Biceps, chamber, hip, point. Thrust, slash, cover. The rhythmic shouts come from a kali master instructor, and they’re echoed by hundreds of students who are mimicking his every move. It’s part of the training that’s taking place at the 2018 Martial Arts SuperShow in Las Vegas.

In attendance are police officers, former SWAT team members, Special Forces operatives, U.S. Marines, and ordinary martial artists representing disciplines that range from krav maga and taekwondo to Brazilian jiu-jitsu to kung fu san soo.

Men, women, and children from all walks of life have assembled in the Bellagio ballroom to learn pekiti tirsia kali from one of the most visible exponents of the art, a man named Apolo Ladra. Let your mind wander, and the clack of their kali sticks can evoke images from different eras and locales.

Maybe the sound is the byproduct of Filipino farmers working their scythes in the field. Maybe it’s the noise of riflemen firing, reloading, and refiring across revolutionary battlefields.

The strikes reverberate beyond the ballroom walls. They’re universal, all-encompassing, drawn from the pulse of an indigenous Filipino fighting art forged over hundreds of years. The resonance is material, and for the stick wielders, it’s spiritual.

Ladra’s role is to serve as a bridge that spans centuries and continents. He’s out to inspire the next generation to learn pekiti tirsia as it was passed to him by the legendary Leo T. Gaje Jr.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL

The art of kali extends into the martial, mental, and cultural dimensions of human exertion. Its practicality derives from native arts adapted to intrusive circumstances. How to fend off an invader? How to adapt to his method of invasion?

It’s arguable that no nation knows this dynamic like the Philippines, where the traditional culture has absorbed a barrage of foreign influences on everything from religion to commerce to combat.

For centuries, incursions and occupations by the Spanish, Americans, and Japanese forced Filipinos to adapt, conceal, or face the eradication of their cultural expressions, including the martial arts.

Essentially, Filipino warriors and the populations they were traditionally bound to defend found a way to unfetter themselves from foreign rule. One way, ironically, was to serve as the fighting force on Spanish galleons as they embarked on imperialistic tours of the South Pacific. The fighting style of the Filipinos was so foreign to the enemies of the Spanish that it couldn’t be defeated.

Fast-forward 300 years. Because of their exposure in seminars and magazines, as well as online and in theaters, the Filipino martial arts are well-known to the masses. In fact, it’s easy to overlook how long they’ve been in the public eye.

Bruce Lee wielded doble baston in Enter the Dragon (1973). Jeff Speakman whirled makeshift escrima sticks in The Perfect Weapon (1991). More recent flicks like the Jason Bourne series (starting in 2002) have featured intricately choreographed, lightning-quick, brutally satisfying kali scenes.

In just a few decades, the Filipino arts have gone from underground to spectacle, and that’s put them on the radar of all martial artists.

MASTERFUL

No one represents the full dimensions of the art of the blade like Apolo Ladra, a Filipino native whose father was chief of police of the province of Batangas, birthplace of the balisong (butterfly knife). Ladra spent his youth in Baltimore, teaching taekwondo.

Then he decided to return to his roots and dedicate his career to propagating the Filipino martial arts, which he learned from Gaje, inheritor of pekiti tirsia. Ladra expresses the art of kali with subtlety and immediacy — during the past two years, the master, now in his 50s, has fought in full-contact stick matches in the Philippines, wearing a fencer’s helmet as his only armor.

In the hundreds of seminars he conducts yearly in the West, Ladra conveys a simple dictum: Learn to teach, teach to learn.

To get a sense of the master’s devotion to the art, you need only talk to those he’s taught. For his students, pekiti tirsia represents the most effective, efficient, and all-encompassing martial art, an assertion they base on its physical as well as mental dimensions.

