first 8 Serak Djurus performed, demonstrated and elaborated upon like you have never seen before.

In addition to the standard practice methods, Pak Chas details the "old" practice of training djurus in a seated position.

 

Pak Chas explains the meanings of many Indonesian terms and concepts and gives a student a clear perspective of where the arts evolved from.

Pak Chas elaborates on the use and application of the knife and the stick with the djurus.

Take a trip to Colorado via DVD and spend some time learning the intricacies of kuntao and Silat Serak®.  It will be a memorable trip!
 

Review by Steve Perry:

Those of you with an interest in penjak silat, especially the Sera(k) version, could do worse than pick up a copy of the  Thunder Rock production by Steve Gartin and Chas Clements. It can be ordered off Gartin's website -- http://kuntaosilat.com/serakdjurus.htm for fifty bucks, and for my money, is worth adding to your library.

The caveat is, I don't think you can really learn silat cold from a vid. If you are already a student of the art, yeah. If you are interested in it from an academic viewpoint, there is a lot of good material here. If you are a martial arts completist, then you'll get as much from this as you will a lot of other videos.

There are some things you can pick up and apply to your own art. Kinds of strikes, and distances and such. And if you have skill in one art, you might see parallels here, but the feel of silat is such that you need at least some hands-on work with a teacher to really get it. Once
that is done, a video can be a useful adjunct, and I suspect this was as much for Chas's long-distance students as for general release.

It's a backyard production, so you get passing trucks, airplanes flying over, and a fly fisherman wading into the shot in one riverbank scene, but you can hear what Chas is saying okay most of the time, and the camera work is clear enough so you can see what he's talking about, which is all you really need anyhow.

You get two camera views, first from the front, then later in the vid, from an angle. I'd rather have seen them blended, cutting back and forth, but I wasn't the editor, so my opinion and a dime will get you ten pennies here ...

Also something of a Socratic-style monologue with a student that works pretty well.

The meat of the presentation is in the djurus, or upper body forms.  These are usually combined with langkahs, or footwork sequences, and in some schools, they are taught together, others, they are taught separately. You can thus do the djurus sans footwork, or even sitting down. Some silat arts, like tjimande (Cimande) start out this way, and West Javanese arts like Sera(k) are almost certainly connected and related to Tjimande, which is one of the oldest systems from that region.

Sera(k) has eighteen basic djurus, and Chas demonstrates the first eight. These are the seeds from which the weapons of the art are grown, and the core of the system, and you can't learn Sera without them.   (I'll drop the 'k', which is usually silent anyway, and a recent addition not used in the old country.)

Chas's djurus don't look exactly like the ones we do in Guru Stevan Plinck's branch of the art, nor do they look like the ones currently being taught by most of Victor de Thouars's gurus, or Willem de Thouars, or Paul de Thouars -- I dunno about Maruice, in Holland. None of those look like each other -- everybody tends to put a slightly different interpretation on the djurus, and sometimes they are arranged a bit different, too, but that's no big deal, as long as you don't violate the laws upon which the variations are based.

Chas also shows that you don't need to be an Olympic-class athlete to do this stuff, which is one of Sera's selling points. If you are old, crippled, and out-of-shape and you need to be able to jump up in the air and kick an apple off the top of Kareem Abdul Jabbar's head to make your fighting tricks work? You're screwed. 

Chas demonstrates the djurus, then explains them, then shows some applications from them. (Nobody actually fights using a djuru, but the motions needed to get to that are all there, and they can be practiced alone. Timing and distance require partners, and Chas doesn't try to tell you that you can become deadlier than Bruce Lee(tm) by practicing these things at home in front of your mirror by yourself.) 

Since Sera is a knife-based art, most of what you see bare can be done with a blade, or in many cases, with a stick. 

For what it would cost to take your spouse out to dinner at a so-so restaurant, this is a pretty good deal. For those of you curious as to what Chas is all about, this is a good intro. He's even lost a few pounds since the Combat Cane for Cripples video, which is not bad, either.
--
Steve Perry

Note: Serak® is a registered and trademarked term used with permission from Victor I.C. de Thouars