Aikido master to conduct seminars this weekend

Mary Heiny, the highest-ranking female aikido instructor in North America, will teach aikido seminars on Saturday, May 17, and Sunday, May 18, in Henry Crown Field House.

Sponsored by the University of Chicago Aikido Club, the seminars will be held from 10 a.m. to noon and from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday and from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. on Sunday. The fees are $20 for each of the Saturday seminars, $25 for the Sunday seminar, or $50 for all three sessions. Admission is free for members of the University community who wish only to observe.

A sixth-degree black belt, Heiny began studying aikido under the founder of the martial art in 1968. After training in Japan, she taught aikido at the University of California in Santa Cruz and later directed a training school in Seattle. For the past several years, she has taught in Kingston, Canada. This is the first time she has taught in Chicago.

While on campus, Heiny also will be available to talk about her current work on the Riwoche Society Taklung Kagyu Text Recovery Project, an effort to use modern technology to preserve original texts that survived the People's Republic of China's invasion and continuing occupation of Tibet.

The Aikido Club regularly invites master teachers to campus and provides instruction throughout the year under three aikido black belts who are University faculty members: head instructor Don Levine, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in Sociology, and assistant instructors Eric Kolaczyk, Assistant Professor in Statistics, and Mathew Leibold, Assistant Professor in Ecology & Evolution.

For more information, contact Levine at dlok@midway.uchicago.edu.