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

ISBN-13: 9780190871543 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 248 str.

Janet O'Shea

Opis

Risk, Failure, Play takes 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.

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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.