Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The notion of play has been a source of curiosity and confusion in academic writing. Across disciplines including anthropology and performance studies, play has been declared to be ambiguous, extremely variable, contradictory, and paradoxical. Play theorists believe that our forms of play reflect the social and cultural values of our times. In performing arts, play has exploded throughout the twentieth century as a platform for uncertainty, creative risks and activism - and as colourful protests against dominant ideological notions of production, optimization and efficiency in movement, body, and space. In 1968, the Swedish activist group Aktion Samtal took over an established art institution with a loud and disorderly playground that celebrated anarchic play. Their work, The Model: a Model for a Qualitative Society, was a form of protest that boasted fresh ideas for a social utopia at the time. The Swedish activists had introduced an anti-elitist alternative of seeing, listening and finding one’s place in the world: play was a form of positionality that proposed to re-allign visions toward a collaborative and participatory society. What does it mean to harness such playful practices to understand shifting circumstances today, and imagine new, future possibilities? The practice of play celebrates a methodological fluidity and adaptability that is most valuable in times of crisis. In considering play ‘seriously’ as a platform for uncertainty and creative risks, the ambitious initiative offers a critical glimpse at how institutionalised centres of cultural meaning-making can be unsettled, negotiated, and re-imagined.