Randall Roberts is a music critic for the Los Angeles Times. We asked him if he could explain how the Beige Ensemble’s 8-Bit Construction Set records were made and show us what they sounded like when played together. Are you ready for the sauce?
PLAY is frowned upon.
PLAY is when the kids go to bed!
PLAYing with fire.
PLAY gives life purpose.
PLAY pretend.
PLAY is cartwheels.
PLAY is complicated.
PLAY is queer.
PLAY is performative.
PLAY is daring.
PLAY is not ignoring.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime
Among my favorite recent podcast discoveries is WQXR’s Meet the Composer with violist Nadia Sirota. I’ve given a lot of thought to the role of performers lately, and season three begins with a pair of episodes focused on performers’ experiences within the realm of classical music. Sirota discusses her métier as musician and her realization that composers tend to write exclusively with the audience in mind:
“I don’t listen to a lot of music in my spare time. Almost all of the music that I participate in is as a performer. And in a way, none of it was designed to be experienced that way. I’m supposed to just [ . . . ] exist as a conduit so other people can listen to it, but that’s my main access point to this stuff as a work of art; is as a performer. It’s kind of weird that I’m experiencing it all wrong [ . . . ] or from the wrong side of the TV set.
Maybe that’s why I want to make this [podcast, because] I feel like there’s all of this stuff that, for me, is what makes up music. [ . . . ] It’s just strange to me that my entire experience of music is unintended.”
I can trace my earliest public performances to church choir in preschool (of which there is VHS evidence), but given my proclivity for the spotlight, I know that in-home performances for friends and family began even earlier. Although Sirota’s commentary has since moved me to reconsider my thinking, I worried for years that the associated endorphin rush I derived from performance had an egomaniacal basis. This, despite the obvious reality that audiences, too, had something to gain from being entertained.
In my own practice as a working artist, I often struggle with the need to articulate exactly what I’d like to make, against the idea that breakthroughs occur more frequently when I work together with others without restrictions. There is a certain kind of effortlessness that emerges from this casual, collaborative inventiveness, which might explain why, as someone approaching the dreaded middle age, I fight the urge to form a “jam band” or some similarly stereotypical pursuit.
A video camera was glued to my hand at all times during high school. My group of friends developed and acted-out ideas for the tape, knowing that we were both performers and audience. Although the ideas were poorly executed, I still long for the creative output of those few brief years. It’s only now that I’ve come to realize the reason we created so much had more to do with our desire to play together than anything else.
Like high school itself, marching band forced a number of unlikely collaborators together in pursuit of a common goal. The rush of performing on field had less to do with how good we were, and more with the fact that we’d come together to make something. Real creativity emerged during water breaks or after practice, where it was common to see more accomplished musicians showing off for their peers by playing a difficult passage of music or an impromptu group forming to improvise.
When I embarked on this photographic project, I had ulterior motives: I anticipated my proximity to the action would stir feelings of nostalgia, as my final appearance on the field was well over a decade ago. I found the performances themselves blasé, designed for the spectators off in the distance. Instead, the spirit of the group in the hidden moments—the esprit de corps—was far more charming and playful than anything made for public consumption.
“Play is collective world building.”
—Kaylene Kau, artist
Albert Mobilio’s fictional stories are based on old-time games played in parlors, basements, and fields with balls, brooms, blindfolds, and cards. As winners and losers emerge from dodge ball, word games, and balloon contests so does the theme of our inner life as ceaseless competition. There is calculation, envy, humiliation, and joy, and there is always the next round when everything might change. Here, he reads the story “Hunt the Slipper.”
Read the story.
PLAY is apparently terrifying.
PLAY lets us discover what kind of mind we have.
PLAY is toys.
PLAY is better than kale.
PLAY with stuffed animals.
PLAY more board games.
PLAY encourages.
PLAY is reading.
PLAY is building towers.
PLAY is playing cars.
PLAY is marriage.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime
FREEZE EGG
Number of players: 1 + as many doctors as it takes
Description of gameplay: In a game of endurance, a player consults with a medical team to postpone procreation indefinitely by preserving her eggs. There is no opponent in this game. Freeze Egg, much like golf, is primarily a challenge of the player’s own skills.
Game ends when…: A player becomes the winner when she gives birth, changes her mind and adopts a child, or decides “You know what? Kids are kind of a hassle anyway. Forget the whole thing.”
Missed last week’s game? Find it here. Look for the latest installments of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.
“Play makes me unaware of what time it is.”
—Julia Jacquette, artist
For the last few months, I’ve been photographing athletes from a wide variety of sports as they arrive at their respective arenas and then, again, mere seconds after they come off the playing field.
The big thing I’ve learned: Some athletes like to sweat. And some athletes need to cry.
