Short Abstract:

This panel explores longstanding adult play communities: embodied practices that have developed an (often utopian) ethos and recognizable form. How might the alternative worldmaking involved in recreational practice inform understandings of folklore and performance in the era of late capitalism?

Long Abstract:

This panel explores the varieties of embodied practice that result in longstanding adult play communities: practices that have developed an (often utopian) ethos in addition to a recognizable form. Examples include Ultimate Frisbee, Contact Improvisation, Drumming and Singing Circles, Nudist Colonies, etc. How do groups engaged in voluntary, collaborative, creative, embodied practice sustain their practice over time and across space? How do participants understand their participation in a lifestyle as well as a recreational activity? To what degree are these forms codified and regulated? What are the elements of such practices that “bleed” into the everyday life of practitioners? How important are founders or founding moments to the practice? How does the physical practice encourage ways of relating that offer alternatives to socially prescribed roles and behaviors? How are members initiated into the form, policed, disciplined, excluded, ejected from it? To what degree are recently invented practices comparable to body-centered traditions of the premodern era? How might the alternative worldmaking involved in recreational practices inform our understanding of folklore and performance in the era of late capitalism? By asking these questions and exploring these forms, we turn to the body (itself politically and discursively produced) and the work that embodied practice can do in the world—a tool for unwriting, (re)scripting, and (re)performing forms of knowledge and the work of play.

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