Matthew “Dutch” Hemker holds a fourth-degree black belt in taekwondo and first degrees in krav maga, Shaolin kung fu, and the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. He spent 10 years on active duty in the Corps and currently works as a contract trainer for the military. He teaches combat, survival, and self-defense through the Warrior Training Group in Hampstead, North Carolina.

Hemker has trained with Ladra for three years, and kali has become the foundation of his personal and professional life. “When people ask me about martial arts, I ask them, ‘What are you trying to achieve?’” he says. “The answer comes in the most bare, direct terms: How do I defend myself against an attack?”

Many consider krav maga the default no-nonsense martial arts approach to hand-to-hand engagement, but Hemker notes similarities between the Israeli system and the Filipino art. “Both krav maga and kali deal with tactical threats with a problem-solving mindset,” he says. “But kali delves into the side answers of self-defense.”

In essence, kali can mesh with virtually any martial art. “The skill sets blend extremely well,” Hemker says. “It’s modular and scalable. I could train a civilian house mom with basic techniques or could scale up the level of aggressiveness for a soldier or law-enforcement officer training to survive being stabbed or bludgeoned out on the beat. In its depth and range, there’s nothing more effective than kali.”

For soldiers and cops, such skills are not only practical but also essential to survival. In the United States alone, there were nearly 130,000 assaults with a knife or other cutting weapon in 2016. Assaults with weapons ranging from bare hands to blunt objects topped 230,000 that year.

Officer Jeff David, who spent two decades on the Pembroke Pines, Florida, police force, teaches close-quarters combat at the Miami Dade College School of Justice. Like Hemker, he considers Ladra’s kali indispensable.

“Six or seven years ago, I went to a friend who runs a martial arts school and said I was looking for someone who could teach effective baton skills,” David says. “He referred me to Apolo.”

The class that Ladra put on emphasized hand-to-hand combat even though it was designed to use sticks. “A ton of people showed up, and we didn’t have enough sticks,” says David with a laugh. “[Apolo] adapted his teaching. We essentially learned a Filipino approach to upright grappling. It was amazing. It involved many of the techniques we use and teach [at the police academy], but Apolo taught us why they work. That why, that how, the mental approach — that’s the force of his teaching.”

David’s interest in kali quickly progressed to sticks. “The biggest attraction for me, as a cop, was the baton,” he says. “[It’s] an incredible tool for grappling and control, with techniques that have been around a long time but forgotten. Locking up arms, doing takedowns, holding [perps] with the baton — it’s a lost art. Apolo’s bringing it back.”

David also emphasizes Ladra’s absorption of multiple martial arts — hard styles, soft styles, striking, grappling — and his transmission of useful techniques in the context of kali.

“The training I got in just six months was worth all the training I’d had in my 20-year career,” he says. “He simplifies everything. Cops can’t take a chance on doing anything fancy. Every patrol, every stop — it can be life or death. No time to mess around or get fancy.”

OFFENSIVE

Offense, counter-offense, re-counter-offense. Ladra’s kali is that simple. And that complex. “Fighting is only fun if it’s always my turn,” he says with a smile. “When I fight, it’s always my turn.”

How does this translate? Quickness.

A snap of the wrist, twitched twice or a hundred times, a fluent flurry of irrepressible offensive force, going, going until you win. That’s the central tenet of kali. No hesitation. No mental reservation. Leave the opponent no space or time to maneuver. Not for an inch, not for a microsecond. He’s sucked into the vacuum of your overwhelming attack.

The kali approach is to hit him with the force of an avalanche but with total precision and subtle articulation. For Ladra, the fundamental principle is simple: Everything is offense.

Attack, counterattack, re-counterattack. Re-counter, re-counter, re-counter as necessary. Even the sound of the word “at-TACK” expresses the action of the hands or sticks or blades.

Attack is embedded even in every block and parry. There is no passive element in pekiti tirsia.

FLOWING

But kali is not crude.

