Translated from the Original French

I was accidentally involved in performance art twice in one week this past month while in New Mexico. One of the times was of my own free will, when I agreed to lead a game of RoShamBo Rockstar as the closing "act" of the Ashoka 25th Anniversary Talent Show. I ran the game as an immersive theatre piece - translated from the original French - deconstructing the fleeting nature of leadership. I channeled my inner Marina Abramović and had fun with it.

Earlier in the week, though, Ashoka staffer Simon Stumpf had led the whole group in an extraordinary experience of The Long Table - essentially a performance of a dinner party conversation - with the provocation "What have you learned to ignore?" It wasn't until I was home, and digging in a little deeper to the experience that I learned it was developed as performance art by Lois Weaver. The whole structure of the experience is the dramaturgy: you can only speak from the table, the table is always open, the audience is always a potential participant. It turned out I was in a performance and didn't know it - and neither did anyone else. Thinking back on the week, I think that's why it worked.

Both experiences dissolved the same boundary — between performer and audience, between watcher and participant. And I've come to think that dissolution might be exactly what's missing from most of our current attempts to bridge what divides us.

I've been thinking (worrying?) a lot lately about what it's going to take to get us out of the mess in which we currently find ourselves. There are calls for dialogues across difference and efforts to bridge what divides us. I am moved by the importance of these initiatives, and yet there is something about what these efforts ask of people - not to mention the scale and the foundational work that I believe is required for them to be successful - that has felt lacking.

One thing that struck me about both the Long Table and RoShamBo Rockstar as performance art was that there is an important difference in the experience when play is integrated as content as opposed to being sidelined as icebreaker. The icebreaker model apologizes for play and signals that the real work is coming. When play is the work, there's no backstage to retreat to. You're already in it before you've decided whether to be.

Looking at my two accidental performance art experiences, I also realize that the dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience turns out to be an extraordinarily important invitation for people to actually be present in the moment as opposed to performing their prior positions.

In wrestling with the idea of how we get ourselves out of this current mess, I am feeling more and more that the key is in recognizing that the design of our collective experiences is the politics. Before anyone speaks, the room is already making claims about who belongs, whose time matters, whether transformation is possible here. Dialogue-across-difference work is most likely to succeed when content follows — rather than leads — opportunities for people to come together in less loaded, generously designed spaces. Otherwise we risk reproducing the very dynamics we're trying to interrupt.

I am curious about play as a tool for disrupting the current dynamic, but only when it's not quarantined. It equalizes status temporarily in ways words cannot. It creates shared reference points that belong to no prior affiliation. It rehearses the specific moves - tolerating uncertainty, recovering from being wrong, being willing to look foolish - that hard dialogue actually requires.

All of which has left me wondering: perhaps the decline of play and the decline of cross-difference trust are not merely correlated. Maybe they share a root cause: the systematic removal of unscripted, low-stakes, cooperative environments where difference was present but not the point. Third places. Recess. Pickup games. Barn raisings. What replaced them was structured, optimized, affinity-sorted. The productive friction got engineered out.

That's why I keep coming back to a single data point from the US Chamber of Connection's  national study on Communities of Play: only 30% of adults belong to communities that do activities together — and those people have the highest rates of connection. Not as a side effect. As the mechanism. In a couple of weeks I'm joining Aaron Hurst on the US Chamber of Connection podcast to dig into what that finding means — and what it might ask of us.
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What would it look like to design for this intentionally - not as preamble to the important work, but as the infrastructure democracy actually runs on?

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