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Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

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An opera singer in full costume waves two swords during a Beijing Opera performance of <strong>The</strong> Monkey King at the<br />

Dzung He <strong>The</strong>ater in Beijing, 1981. (Dean Conger/Corbis)<br />

418 Performing <strong>Arts</strong><br />

the imitation is of brave bodies and souls, the action is direct and muscular,<br />

giving for the most part a straight movement of the limbs of the body”<br />

(Laws 7.815A). While the Pyrrhic was in essence a performance that also<br />

served as a preparation for armed combat, the Anapale, practiced at the<br />

gymnopaedia (literally, naked boy; a sports festival) in Sparta, was a dance<br />

performed by naked young boys “moving gracefully to the music of flute<br />

and lyre, [which] displayed posture, and movements used in wrestling and<br />

boxing” (Lawler 1964, 108).<br />

Whether on the battlefield, the game field, or in the dancing place in<br />

mimetically transformed versions, both armed and unarmed martial techniques<br />

were a highly visible and important part of classical Greek culture<br />

and social life. Each specific display or cultural performance context embodied<br />

a shared “display ethos” founded on commonly held assumptions<br />

regarding important attributes of the heroic warriors who practiced such<br />

techniques and who were prepared to die in battle. Elias discusses how<br />

both game-contests and fighting in classical Greece “centered on the ostentatious<br />

display of the warrior virtues which gained for a man the highest<br />

praise and honor among other members of his own group and for his<br />

group. It was glorious to vanquish enemies or opponents but it was hardly<br />

less glorious to be vanquished” (Lawler 1964, 100).

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