Risk, Failure, Play

• Presents a new theory of play as a means of managing difficult realities with intelligence
• Demonstrates the importance of physical play
• Explores how and why sport fighting inspires devotion and differentiates itself from violence

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 the ability 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 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.

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 and sports administrators.