Janet O'Shea
Writer, researcher, and martial artist Janet O'Shea is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training (Oxford UP, 2019) and At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage (Wesleyan UP 2007). She is currently working on a project focused on corporeality and emotion in activism entitled Bodies on the Line: Physicality and Sentiment in Social Justice. Research interests include critical dance studies, performance studies, phenomenology, new materialism, the politics of everyday life, sports studies, social movement studies, critical animal studies, and food politics.
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TEDxUCLA was organized by UCLA Extension Visual Arts and UCLA Residential Life.
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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 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. 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. Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality, intertwining 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.
Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea deliver a substantially revised and updated collection of key texts, featuring an enlightening new introduction, which tracks differing approaches to dance studies. Important articles from the first edition are accompanied by twenty new works by leading critical voices. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader gives readers access to over thirty essential texts on dance and provides expert guidance on their critical context. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.