Martial Arts vs. Performance Arts

What is the difference between a performance art and a martial art? Let us consider for a moment Professional Wrestling:

We can all agree that Professional Wrestling:

1. Is athletically demanding.
2. Requires martial arts related skills like falling and moves that come from martial arts.
3. Training in it could help you in a real life self defense situation.
4. Is NOT a martial art.

Why is it not a martial art? Very simple: no sparring. Sparring delivers on the following promise: practicing this art will give you actionable combat skill when being attacked by another human being. This can only be accomplished through sparring. Only through sparring can you actually practice against someone really trying to attack you... anything short of that is not sparring.

When martial arts show off parts of their martial arts that are NOT sparring, such as forms or Kata for example, they are performing, even if they are performing an exercise that they use to help them get better at sparring. Martial arts that lose sparring, such as many Tai Chi classes for example, have thus degenerated into only being a performance art, and are no longer a martial art. (See also: What is Tai Chi?)

I believe that this is true of all combat sports, self defense systems, combatives, etc.: when they spar they are a martial art, and without sparring they are performance arts. Wrestling is a martial art, but javelin throwing is a performance art. Olympic Boxing IS a martial art, Olympic Archery is NOT a martial art. Don't get me wrong, some Archery people spar with their archery, and they are thus martial artists:

What if in boxing we had an Olympic event for judging heavy bag hitting, using a similar scoring system to how figure skating in judged. Would heavy bag hitting be a legitimate martial art? Of course not, that would be a performance art.  At some martial arts tournaments breaking inanimate objects is considered a martial arts event. This is as ridiculous as a punching bag competition. Breaking inanimate objects is a performance art practiced far and wide outside of the martial arts.

Same goes for competing in Kata, Forms, and fake sparring like Kumite Point Fighting or Stationary Push Hands. All of that is performance arts: impressive conditioning exercises that in the absence of sparring or fighting amount to a performance to the audience. You may as well be having a Yoga competition: meaningless in terms of actionable self defense skills! Performance arts may or may not be used as conditioning exercises for martial arts, but no school without serious sparring should be considered a martial arts school (it should be considered a performance arts school instead.)

I am not saying here that only combat sports are real martial arts. I have been in plenty of traditional martial arts classes that have had their own styles of serious sparring. Let's take the very worst case scenario, Capoeira. It has all the traditional excuses: sparring was forbidden by colonizers, the techniques are too dangerous to spar with, it is supposed to be more dance than self defense, it is a cultural exercise more so than a self defense system, it is more valued as a form of exercise than as a fighting style, etc. etc. This is the sad excuse for a martial art that Capoeira most typically is:

Far less relevant to self defense than say Professional Wrestling, no-contact fake sparring. Clearly more intended to impress potential sexual partners than it is to prepare someone for self defense. But what if I told you that even in the Capoeira community there are people who spar? Check it out:

If Capoeira can spar, so can YOUR martial art. It is really a decision the instructors of the class make, and it is a moral decision: are we going to deliver on the promise of helping our students develop actionable combat skills, or are we just going to make them feel good about themselves?

I will take this one step farther: any system of physical exercise can potentially be a martial art, if it adds sparring. When I first started attending BJJ, the club I attended (called "Summit" and who's logo looked like a mountain) inner circle/higher ranked belt members frequently went rock climbing together. They praised how rock climbing made them stronger on the mat. This particular club at the time was 99% ground fighting, and sport only (no combatives.) But you wouldn't have wanted to get in a fight with any of these guys, they shut down serious grapplers who showed up to the club on a regular basis. It was like a Rock Climbing club that used BJJ tournament rules as a sparring practice, and it was an awesome martial art in and of itself.

I will go so far as to say that Tap Dancing could be a martial art, if it added a relevant type of full contact sparring. Behold:

Blog Labels

I have updated this blog by labeling each of the over 100 blog posts as one or more of the following:

1. Martial Arts: make no mistake, though I write about martial arts, I also practice them.
2. Ideology: I talk about religion and politics far more than is considered polite.
3. Entertainment: for everything that isn't clearly Martial Arts and/or Ideology.

Progressive vs Conservative in The Restored Church

Fall Conference has concluded, with a historical announcement about Sunday meetings going from 3 hours every Sunday down to 2 hours, and 12 new temples, many of them in remote or destitute parts of the southern hemisphere - everything was pretty progressive and exiting. But the strange thing is this has all be side tracked by Elder Oaks talk that was a rehash of all our current politically incorrect beliefs. What was Elder Oaks thinking?

Before you can understand what Elder Oaks was doing there, you first have to understand the ongoing debate that has dominated General Conference since I can remember. The Church has been making an awkward transition from a theocracy to a spiritual practice since Utah joined the United States. At one point in those days of yore The Church was running a form of Christian Socialism called "The United Order" and was anti-slavery, just as progressive as you can possibly imagine for that era. As The Church has assimilated slowly into its place as a global religion instead of a local theocracy, it has taken political positions similar to other major Christian religions.

But if you are a member of The Church, those political positions do not weigh on your day to day life. What takes its toll on your life is how much time your religion takes up out of your day. As an all volunteer ministry, you donate significant amounts of time keeping your local congregation going in volunteer assigned positions called "callings." The Church puts other demands on your time. Consider the expectations I had as a 16 year old member of The Church:

• Go to Church for 3 hours each Sunday.
• Go to Boy Scouts once a week and try to become an Eagle Scout (no small task.)
• Have a part time job to save money to serve a mission (I got employee of the month at my local Safeway.)
• Go to an hour of early morning Seminary each day before school.
• Participate in extra curricular activities, particularly athletics.
• Do well in school, doing lots of homework.
• Socialize with other youth from Church.
• Practice personal prayer and scripture study.
• Participate in family prayer and scripture study.
• Get adequate rest to do some fraction of the above.

Obviously that was impossible, and I chose to do martial arts instead of much of the above. But in the past The Church was an entire society/ethnicity/culture/theocracy that completely consumed the time of the people in it (as most cultures do.) 

The debate inside of The Church is about "how much time should members have to spend doing things related to The Church?" On a local level you might call this a power struggle between the Stake Presidents, (who's job it is to administrate the church in their area and thus need lots of volunteer man hours to help them do that,) and the Temple Presidents (who need people to have lots of free time to meditate, spiritually develop themselves, and thus spend time at their temple.)  If you pay attention to General Conference carefully, you will see some people are clearly on one side or the other, and others are caught in between in the fray between these two opposing factions.

This conference was a near total scorched earth victory in this great tug of war, with the 3 hour church meetings being reduced to 2 hour church meetings. The divorce between the Boy Scouts of America and The Church was another such victory. The Church is focused on becoming a serious spiritual practice rather than an all consuming volunteer activity.

Elder Oaks is the most single outspoken proponent of members spending as much time as they possibly can doing church stuff... to listen to some of his previous talks, you would think doing anything that was not in direct service to the faith could be considered a senseless waste of your life. So from an internal perspective as a member of The Church, Elder Oaks is the most conservative Apostle, the one who embraces the old theocratic lifestyle more so than the others.

Obviously Elder Oaks wasn't really able to do his usual thing at conference where 1/3 of the membership's Sunday duties were just excused. Instead, he just focused on his other extraordinarily conservative views. The apostles are not supposed to agree on everything, and it is refreshing to me that even with the frustration of not really being able to tell who the progressive minds within the apostleship are, we can at least see who the most conservative one is. I appreciate Elder Oak's transparency on this, even if his positions make it harder for me be a member of The Church: