SYMP 111 - The politics of play in a culture of fear

From the influx of refugees into parts of the world where people are already angered by diminishing resources and growing income inequality, to the failure of education systems to transform to meet the needs of children in the current century it has become painfully clear that the options currently available to humanity are inadequate to the problems we face. Fortunately, as Vygotsky points out, “If human activity were limited to reproduction of the old, then the human being would be a creature only oriented to the past and would only be able to adapt to the future to the extent that it reproduced the past” (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 15). We are a species that is capable of more than reproduction or even adaptation to the current conditions, we are, through imaginative, creative, playful activity, capable of creating something new out of what currently exists. Around the world, there are scholars, practitioners, and activists who are using play in innovative ways to tap into the human capacity to create even in the face of instability and fear. This symposium will locate the relationship between play, performance, human development and societal transformation within the socio-cultural methodological and theoretical framework. This will be followed by presentations by performance activists and scholars from six countries who have been participating in creating what has come to be called the performance movement.