Baer Kenney began his fencing career in high school with Olympic Fencing. That changed to LARPing with his children, then Society for Creative Anachronism, Association of Renaissance Martial Arts, and then Historical European Martial Arts. In that time, he has trained karate, taekwondo, and hapkido, and established his school, Baer Swords School of Western Martial Arts in 2015. He has enjoyed every moment of teaching. Today, Baer talks about his fencing journey, his passion for teaching, and how historical fencing is trying to find a middle ground between pure martial and pure sport. All images provided by Baer Kenney.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Hello and welcome Baer! We are excited to have you here to talk about historical fencing!
Baer Kenney: It’s great to be here and I’m looking forward to it.
MAYTT: When did you get started in HEMA? What was it about historical fencing that garnered your interest rather than Eastern Martial Arts?
BK: I started in HEMA, specifically, about twelve years ago [in 2012]. I had done ARMA and SCA before that, and several other sword things before that as well.
MAYTT: How did you get yourself into the sword arts, specifically the Western variety?
BK: What I tell people is that I never stopped. When I was six years old, I was hitting my brother with a stick. Then in high school, I went into Olympic Fencing and did that for a long time and through college. I took a little break; my kids came along. I started into LARPing with them, with Boffer Swords. That got me back into steel swords. I started working at Renaissance Festivals and doing a lot of live steel fencing, and I have several scars to show from that. I advise against fighting with sharps. [Laughs] From there, I got into the SCA because I wanted to try a little bit more, get a little bit more official training. Then into ARMA. Then, I naturally moved into HEMA. It’s been a long and arduous process, but it’s been fun all along the way.
MAYTT: The training that you received from SCA, ARMA, and HEMA, how would you describe those types of training? How were they similar and different?
BK: It was on the job training, really. [Laughs] There was very little formal teaching from any of the groups. A little bit in ARMA, but SCA, they’re like, “Here! Borrow this helm and armor and then we’re going to hit you as hard as we can.” And ARMA taught me some of the stances and guard, and all that. But most of what I’ve learned has been self-taught and learning how to not get hit, not get hurt, while at the same time, scoring against my partner. So very little of my training has been formal training. Like most HEMA aficionados, I picked up the manuals. I learned from the manuals and then went into practice, found out what worked and what didn’t, and kept what worked.
I think it will be many years until that process, at all, stabilizes. I think we will continue to grow and morph as a community for another decade or two until we stabilize into anything considered a complete whole. And I kind of like that chaos.
MAYTT: It seems to be a little bit more chaos, a little bit more freedom for the practitioners to find out what works in whatever system they are doing before they can get to this stabilized or more standardized version. Is that correct?
BK: That is very correct. I am very much in favor of that. There are dozens of manuals, and some groups focus on a single manual and really get down into the nitty-gritty granularity. Others try to spread across several manuals and try to find what works for each and put them together into a new system. HEMA is big enough for all of those to join together and see what works against each other. It’s a very living, growing community and life is messy. And I like the messiness of it because it gives each of us a chance to do what we think is really valid and what we really want to do.
MAYTT: That is actually refreshing to hear because what I have heard from Eastern martial artists is that if someone deviates an inch from the standard practice, there are problems.
BK: Before I taught at the school, I was also in the Eastern traditions. I got a black belt in taekwondo and karate, and I specifically did not want my group to follow the Eastern tradition. We are very non-hierarchical, no one calls me sensei or master – they call me Baer. Nobody bows to each other; we bump fists or hug. It’s largely a difference between Western community and Eastern community. Western community is much less structured and hierarchical, while the Eastern-type community is more hierarchical. Both have significant advantages, and I’ve enjoyed both, but HEMA is not anything like the Eastern martial arts: this is this way, and this is this way, and this is this way. Now, that’s not to say that there are certain HEMA groups that say, “This is the only way to study and anyone not studying this way is wrong!” And there’s room for them too.
