BUSTLE Magazine — Survival Arts Redefines Filipino Martial Arts for Women

Redefining The Practice Of Filipino Martial Arts For Women

“Yancovitz starts with cultivating basic concepts of consent, respect, and boundaries to her students as young as five years old. ‘With little girls, for example, when I work with six-year-olds or five-year-olds, the first thing I teach them is how to say no,’ she tells Bustle. Yancovitz founded Survival Arts in the Philippines in 2013 as a response to the attacks young women were facing during their jeepney rides (a type of public transportation in the Philippines). Last year Survival Arts moved to Los Angeles, where Yancovitz says they're continuing their work ‘to empower women and girls against sexual assault, rape, and all forms of violence.’

‘Our [fighting] system is purely combative which makes it really helpful, really useful for women to fight off larger, bigger attackers,’ Yancovitz says, on why PTK is effective as a form of self-defense. ‘I really use the techniques that I believe are the most important in PTK to apply when a woman is in danger.’ In the one year since replanting Survival Arts in California, Yancovitz has trained over 300 women and children from communities of color and the LGBTQ community. And the positive responses from her participants has her wanting to spread Survival Arts by creating chapters all over the country and the Philippines led by Filipina instructors.”

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Yancovitz is trained in close-quarters combat through Pekiti Tirsia Kali, or PTK. PTK is the only system currently used by military forces in the Philippines and the United States, says Yancovitz. Because of the connection to the word “military” in “martial arts,” Yancovitz prefers to call FMA “indigenous fighting arts,” as it best describes what she and others like her are training and practicing. At her Survival Arts Academy Yancovitz, who has been training martial arts for 25 years and currently PTK under Grandmaster Tuhon Leo T. Gaje Jr., arms herself with blades and books — the former as her tools in training PTK and the latter as her resources to educate her students about this same Filipino history. She points out that many Filipinos may not be familiar with the Philippines’ history “warrior bloodlines,” which also had women warriors leading Filipino groups to resist colonization.