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.

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.

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