MAYTT: Where does your Eastern martial arts experience fit onto this timeline of training?
BK: Let’s see… I was in taekwondo for nine years, and karate for seven, and that was in my early thirties – that was right when my kids were starting to get of age, and I was starting to do Boffer fighting. So, they also were in taekwondo with me. We all did it together. That was definitely before I even started into the SCA.
MAYTT: With that, how do you feel eastern martial arts have influenced or complemented your understanding of Western historical fencing?
BK: Absolutely, yes. All of the above. It helped and hindered. You have to realize that there are a certain number of ways that the human body can effectively move and join combat. So, all forms have very similar movement styles, whether it’s jujitsu or kali, or HEMA or fencing, or whatever system you’re looking at, everybody has a specific stance designed to keep you well-balanced. They work on small movements to get into the combat quickly. You have to be very well-balanced so you can react to the situation. There’s timing. The three big tenants that we go with are balance, distance, and timing. I would argue that there is not a martial system in existence today that does not stress those exactly same three tenants. And so, everything I learned from all of my taekwondo, karate, jujitsu, and Boffer fighting, and foil fencing, all of those contributed very much to knowing how to stay the correct distance from your opponent, choosing the timing when to move into an attack, knowing how to defend.
But the detriment was that each one of them have very different subtleties in distance, specifically, but some timing. It’s been an experience. It has shown me though that all martial arts are dramatically similar. Many of my students come to me from other martial arts. I get a lot of ex-judo people, I get a lot of ex-MMA people; a lot of them are just tired of hitting the mat – “Okay, I want to stand up and hit things with a sword for a while.” They all come in with ready-made stances and sometimes that needs some adjustments. But one of the best things about HEMA is that we can take those stances, we can take those different moves and blocks and incorporate them into our moves and improve our technique at the same time they’re morphing their technique into a different distance with a sword in their hand.
I love learning from absolutely every source that can come to me, whether it’s written or verbal or just visually.
MAYTT: How did you transition from ARMA to HEMA?
BK: I actually left ARMA before the major schism came about. I spent time with a local ARMA group in town and learned a lot of the basics from them. I’ve still got my waster from those days. I was lucky enough to get out of it before everything hit the fan. I was studying on my own for several years there before I joined the HEMA community. I didn’t even know HEMA existed at the time. I didn’t join HEMA until probably around 2013 or 2014. I didn’t have any ideological “It should be this way; it shouldn’t be this way” like so many of the ARMA people jumping into HEMA had, because I took that sabbatical out for a little while.
MAYTT: You established your Baer Swords School of Western Martial Arts in 2015. What influenced your decision to open your own school? What was the goal were you trying to achieve, if at all?
BK: A lot of things. I’ve been training several people and I had more and more people come to me and say, “Hey, can you give me some time learning this. I want to learn how to do this and that.” My wife and I were actually on vacation in my hometown in Colorado and we were talking; “I don’t know how I can find time to train all these people.” She said to me, “Why don’t you just open a school?” She’s a business major, so she loves forming businesses and has formed several successful businesses. She continued, “Let’s make a school; make it official. We’ll get all of the licenses and everything.” That could work. That’s where Baer Swords School was born.
MAYTT: Before that, how did you find these individual students or how did these individual students find you to teach?
BK: Most of them were through the renaissance festival. I was working as a guard at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. And one of the things I got started there was Fight a Knight, where patrons would come in to fight us. Well, in order to do this, I had to train the other guard on how to not get clocked with a drunk college kid saying, “Ahh, I can take your head off!” and how to keep yourself safe in that situation. So, I started training them and more and more were excited, saying, “Let’s do this!” We’d be sparring with Yeoman training – we were called Yeomen of the Guard. We’d be sparring back and forth, and that’s where I met most of them. I had a lot of contacts from my old ARMA days and the SCA community.
