Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet OâShea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why do you do this? Experiencing Humanity in Combat Play Chapter One: No Hard Feelings: Why Martial Arts Doesn't Mean what Violence Means Chapter Two: The Magic Ring: How Combat Sport Transforms Meaning through Space and Movement Chapter Three: Chess with Cardio: Finding the Meeting Point in Sport Fighting Chapter Four: What's there to Lose? Vulnerability in Combat Sport Chapter Five: On the Line: The Pleasure of Risk versus the Culture of Fear Chapter Six: Fail Better: The Paradox of Defeat in Martial Arts Training Chapter Seven: Making Play Work: Competition, Spectacle, and Perfection in Sport Chapter Eight: Making Work Play: Rethinking Competitive Pleasure through Self-Defense Training Conclusion: A Crisis of Play? References Index

About the Author :
Janet O'Shea is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Author of At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage and the co-editor of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 2nd edition, her research focuses on corporeality, interdisciplinary exchange, and the politics of everyday life. She is a practitioner of Filipino martial arts, jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, and empowerment self-defense.

Review :
"This book does an impressive job of providing examples of self-defense training as work and as play, including the differences between men and women. This is an excellent read for those interested in sport psychology and sport sociology." -- CHOICE "Risk, Failure, Play is a masterly exploration of conflict, movement, and mind-body connection. The book builds from sharply observed personal experience to cultural analysis, using the sensations and emotions of martial arts practice to anchor a rigorously constructed theoretical approach. Drawing on sources as varied as Elaine Scarry and Dan Inosanto, O'Shea gathers the many threads encountered in her training into a compelling read that links the domains of dance and combat." -- Dr. Susan Schorn, University of Texas at Austin, author of Smile at Strangers and Other Lessons in the Art of Living Fearlessly "Risk, Failure, Play offers a compelling discussion of the social value of combat sports, foregrounding their personally edifying potential and the role such processes may play in building more civil, respectful, and egalitarian approaches to conflict and disagreement. O'Shea carefully avoids overstating her analyses, reminding readers that 'play' fights can themselves become violent and that positive, transformational outcomes of sports are never guaranteed. She ultimately argues that, while socially supportive risk-taking and failure-embracing play can't cure all of our personal or social ills, they provide the chance to learn skills that might help us do so. In this way, O'Shea brings her engaging, insightful and neatly-written analysis to a fittingly optimistic conclusion." -- Alex Channon , Martial Arts Studies