Antoine Richard

Unlike many practitioners, Antoine's path in martial arts looks like a pretty simple story: he chose one art (Chen-style taijiquan) and diligently stuck to it - not by lack of curiosity, quite the contrary: year after year the discipline proves him to be an endless source of insights on many levels.

He started for two reasons: 1) to understand how ancient Chinese philosophy can be incorporated and applied in a fighting method, and 2) because he was eager to learn some self-defense without going head-first into fighting madness. In 2011 he dived into the Chen Yu method with one of his direct disciple, Nabil Ranné. He has been training this method ever since.

Because taiji has many facets and because all facets complement each other, it is the only “sport activity” that could permanently captivate him. Working on developing gongfu is a lifelong adventure. Curiosity can be fed forever. The constant refinement of the body awareness, the work on the architecture of one's own body, the development of fighting skills, the concentration and the sustained, patient learning of body mechanics: everything here “condenses” one's own presence.

Born in France and living in Berlin since 2008, Antoine is a CTND-certified course instructor. He is eager to share his enthusiasm for gongfu in his neighborhood, hence this page about the smaller CTND school in Berlin Friedrichshain! He also teach two weekly classes at the main CTND Berlin school in Prenzlauer Berg, where he started learning taiji in 2011. Antoine can pass on this tradition in German, English, French or Italian!

Read below my short interview from Gongfu Crew's Instagram!