The sword fighting community is similar to the Eastern martial arts community – it’s a small community. Everybody talks. That was the bulk of it; people saying, “Oh! You gotta try this! Let me try this thing I learned!” then people would ask, “Where’d you learn this?” “Oh, from this guy! You gotta come see him!” It was a lot of that.
MAYTT: When did you first start teaching historical fencing? What was that experience like for you?
BK: In SCA and ARMA, I was very much a student. In the SCA, I was pretty much a stupid young kid with no money, just getting bashed in the head a lot. I dropped out for that quickly because it hurt! It hurt really bad. Even in ARMA, I was a student, but ARMA is what pushed me into self-learning. Even pre-HEMA, when I was just teaching sword fighting, I was mainly instructing.
I loved teaching, I actually have a minor in education in college, so I always loved teaching. Teaching has been a joy for me. Some of my early jobs have been in teaching. But I found that there’s no money in that. So, I got into a more lucrative career, but I have never lost my joy for it. Anytime somebody says, “Hey. Show me how to do this.” I can’t help but jump in and show them. It is very much a joy.
There’s always the oh shit moments and the imposter syndrome – “Oh my god. There are so many people that know this better than I do! Why am I teaching this?” But every teacher feels that at some point or another. And the trick is just to realize, “I do know this part. I can teach this part.” And then continue training yourself, continue teaching more, until you can teach a larger and larger and larger portion. And you’re not an imposter; you’re an actual teacher. It’s a good thing to know. I was lucky enough to realize that fairly early on.
MAYTT: How did teaching in this way further your training and understanding of historical fencing?
BK: It gave me targets! [Laughs] It gave me lots of people to spar with! That was actually the biggest reason why I opened the school was because I wanted people to constantly fight with. At the time, it was once a week that we met, but I had a dozen or so people to fight with, and each one of them fought a little differently.
Being a teacher helps my skill level and hurts my skill level. It takes time away from my training, which some of my current instructors at my school gripe about sometimes, but it also gives you a unique experience. When you’re looking at a student and trying to determine why can’t they make this move work and why does it always look incorrect? And you’re cracking down, “Oh, it’s because their shoulders are like this,” or “They’re leaning far forward in their stance.” It’s about finding the specific situation that any particular student has issues with gives you insight into your own and you’re like, “Oh god. I do that. That’s why I’m having trouble doing this certain move that I’ve been working on.” So, it does help you because you’re constantly focusing on improvement. And it takes away your training time, but I would say it’s a fair trade.
I think it benefits both parties, both the teacher and the student. Though, like I said, some of my teachers disagree. They’ll take their own sabbaticals and work on their own stuff, but I’ve had two teachers do that and both of them came back saying, “You gotta let me teach more! I have to teach more!”
MAYTT: You published a book, The Joy of Sword Fighting. What factors inspired you to put your ideas to paper?
BK: Mostly vanity, to be completely frank. [Laughs] “I wonder if I can write a book?” So, I did. As my normal course of action, I did a whole bunch of research on how to write a book and how to get it out there, and everything. I found out that it’s dramatically easy if you know the tricks that a lot of the book writers do, and I’m in the process of writing a second on how to teach sword fighting. But I wanted to have a book out there and I wanted it to be something that people I’ve never met could pick up and learn some of the basic moves and get themselves started in it. That was my goal.
MAYTT: So, it sounds like you enjoyed the writing process.
BK: Oh, I did entirely. Well, I know it’s hard to tell from this interview, but I like to talk. [Laughs] I’ve never been accused of never having something to say, and the whole book I dictated it to my phone and then did a phone to text speech, cleaned it up, and then I organized it. So, the whole book was spoken and that made it really easy to write. I’m still doing the same thing. It’s like going into a class and explaining to a student, “Alright, this is how you stand. This is how you hold your hands; and which muscles to tense and which muscles to relax.” You just speak it into the book and boom! You’ve got a book. So yes, it was a blast to write.
