Pattern Practice
See Form/Xing/Kata/Pattern Practice
Pentjak Silat
See Silat
Performing Arts
Combat systems and specific martial arts techniques have had a profound
and lasting impact on the development of cultural performances through-
out human history. From decentralized tribal cultures to politically cen-
tralized states, specific techniques of the hunt or fight have been trans-
formed into cultural performances, enacted either by warriors themselves
or by performers who have incorporated or modified such techniques to fit
a culturally specific, yet evolving, aesthetic and performance style. The spe-
cific forms of cultural performance centered on martial systems may be best
thought of as stretching along a continuum from actual to virtual combat.
Classical Greece offers one example of the wide range of combat or
martially related cultural performances along this continuum. Actual com-
bat in ancient Greece was common, but in addition there were other im-
portant forms of cultural performance in which the use of fighting tech-
niques was central—the game-contests, and preparations or training for
warfare. Both were characteristically violent.
Sociologist Norbert Elias has ably illustrated that unlike today’s rather
tame modern versions of the original Olympic Games, the early Greek
game-contests were regarded “as an exercise for war and war as an exer-
cise for these contests” (1972, 100). Further toward the virtual end of the
continuum, many of the same martial techniques served as the basis for
two important forms of performance—the Pyrrhicand Anapale.These two
forms illustrate the symbiotic relationship that has always existed between
martial training, dance, and performance. The Pyrrhic was part of the
training of boys in Sparta from the age of 5. Similar to the dramatic con-
tests, where the chorus was trained at the expense of the choregus (citizen-
patron) and performed as part of the festival of Dionysus, Phyrric compe-
titions were held at the Panathenaea Festival. Plato was ready to include
the Pyrrhic in his ideal state and provided a vivid description of this mar-
tially based performance, which mimetically transformed actual offensive
and defensive maneuvers into a graceful and athletic dance. For Plato the
Pyrrhic imitated the modes of avoiding blows and missiles, “by dropping
or giving way or springing aside, or rising up or falling down; also the op-
posite postures which are those of action as, for example, the imitation of
archery and the hurling of javelins, and of all sorts of blows. And, when
Performing Arts 417