Week 3
We continued to work on stance, footwork, lunging and stringere. New techniques introduced were the contracavazione (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o0uZRrxvgg) and the contracavazione di tempo. In the contracavazione di tempo, rather than circling the opponent's blade, the blade is regained simply by changing line, intercepting the opponent's blade in the middle of their disengage, followed immediately by a lunge. This works when the measure is somewhat narrow (the cavazione is thus relatively slow and the attack very fast) so the attack occurs in "time of the hand" or "time of the body".
The specific example we looked at was that of one fencer moving forwards taking stringere while the other retreated on each cavazione. At some point the first fencer has narrowed the measure (forward motion being naturally faster than backwards motion) and, rather than disengaging in response to the opponent's cavazione, intercepts the cavazione half way (by just moving the point from one line to the other) and thrusts.