I set myself a deadline, but of course, I missed it. [Laughs] Towards the end, there was a lot of stress and strain. There was getting the pictures for the book, getting the ISBN numbers all together, getting it published, and all of that. All of that is kind of a pain, but the actual writing of the book is a blast. I highly recommend you try it. [Laughs]
MAYTT: I have talked to other HEMA practitioners, and they mentioned that historical fencing is becoming more of a living lineage than before. Do you feel that this is a positive course of action for the movement or a negative consequence for the movement becoming more popular than ever before.
BK: I’m going to give an unpopular opinion here in the HEMA community. Let me preface by saying that the HEMA community is no one thing; we’re incredibly fractured. But in general, the HEMA community is trying desperately to hang on to the historical methods of fencing that were used anywhere from the 1200s through the 1800s, even up to the early 1900s. It never works like that. Every martial art changes and grows as people use it. Karate is a perfect example. Karate initially had none of the big flashy kicks that it has now, and it wasn’t popular. So, the people who wanted karate to grow added in these really fancy and flashy kicks that actually came from the English moves that were being viewed in Asia at the time. It completely changed the art of karate.
Well, HEMA is doing the same thing now. As people fight, we’re learning things that work better in the current fighting methods that we have. Now, would they work in an actual judicial duel where people were trying to kill each other or go to first blood? Maybe not as well. Would they work in actual battle where you’re fighting for your life? Not quite as well. Do they work in our current tournament environment better? Yes, they do. And that’s why they’re becoming more popular and why things are moving away from some of the traditional sword fighting techniques. Are they dramatically different? No. It’s very subtle changes, but for those trying to cling desperately to making it exactly like it was in 1497, I fear that’s gone; it’s never going to be the case.
I heard a good argument once with a guy that said, “It wasn’t that way in 1497. What gets written down into a manual is not how people actually fight. It’s the best that the manual writer can make about how to get that across, but it’s never a hundred percent accurate.” So, trying to cling to a hundred percent of that isn’t even what they did then. It has to grow. It will grow, whether people want it to or not.
MAYTT: It sounds like you would be alright with HEMA becoming more sportified than before.
BK: I agree with the fencers that lament about the sportification of HEMA, and I lament that too. I don’t ever want it to be as sportified as, say, Olympic Fencing is, where it is just whoever hits first, and it doesn’t matter. There’s no need to defend yourself from your opponent. I lament that and I don’t ever see it going all the way there. I support a little bit of sportification in terms of just keeping people safe, keeping people from getting concussions or broken bones – which doesn’t happen often, by the way. But I support that sportification, but I do share their grief at the loss of the martial aspect of HEMA in general.
MAYTT: From that, how deep is the sportification of the movement? Is it being blown out of proportion or is it slowly creeping up that it is going to become an issue that needs to be discussed?
BK: I would say it’s beyond that. It is unstoppable. It is a part of HEMA and will be going forward no matter what anybody does. Potentially, HEMA will fracture into the sports side versus the historical side. It’s likely the way it will go, and it will become two relatively separate entities.
Sword fighting is designed to kill your opponent. Swords are very very good at killing people. It’s what they’re made for; it’s what they’re designed to do. People are opposed to that in modern society. [Laughs] And you quickly run out of people to fight with if you actually go out there to kill each other. So sportification is inevitable whenever you try to use swords for something other than killing people. There is no other choice.
So, will it happen? Yes. It happened ten years ago and will continue to happen and there is nothing any of us can do about it. And is that sad? Yes. But go with what it is and you can find an amazing time in what is there now as well. I know it seems like I’m talking out of both sides, but it’s more like grief and acceptance.
This is my opinion. And like I said, everybody disagrees in HEMA. There’s a famous quote that says, “Why do the people on the HEMA boards always fight with each other? We train them to fight. What do you expect?” [Laughs]
MAYTT: At the more local level, how have you seen HEMA grow in Kansas City?
