Shaolin Monks

Saturday night we joined a group of people to see a performance by the Shaolin monks. These are the kung fu fighters that are copied in so many movies, including the ever popular Mortal Kombat.

We had about 12 people seeing the show together and had one of our group called up on stage to try out cool moves (go Julio!)

You can see some of the moves we saw in this movie.

Some show highlights:

Resting on guy on 4 'spear' tips (as seen in the pic)

Top of the head flippy things (see the video)

Having 15 or so of the monks lying side-by-side on the floor like a bunch of logs pushed together. Then one more monk lays down about 3 yards past the last guy in the row and rolls towards all the other monks who are lying there. As the rolling monk approaches each of the monks that were lying there on the floor they somehow jumped straight up into the air with their body still parallel to the floor (in other words, they didn't leap up from a crouched position. They were lying on the ground with their arms by their sides and then they were simply hovering about 3-4 feet off the ground.) Meanwhile, the rolling guy was passing underneath them. The whole thing looked like some amazing human wave.

2 finger (hand?) stands

A lot of jumping to standing from the lying on your back position (like Nero in the Matrix, also in the video above)

Standing full splits where one foot was on the ground and the other was above the monks head from which position they would fall sideways and maintain the full split as they landed on the floor.