Play, Creativity, and Social Movements

From the birth of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987 through the rise of the global justice movement in 1994, the largest day of anti-war protest in world history on February 15, 2003, the Republican National Convention protests in August 2004, and the immigrants' rights rallies of spring 2006, the streets of cities around the world have been filled with a new theatrical model of protest. Elements of fun, creativity, carnival, pleasure, and play are cornerstones of this new approach toward protest and community building. In a nutshell, people are playing. Play is a term for drag, ACT UP zaps, the use of food and mariachi bands in the Latino community, dance dramaturgy, culture jamming, the carnival, and other forms of creative community-building activities. It is the exhilarating feeling of pleasure, the joy of building a more emancipatory, caring world.

While some social movements are concerned with specific ends, such as policy making and economic resource distribution, other projects are concerned with the day-to-day activities of clients and participants.

In the former, the ends are the emphasis of day-to-day life (liberal strategy). In the latter, some means and ends overlap, such that engagement with other people in creative and joyful ways is a desired end and it is also a means for drawing attention to a problem. There is a long history of community-organizing models that make use of playful, prefigurative approaches that seek to create an image of the world in which activists hope to live. Play has long sustained social movement activity.

Many elements of creative play have long been part of social movements. Civil rights activists sang and danced even when facing the likes of Bull Connor's attack dogs throughout the civil rights era. Queer youth formed a Rockette kick line and sang “We Are the Stonewall Girls” as they thwarted riot cops during the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, environmental activists met at weekend festivals called raves, where dance, performance, and gestures described as acts of beauty overlapped with activism and organizing. By the 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP had made sophisticated graphics, arts, and a defense of pleasure cornerstones of their struggle for life. Pleasure, camp, and fun became vital tools in a struggle against disaster.

By the 1990s, do-it-yourself (DIY) avant-garde agitational groups sought to break down the lines between art and life and introduce creativity, imagination, play, and pleasure into activism. With events such as Critical Mass, bicyclists created protests with amoebalike bike cavalcades. In New York City, community garden activists created their own “Central Park” within the rubble of neighborhood vacant lots, and DJs transformed street parties into political protests. As public spaces were transformed within this burlesque of do-it-yourself protest, creative play was recognized as an effective approach. What links these protest gestures is an appreciation for the transformative possibilities of creative play.

There are many forms of play. For anthropologist Johan Huizinga, play is anything but serious. It is a space for joy. For Richard Schechner, play involves doing something that is not exactly “real.” It is looser. The Oxford English Dictionary lists pages and pages of definitions and meanings for play as both a noun [Page 1127]and a verb. Play in social movements is part of a continuum of organizing strategies that can include presentation, dramatic acts, theater, tactical events with flair, guerilla plays with humor or outrageous acts, and even nonplayful confrontation.

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