Janet O'Shea

Decried as mere brutality on display and celebrated as viscerally real, combat sport has escaped nuanced reflection. 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 examination of the politics of everyday 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. The book suggests that play gives us theability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and that physical play, with its immediacy and its heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Despite its association with frivolity and ease, play is not the opposite of danger, rigor, or failure. Indeed, Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personalexperience 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 torehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality. The book will be of interest to martial artists and martial arts scholars, dancers and dance researchers, sports studies scholars, cultural theorists and philosophers of everyday life andsports administrators.

What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training

Risk, Failure, Play

Alexandra Carter

Represents the range and diversity of writings on dance from the mid to late 20th century, providing contemporary perspectives on ballet, modern dance, postmodern 'movement performance' jazz and ethnic dance.

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader

The compelling story of a beautiful and versatile South Indian dance form One of the most popular and widely performed dance styles in India and around the world, bharata natyam has made the transition from its beginnings in the temples and courts of southern India to a highly respected international phenomenon. In this study of a classical dance form, author Janet O'Shea tracks the choreographic transformations that accompanied the transfer of bharata natyam to the urban concert stage in the 1930s and 1940s. At Home in the World situates these changes within the political debates of their time, and further ties the concerns of this period to present-day practice. The history of this dance is also a history of India itself, and readers can trace various national struggles over gender identity, regionalism, and globalism through O'Shea's narrative. With over 250 teachers in the United States alone, bharata natyam offers a remarkable case study of how a traditional art form moves into the world.

Janet O'Shea

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