From my experience, in destreza texts, the authors tend to say that a tajo and a reves are performed by "describing a circle" with your sword. For the longest time, I would just draw a little circle in the air. I was confused! Was this a maneuver designed to entangle the blade? It's called a cut, but maybe "tajo" and "atajo" are more similar than I have been led to believe!
But no. Not at all.
A properly-executed tajo is performed by first rotating your hand so that your sword is in seconda. Then, move your wrist such that your sword swings around to your left. You are drawing a disc in the air with your blade. The tip will make a really big circle. Not a cone. A circle. A disc.
Halfway through, your sword will be just above your head. Completion brings your sword back around to a similar position to where it started, except that you will be in quarta. Remember that you are drawing a disc - you are not drawing a cone, you are not making a little circle in the air with your tip. Your tip will draw a big circle, one that probably almost-fully goes around your body, if viewed from above.
This should be executed primarily from the wrist, though you will almost certainly need to flex your elbow a bit in order to get through the middle portion of the tajo, when your sword's blade is directly above your head. At that point your hilt will be closer to your opponent than your tip.
The red is the location of your tip during either a full tajo or a full reves. Don't hit yourself in the head.
Similarly, in a half-tajo or half-reves you put your sword in terza. Then you move your sword along the direction of your false edge, using your wrist as much as you can but your elbow will come into play a bit. Stop the motion when your sword almost hits your own head, and your pommel is pointed away from you. Then rotate your blade in the direction you intend to cut, and make a half-disc with your blade, ending with your blade striking your opponent.
As an aside, an atajo is a simple motion. It is performed by first taking your opponent's blade defensively, with your blade on top of theirs. Then you increase the strength of your defensive position by lowering your entire sword at the same time, tip descending at the same rate as the hilt. Make sure that you keep your blades touching at the same degree of strength.
This motion pushes their downwards, limiting the geometry that they can use to perform a thrust or a cut.
As another aside, this is obviously not super-applicable to vanilla SCA rapier. In cut and thrust that sort of chop might work, but in vanilla rapier we need to perform a slice. My current solution happens when I am about 45 degrees from completion of the disc of the tajo, reves, half-tajo, or half-reves. At that point, I lock my wrist so that my blade does not extend completely. Then I complete the cut with my shoulder. This means that my blade strikes my opponent at a 45-degree angle from straight, and will naturally have a draw across them with pressure. I probably also want to cut somewhere in an X across the chest, so that my cut lands on heavy padding rather than mask.
This guy is so happy that he's getting cut along one of the four branches of that big X.
It is slower than the chop, probably is slightly defensively inferior, and happens at closer range.
Realistically though, cuts are to be used at the range where I can't really perform a disengage or yield around my opponent's blade. Because of this, the loss of distance doesn't matter. And as for the other objections to this sort of cut, those are the costs of being able to use it in SCA rapier.
The takeaway here is that integrating destreza concepts into my rapier game will give me more options when close to my opponent but not yet in dagger range. That's pretty cool, for this 45-inch-rapier-using fencer. There are some other cool things that I've been doing with destreza-esque tactics, but those belong in a separate entry.
Oh wait this is a blog. I'm supposed to end this with a question. So, where else have you found that you were completely wrong about something in a historical manual, to an almost embarrassing degree?
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