Curators’ Statement: Play as a Willful Act of Engagement

Play speaks to our capacity to act as if the world is still open and responsive. To play is a willful act, a deliberate act of engagement with the world, not an escape from it.

In The Ritual Process (1969), the anthropologist Victor Turner analyzes the ways in which rituals interact with social norms. His findings indicate that rituals are performative events that challenge social norms and reshape individuals’ identities. These findings oppose the view that rituals are reactionary and unproductive. During rituals, participants step outside conventional roles and experiment with new ways of being. They do so through a playful performance: a structured and improvised engagement that rehearses transformation.

For Turner, rituals are governed by their own set of rules and these rules can purposefully overturn social hierarchies and cultural norms. Ritual participants often find themselves in the space between social norms - e.g. the novice is no longer a child, but not yet an adult; the pilgrim who has not yet arrived at their destination. Turner describes these events as “liminal” experiences - spaces of ambiguity where participants find themselves in between life stages.

The central players in this story are what Turner calls “liminal personas”. These are individuals who tend to be located at the edges of the social order, but play a central role in rituals. These players usually take the form of shamans, fools, and tricksters and their significance lies in their capacity to perform moments of transition and to live in between social norms - ie. the shaman mediates the sacred and profane; the fool is a sanctioned transgressor; the trickster exposes paradox. These players inhabit a double consciousness where they simultaneously live in the normative world and in its alternative.

Ritual, in this scheme, is a place of play - a structured event where people self-consciously perform an alternative society. Play is a creative response to the double bind of the modern experience that requires individuals to be autonomous, but obedient; promotes freedom of expression, but punishes dissent; encourages creativity, but enforces conformity. Play speaks to our capacity to act as if the world is still open and responsive. To play is a willful act, a deliberate act of engagement with the world, not an escape from it. Play does not speak to idleness, but to the gesture of becoming alive. The challenge to Turner’s vision would be to develop play beyond the temporal confines of the ritual; to see how to prolong the play time as much as possible.

This year’s programme presents films that treat cinema and filmmaking as a site of play. The players in these films are also caught in between different spheres of experience - e.g. the world behind the camera vs. the world in front of the camera. In making a film, players engage creatively with a set of constraints that are either imposed upon them (technical issues) or imposed by themselves (ethics). These constraints function much like the ritualistic protocols that Turner describes in that, when played with, they become sites of new ideas and new relations.

Photo: The Unsteady Boxer, Thivolle Lo

Published: 24.04.2025.