Although born of battles in jungles and alleys, on streets and ship decks and battlefields, it’s far from messy. One session with Ladra and it starts to feel ingrained: This is an art as refined as painting, as poetry. It’s that elusive air that, ironically, keeps its practitioners training toward a perfection that’s impossible to attain. It’s a pursuit. Kali fighters call it “flow.”

“When you’ve moved through those thousands of simple moves, you start to find your flow,” Ladra says. “Flow is possibility, finding new patterns, new ways to move that come from your nerves versus your active brain. As you train, flow becomes natural, and kali fighters learn to feel, intercept, and return the flow of other fighters.”

This isn’t at all mystical. Flow is the function of the muscular repetitions that are central to kali. It’s based on physical principles that were first noticed for their roles in different aspects of Filipino life, from farming to dancing to animal husbandry.

Flow is defined as “the continuity of a kali fighter’s tactical execution of offense, counteroffense, and re-counteroffense.” This end result is movement without thought. You must learn to forget. As Gaje likes to say, “Forgetting is knowing.”

Repetition, again, is fundamental. Kali training requires tens of thousands of repetitions of sequences that range from the simple to the subtly nuanced, from strikes with a single stick to blade disarms, joint locks, traps, and takedowns.

REALISTIC

Realism, in the sense of putting pressure on an opponent, is key to Ladra’s teaching method. In seminars he runs for karate and taekwondo schools around the world, consequences are central to the training.

Getting hit with the point of a rubber knife, for instance, is less realistic than the jab of a blunt aluminum blade. The latter changes you physically and nervously.

The realism extends to the drills. “In a practice setting, when you’re slashing and thrusting, you might stop just before the tip of the blade hits the target,” Ladra says. This results in rigidity, which can be lethal.

Thousands of repetitions of a stunted strike mean that the strike will be stunted — and likely fall short when it counts. Instead, Ladra says, practice striking through the target.

MOBILE

Like so many elements of kali, the movements flow from instinctive, ingrained Filipino habits of work. Nothing demonstrates this better than the art’s footwork. “The closer you are to your opponent,” Ladra says, “the fewer angles they have on which to attack.” He teaches students to move in an open V-formation, one adopted from the way Filipino farmers spread rice seed from baskets held at the hip.

“They do this for hours,” Ladra says. “Step in, strike (toss a handful of seed), step back and thrust (put the hand into the basket for more).” The circular motion opens a periphery of perception from which one can intercept multiple attacks.

There’s another strategic aspect to the footwork and motions of the art.

“The rice fields of the islands only come up to here,” Ladra says, placing his hand just below his chest. “So when a fighter in the fields makes a slash, he also moves down, below the stalks.” He disappears for an instant, and when he returns, it’s to slash again — from a new and unforeseen angle.

SMOOTH

Like in so many martial arts, the force, speed, and power of a kali strike don’t come from one muscle group or one motion. The torque generated by twisting hips combines with the muscles of the torso and arm to accelerate strikes with the stick.

Think of the patterns available as the simple workings of a complex machine. You have gears in a piece of machinery, which turn and interact. You want them to turn smoothly; you don’t want them to grind, to stutter, to halt. “You say you don’t want to throw a wrench into the gears, right?” Ladra says. “We make smooth movements constantly. That’s how you generate speed — you make force and open up angles of attack.

“When you mix the angles and lines, it’s like a web. Hence the idea of sinawali (weaving). In the spider’s web, there are openings, but we seal them through circular lines with the feet, the hands, the weapons. That takes away those gaps.”

Think of old-school basket weaving.

The Filipinos are famous for their woven wares, including traditional sleeping mats called banig. These are hand-woven by the manubanig — literally, a person who weaves banig — from dried sea grass that grows in the rice fields.

How do the manubanig weave so precisely? Through the very method that’s been mentioned repeatedly here.

It’s the same one used by all students who train in pekiti tirsia under Apolo Ladra.

Apolo Ladra’s website is artofblade.com.

Photography by Brandon Snider

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