Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts by Barry Allen (review)

Martial arts have long held an intimate connection with dance. War dances and dances with weapons presented opportunities for nations to impress and intimidate visiting dignitaries with the discipline and athletic prowess of their armies in ostensibly nonconfrontational settings, while rehearsing such dances functioned as a kind of cross- or off-season training for combatants. The influence of kung fu films on hip-hop is recognized as fueling B-boy/girl power moves and the battle mindset (Kato 2007; Holman 2004; Hoch 2006). Aikido’s influence on contact improvisation is also well-known (Novack 1990, 64–65, 184), and tai chi’s principles of qi in the bones and effortless movement are central to Klein-informed, release-based techniques (Klein 1996). Contemporary dancers and choreographers, including Cloud Gate Theater and Rootlessroot, draw heavily from martial arts for qualities, including a sense of urgency, multi-focal presence, and precision, in addition to associated somatic, aesthetic, and health benefits. Martial arts have been treated topically by a few contemporary dance choreographers (notably Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sutra), while the presence of a stylized fight scene is a staple of many ballets. While direct contact between dance and martial arts has received some scholarly attention (van Orden 2005; O’Shea 2018), there is a dearth that should be addressed, as they are mutually informing, parallel bodily practices.

Barry Allen’s Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts makes some contribution to the fledgling discourse, and his treatment of the titular concepts of beauty, philosophy, and violence provides unique perspectives for dance studies. As Allen attests, Asian martial arts are already deeply philosophical in a manner in which the theories are nurtured, informed, and interrogated by the physical practice. Striking Beauty provides comparison and some dialogue between these somatically oriented philosophies and Western philosophy, which has historically neglected this corporeal source and resource. The first two chapters of Striking Beauty center upon themes from Chinese and Western philosophies of the body, respectively. Chapter 3 examines aesthetics, while chapter 4 considers ethical concerns and physical constraints surrounding what bodies can do both alone and with other bodies.

Chinese martial arts, and the forms that have descended from them, feature the “dual cultivation of the spiritual and the martial, each through the other, each perfecting the other, with the proof of the perfection consisting in a kind of effortless mastery of violence” (1). While the Buddhist roots of Shaolin external martial arts are historically sourced, the origins of internal arts such as tai chi are mythologized. Documentary evidence considering tai chi as a physical practice of Daoism goes back only to the middle of the nineteenth century, and Allen follows scholars who argue that its origins were placed into the mythological past by neo-Confucian scholars in order to legitimize this gentler, philosophically dense martial art as originally Chinese during a time when they were under Manchu rule. Thus, while Allen regards the narrative of tai chi as the embodiment of Daoism as a conservative, nationalist mythologization (in a move that has a number of parallels in dance histories), he contends that Buddhist-influenced and originally Daoist concepts nonetheless reflect, inform, and/or articulate Chinese martial training (41ff.). The martial artist cultivates the Buddhist concept of a flowing mind that is never fixed or fixated (5–6). Daoism seeks the related state of wuwei (not doing): the effortlessness that arises from and accompanies emptiness (10–12; 32ff.). Rather than combat forms that meet strength with strength or calculate strategies, emptiness is not encumbered by thought and responds immediately by gravitating toward the weakness inherent in any strength, the yin in the yang: “Untrained people fight the force, not the emptiness” (10).¹

Allen’s treatment of wuwei is relevant historically as postmodern and release-based dancer-theoreticians were (and are) seeking conceptualizations of effortlessness and ease outside of industrialized, capitalist discourses of efficiency formulated by...