The Baryshnikov of Muay Thai | Karuhat Sor. Supawan
what follows is a photographic and analytic-poetic essay on the unspeakable Karuhat Sor. Supawan. It flows from my edited stills from the most recent Muay Thai Library documentation (83 min - watch that here as a patron) of him and his style, but encompasses my now, perhaps 6 years of knowing him, studying him, standing with him, feeling his fish-like creations in the space of the ring, but also in Life itself. It is my photographic expression of him, and my continuity of thoughts. He may be, under certain qualifications, the greatest fighter who ever fought.
Read this on desktop to see it in its intended design, mobile kind of shrinks things down.
If you are unfamiliar with him, start here:
his switching, bewitching footwork, above
The immediate appeal of Karuhat is that he seems to move unlike any other fighters before or after him. It's not just the qualities of his movements - that they be beautiful, or rivenly unexpected - it is the way that they seem to ride on the very edge of rhythm itself. If fighting is more than just imposing your will upon another, but the art of it about the recognition of patterns, the presentation of pattern, so that that Willpower can find issue, Karuhat seems to walk on his own ledge, his own precipice of care, concern and management. He is always presenting, something to be understood in the context of Thailand's love of the Aesthetic, that presentation is at least half the battle of Truth. His ruup, his cadence, is woven right down into his soul and body.
One of the things, the keys, to understanding Karuhat's muay, something I've digested over these many years of filming him in the training ring, but also walking with him through crowds, up to the ring, into coffee shops on long road trips where gas stations serve as our oasis, is that you have to watch him all the time. In the stills above his muay is already there. The seedling is in every posture, in the lines of his body. The relaxation that is so prized by Thailand's fight aesthetic pervades. Look at the infinity in the casual and the uncasual in the above stills. If you are around him you can tell that it relates to his chest. A rising chest somehow levitates for him, as a part, a posting of his dignity. It isn't that his chest puffs out, but it - just below the collarbone, has a force, it's the bow of his boat. Once you see it, recognize it, you see it everywhere. It is the keystone, perhaps, to his flowing Roman arch.
This photo, above, I'm taken with. It's just one frame in a river of movement but it speaks to his curious feeling of relaxed springing. This curvature from shoulder to foot even does not seem optimum, or of a prototype of boxing mechanics, but rather expresses himself, his particular relationship to slackness, curvature, load, and perhaps most importantly...Time. In this posture for me you can see his delay built in. The left leg sits there almost hidden, but it is quietly loaded. His chest, that sub-collarbone pride, is postured. He appears, just as a visage, defensive, waiting, perhaps even baiting, but there are so many temporal contradictions built in. The upperbody is closed. The front leg advancing, the rear in delayed attack. There are so many potentialities in this simple, catlike, baiting moment. Elegant.
The Play With Neutrality, Advance and Cover
Following from the above, and in this series I hope you can see his fundamental flex, as it is part of a presentation. The curvature of his lines, the force implied by his posture change, the directions of his occlusions are all playing with Time. He is advancing ahead of himself, his is delaying his attack even further behind that presentation, he is nesting his possibilities within his cover, so that when he unfurls himself it not only can't be seen, when it is seen by judges and gamblers it has a brilliant suddenness, like a crack in the sky. This is the lettering of the soul.
In the above the posture accepts the strike. This is a significant score in Thailand's Muay Thai, but his posture lies. His chest lies. Everything is a beautiful, momentary lie. But, this lie is for something more. It is what give power to his melt. His melt is famous. It is surreal, it looks impossible. It's impossibility lies within this lie. This presentation creates the melt. It makes it so you cannot even know where you are in the staging of things.
It's so hard to quantify the depth of this fighting technique, because it comes out of much more human things. Like how a man stands in line at the grocery store, or how he pumps gas. It's how he shakes hands or wais. It's how what is in reserve is communicated or hidden, its the way our potentialities as persons are symbolized and stylized. It is why you can see his muay in all the in-between frames. What is amazing about this is just how potent and electric he was as a fighter, while so much of what you can see is about what is hidden, slack, fallen, delayed. It's a beautiful magic of the pedestrian, something that is, I believe, unique to Thailand's Muay Thai, the way elite fighters expressed themselves in violence within the pedestrian.
The Myth of the Pedestrian
The Thais have a phrase you'll hear in gyms when westerners are being taught now to execute a technique. Tamachat. It means Natural, how you would just do something. You have this beautiful myth-shape in the History of Kung Fu cinema of the Natural Man. It's found in Jet Li's performance of the historical Wong Fei-Hung. It is a marital art that draws on the natural states of a body at rest, or the natural potentialities of the body. Leaving beside the more esoteric philosophies of Martial Arts, and the upper reaches that masters of those arts may reach, Thailand's fighting arts indeed has such a principle. Samart Payakaroon, himself a legend of Femeu, in his Library Session teaches just this sort of efficacy, this principle. Not as a rule, but as an exemplar. You can see Sylvie's respond to and learn from it here. She remarks that this god of the sport stands like a man who is standing at a bus stop. Not "get in your fighting stance", but just stands. He stands. This is what you get in Karuhat. It's not just in the higher reaches of his fighting style, his pristine technique - which westerners imagine as somehow technically honed, but how he walks across a room, sits in a chair. It is both stylized to express his version of pride and masculinity, and also completely and utterly natural. You can see it in all the frames. It is a kerneling and a presentation. It is a manipulation of Time itself.
The chest. It is where we breathe, but also it is where we project much of our social force. In the above, almost accidentally, Karuhat is touching this core principal of the self when talking about what makes his Golden Kick so special, so unidentifiable in its particulars of force, defying imitation and mechanics. It's as if he is saying: From here. Sylvie's chest is concave, she is feeling the message, taking it in...in its opposite. This is the life force of his kick. In the stills higher up you can see the postures from which he hides his kick, where he lets it lie fallow in the lie of his chest, playing with Time Travel. But here, in the chest, just below the collarbone, is from where the movement comes, in a suspension.
This is not a mechanization of the heart. You cannot make the heart do this. These movements are not about pieces put in cogs. But...it is not just a feeling either. It's an ascension perhaps. An ascension of the Spirit. For this reason - and I have seen countless endlessly beautiful techniques in Thailand, things that take my breath way - Karuhat is in a place nowhere else stands. He's has a ballet woven into his violence that almost denies possibility. The Muay Thai of his generation was at the height of the most brutal, accomplished fighting art on the earth, yet he held shapes like this...(below), while giving up prodigious weight in the ring.
Witness it unfold above, in slow motion, from our previous documentation...
You can watch the hour out of which these thoughts flowed, here The Rosetta Stone of Karuhat, but really this essay'd form of photos and ideas follows from the remarkable man of Karuhat himself, the privilege and brilliance of being in his company. There is something quite beautiful that a man's technique cannot be boxed and broken into parts, that it defies the export from himself, the qualities of it residing deep within his lived spirit as a man.
for more photo expression of Muay Thai: muaynoir.com
