Risk, Failure, Play

Decried as mere brutality on display and celebrated as viscerally real, combat sport has escaped nuanced reflection. Risk, Failure, Play addresses this gap, signaling the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence through risk-based play. Despite its association with frivolity and ease, play is not the opposite of danger, rigor, or failure. Indeed, Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. This book suggests that play gives us the ability to manage difficult conditions with intelligence and that physical play, with its immediacy and its heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through considerations of the politics of everyday life exemplified in martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, and 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, challenging us to reimagine our social reality.