BK: Definitely one of the ones that Mike for sure also mentioned was Mark Wickersham. He’s an amazing instructor. He focuses on Olympic Fencing, but, like I said, it’s the same movements, same distance, and timing. The original school here is now called HEMA KC, and they do mainly armored combat, which is a totally different section than the non-armored combat. We call it Blossfechten, or shirt fighting. The school there with Bruce and Trevor and all of those guys are great people. Some of them were Yeomen with me back in the days and I love getting together with them.
Mike Roth started, when he came to Kansas City, as one of my instructors at my school and split off to form his own, Heartland HEMA. And then there’s me. Those are the only three big schools in Kansas City that I’m aware of. Other groups in the area; there’s a wonderful school down in Oklahoma City, Jeremy Pace. He’s a wonderful guy. A guy named David Miller is an old friend of mine, also a yeoman. Taught him when he was seventeen or eighteen. Well, he’s now YouTube famous. He has a million-plus followers and he’s bringing HEMA to social media and making it very accessible. And so many people in the local community are moving things forward. Some of my students, like Brian Howard, are moving out and contacting individuals all over there and bringing them into HEMA. Chris Pryer, he’s an actor so he’s bringing all of the stage combat groups into HEMA. It’s all of the little tendrils that snake out from a movement that people love but don’t know about is happening in the area. We’re having more and more big tournaments. Things are very much growing and flourishing in the HEMA community.
MAYTT: How have you seen HEMA grow since the end of the pandemic?
BK: Oh, a lot. The pandemic just about shut us down and I know it shut down a lot of schools and clubs. People were just terrified to gather together, and we tried to do some online training, which really doesn’t work with sword fighting. You’re like, “Okay. If I attack this side, try and defend if I was right there.” it just doesn’t work. [Laughs]
Since the pandemic slowed – I can’t say it ended – and since people were able to gather together again, people were desperate for some way of contacting and connecting with their fellow human beings. Many of them went to HEMA because we’re separated; we wear fencing masks and a lot of people for a long time wore a mask under it. But we never physically touched; it was always our weapons touching. And we stayed away from grappling during that time. But it made it, as people were coming out of the paranoia of the pandemic, a much safer sport to try. It was a way to get that human contact without human contact. I think that the pandemic, while it definitely crushed a lot, long-term helped HEMA grow and brought a lot of people to a community that wouldn’t be here otherwise.
MAYTT: Where do you think HEMA is going to go in the next decade in America as a whole?
BK: That’s a good question. A decade is a short time in HEMA. We tend to think in centuries. [Laughs] But I think the HEMA Alliance influence, the pseudo-governing board for HEMA that helps influence many of the tournaments around the country, will grow. I think they will become much more of a standardizing board, which has its downsides.
We need it though. For HEMA to grow, it needs spectators; it needs to be something that the community sees that’s more than just, “Oh yeah. It’s a bunch of nerds hitting each other with swords.” Which is how the vast majority of people view HEMA now. It needs to do the same thing that Eastern martial arts did in the 1970s and gain respectability and have people say, “Oh yeah! I know somebody that does judo or taekwondo. I should try that.” I think that HEMA will go there in the next ten or so years and I think it will standardize. I think that will sportify it more and that will standardize it, which will squelch a lot of the Wild West individualism and growth that has gone on for the last fifteen years.
Once again, grief and acceptance. It’s a sad thing to see the chaos go but I will also benefit from and rejoice in the growth of the standardization.
I think HEMA will always have that rogue flair. It will never be the Olympic sport where its timed down to the sixteenth of a second. It will always be guys meeting in the park to have fun and work out and play with each other and form amazing connections. But it’ll go more standard. It’ll always have that rogue flair to it. I predict that it’ll never lose that.
MAYTT: Thank you for this great discussion, Baer!
BK: It was a pleasure being here!
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