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

Risk, Failure, Playtakes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through fight sport training. It intertwines personal experience and scholarly research, producing powerful reflections on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, and identity.Risk, Failure, Playilluminates 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 O?Shea 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, Playalso demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality.Risk, Failure, Playintertwines 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.Introduction:Why do you do this? Experiencing Humanity in Combat PlayChapter One:No Hard Feelings: Why Martial Arts Doesn't Mean what Violence MeansChapter Two:The Magic Ring: How Combat Sport Transforms Meaning through Space and MovementChapter Three:Chess with Cardio: Finding the Meeting Point in Sport FightingChapter Four:What's there to Lose? Vulnerability in Combat Spo