The Politics of Playfulness: Silliness as Strength

“Don’t be Silly!” “Stop playing around” “This silliness has to stop”

Ever heard those? Ever said those?

Why, as “serious adults” do we have such strong feelings about these words, these actions? What are we threatened by? What is wrong with being playful and even silly?

Perhaps we feel that they are sufficiently close to anarchic that our way of thinking can’t contain them.

Which is why I wanted to be in Helsinki in November 2022 to try and argue for their values. Based on years of work with less advantaged people and recently with students experiencing loneliness and anxiety, these ideas seemed to have a definite relevance.

The biennial conference?of ELIA (a higher education network of institutes of the arts) took place in Helsinki as an opportunity for arts academics and practitioners to interact and consider the many possibilities for arts in an increasingly fragile world.

The three-day meeting considered many aspects which are at the centre of our work. Diversity, equality and inclusion were at the forefront of discussions, with particular emphasis on the connection between privilege and prejudice. The voice of the student/participant and how it can be encouraged to be innovative when institutions are veering towards conservatism was equally a central thread.

I was invited to talk about and present work which has emerged through our methods at Pan Intercultural Arts and which addresses, in some ways, both these issues. But it has wider implications and these became of great interest to other attendees. Working with Beverley Carruthers of London College of Communications and Neil Armstrong of Oxford University and King's College London we wanted to examine how playfulness and silliness can be forces not only for creativity but to combat loneliness and anxiety.

At Pan we play games in almost every workshop session. There are many forms of games and at their most basic they serve as “icebreakers” to bring people together, leave behind thoughts and concerns of the world outside the room and provide a little fun.

We have gone considerably further, utilising and inventing new games which stimulate alertness, concentration, trust, group-forming, idea-sparking, text development, story-telling and the creativity necessary to move forward in life.

It is well documented how trauma tends to diminish the imagination and most of our participants at Pan have experienced trauma. The games we play with them allow them to work together, trust and own their ideas and start to reflect on subjects while having fun. This is one of the great advantages of playfulness; you don’t have to think about creating, the creativity emerges in the games.

Games have rules and many have huge latitude for novelty and originality within them. This is as true of football as it is of a rhythm game or a story-telling game. The rules keep you within the overall format and the?playfulness ensures it is never played the same way twice.

But there is a step beyond this when that originality takes over in a spontaneous way and totally unexpected things happen, in words, actions, gestures etc. These are when the rules are left behind and a kind of liberated silliness emerges and often surprises. This silliness shows that we can be creative and original even without the rules (although some rules may be the ‘launchpad’ to get to this level).

During Covid I joined a casual grouping called Creative Connects to see if the above ideas, had wider use and implications. Some members were from London College of Communications, part of University of the Arts London, and they wanted to see if our experience of playfulness/silliness at Pan could help a situation of increased anxiety, loneliness and creative block which was observed amongst their photography and film students. Lockdowns only exacerbated these factors and staff were worried.

We therefore conducted a series of Zoom-based workshops with about twenty students?in each session to allow them to feel the effect of a carefully thought out sequence of games and exercises. Many of these were students joining the university but unable to meet their peers face to face. A vital part of the student and learning experience was missing.

An hour of exercises with a following feedback session gave us the evidence that these did indeed work extremely well. We repeated them one term later and again at the beginning of the following year. As well as their feedback after the session they were invited to further reflection six months later.

“I was anxious at the beginning but the sillier the exercises got the more comfortable everyone felt”

“When you stop thinking about how to act and being conscious about yourself you start to connect with others”

“It takes away the masquerade”

“It helps me forget those sufferings. It was really useful”

“When others are having fun you are drawn towards them”

Considering this, and much more, evidence we cautiously started to believe that this could be of benefit to a much wider range of people. One of our group is a medical anthropologist who is working on student wellbeing at Oxford University and at University College London.?He is seriously considering silliness as a valuable quality. (We often find such contradictions as “seriously” and “silliness” in the same sentence).

His developing thoughts are that the key problem in many students’ lives is loneliness and that this leads to anxiety and uncertainty. He also believes that we are treating loneliness in entirely the wrong way because we are tending to see it as the fault, or deficit, in the individual and we attempt to treat that (CBT etc). In fact, he maintains, the problem is not with the individual but with the group which does not provide the support for individuals.

“We think that at least part of the problem is that our students are lonely. They lack social connectivity. But we don’t think that students who tell us they are lonely are in some way lacking, or defective. Loneliness needn’t be related to psychopathology. In our view, lonely students are like canaries down the mine, whose sensitivity to poison gas is a valuable way of alerting miners to deeper problems. This means we are cautious about research methodologies that focus on individuals because the interventions that result from them, such as CBT, positive psychology, mindfulness, seek to fix the problem by promoting personal agency. That is like giving canaries inventions to make them more resistant to poison gas, rather than trying to address the poison gas itself.?Mislocating the problem is unhelpful, even risky. Since the problem of loneliness is a problem of relationships, our workshops are designed to promote healthy relationality.” Neil Armstrong

He also has some interesting observations on certain types of games which use competition and therefore bring the focus back onto the individual (I win/I lose) rather than promoting the support of the group.

?And so these ideas came to Helsinki.

On the second day of the conference we gathered a room full of teachers, academics, researchers and administrators of theatre, performance, fine art and music. We wanted them to experience the power of play rather than intellectualising it so we gave no introduction to the session, we just played the games with them and invited them to participate and be part of it.

?I was delighted that they all engaged and as the games asked more stepping out of themselves they willingly took risks and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Stepping out of yourself and going beyond the rules invokes the silliness of action and words. They were surprised at their own actions but if everyone is ridiculous then nobody is.

Only when they had followed this sequence did we explain the context and effects we had seen in similar exercises with LCC students and with participants at Pan and our anthropologist elaborated further on the theory through a pre-recorded video.

It was a lot of fun, perhaps especially because almost all other sessions at the conference were sitting and listening. And it generated a lot of conversation then and throughout the following day:?

“I’ve often used games as icebreakers but now I see they can go so much further, perhaps everything can be achieved through play”

”And so now I see this as a new path to creativity”

“ This can really help the problems our students are experiencing”

And Neil Armstrong’s words sum it up:

“The effects of silliness tells us something about what it means for a group to be poorly connected. Silliness promotes social connectivity by (we think) overcoming inhibitions and self-monitoring, by undermining the conditions for comparison or competitiveness, by removing responsibilities. The workshops create a sense of safety and emotional containment and so make mutual attention and atunement feel more possible.”

Hopefully many of the delegates will return from the conference with new ideas to use these approaches in their work.

“We don't stop playing because we grow old;?we grow old because we stop playing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Postscript:

Talking about our work in a European context led to a further unexpected discussion about whether our work was ‘political’.?We have never used this term about our work, but then we had never used ‘anti-extremist’ until it was pointed out to us by an anti–extremism officer. Moreover the use of the word ‘political’ is not in any sense party political. Conference delegates’ opinion was that by giving voice to those who do not normally have one (or use one) we are empowering them to speak their experience, their thoughts, their needs, which may not always be prioritised by those who hold the power. This they hold is ‘political’