I’m not a sports analyst, a sports reporter, a sports scientist, a sports doctor, or even, really, a sports fan—and can offer little more than anecdata from my time getting to meet, however briefly, athletes from so many different stripes. Time and time again, it’s become obvious that the most striking differences from one sport to the next come down to what writer Charles Portis referred to as “true grit” in his novel of the same name.
The differences are large, and it’s hard not to notice that the more physical the sport, the better the athletes take their pratfalls in stride. Shooting roller derby ‘girls’ a few months ago, several of the competitors apologized—one of them profusely—because, after a couple hours getting knocked around, they’d forgotten my shoot and wiped the blood off their faces on their way off the track. A professional wrestler, screaming in pain from the capsaicin in his eyes after a stunt went wrong, stopped while having his face doused with milk to consider his sense of professionalism. “Wait, I need to get my photo taken,” he declared, half-and-half running down his cheeks. “Fuck it, let’s do it.” Meanwhile, the professional baseball players photographed during spring training, after three largely inert hours standing out in a field, demanded that a stylist redo their coiffures before being photographed, and most of the dozen professional bull riders I photographed—whose entire event consists of eight very tough seconds of activity—refused their ‘after’ image, because they were concerned how they’d look, visibly crying after falling off cattle.
The inverse relationship extends, it seems, to courtesy as well. While shooting Knicks basketball players—a couple dozen guys, any one of whom could have thrown my six foot, two hundred pound body like a rag doll—it was hard not to be encouraged seeing each and every player, many of them seemingly drenched skin, bone and marrow with sweat, strain themselves through their panting breath to be courteous to my assistant. In contrast, the bull riders—their every hair, hat, and buckle as firmly in place as when they’d gone out to ride a few seconds earlier—threw chairs backstage, and repeatedly asked the league’s PR rep what they could do to get out of meeting fans after the event. The very next day I photographed the Metropolitan Riveters—the National Women’s Hockey League team roughly affiliated with the New Jersey Devils—and the two dozen ladies of that team marched off the ice, looking more disheveled than any other athletes I’d seen in this series—and politely asked to move quickly—as a hundred little girls who’d attended the game were waiting patiently in the arena lobby to meet them and get their autographs, which was as clear to them, as to me, a far greater priority.
What does this all mean? My sampling size is small, and even if it weren’t . . . well, Socrates, himself a great fan of the sports of his day, once declared that “the only thing I know, is that I know nothing.”
In my last installment of this series for PEM, I suggested that I misnamed the project. Perhaps I was right. Some athletes perspire. Some athletes cry. Some do both. Maybe the work might better have been called, simply, Salt Water.
Missed part 1 of B.A. Van Sise’s Sweat series? Check it out here.
PLAY hard!
PLAY more often than you think you should.
PLAY is cool.
PLAY is the thing.
PLAY is golden rays of sunshine.
PLAY feeds my soul.
PLAY your favorite song.
PLAY with my heart.
PLAY is my sanity.
PLAY is noodles.
PLAY is rockin’ out.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime
Beyond childhood and the adult uses of play
While play is most commonly associated with childhood, some species, including rats, dogs, and more than fifty percent of all primate species, retain play into adulthood. Some of this play may be useful to relieve stress, maintain friendships, and ensure skills are kept well honed.5 The very qualities that make play fighting playful, and that in juveniles generate the experiences important for brain development, are also the qualities that make it a useful tool for social assessment and manipulation. When two adult playmates have an established social relationship, with one dominant over the other, the play fighting involves the same give and take routine already noted, but the inferior partner may reinforce that social status by altering the role reversal ratio in favor of its partner. Alternatively, the inferior partner may play more roughly than expected, not conceding the advantage to its partner. If the dominant partner tolerates such a situation, the inferior animal may push its luck further and so test whether it can reverse its status. A forceful put down by the dominant, conversely, signals that the dominant is retaining its superior position.
Similarly, when strangers meet, a playful interaction may be a way to assess one another without having to resort to serious aggression. For example, consider the use of jokes between colleagues when settling into a new job. Such jokes, as a form of play, can test the relationships and personalities of your potential colleagues and allow you to assess your position in the order of things. If a joke is too off color, or perceived as a put down, then you can back away with, “sorry, I was only joking.” Indeed, playful flirting is a common tactic for humans to break the ice in more romantic settings. In this case, a playful, gentle punch to a shoulder can be very informative as to whether such closeness is welcome or unwelcome – again, allowing either partner a graceful exit before a bigger faux pas is made.
In play, any given action can be ambiguous. Was that a deliberate transgression of the rules, or was it a mistake due to the excitement of the moment? Yet such ambiguity serves a purpose. Among juveniles, such ambiguity taxes the capabilities of their developing prefrontal cortex, helping them to hone their skills. With adults, such ambiguity creates plausible denial—“I didn’t mean to punch you so hard, I was just playing.” The nuanced skills needed for navigating such ambiguity in adulthood depends on the same prefrontal cortex mechanisms that are improved by juveniles via the experiences gained during play. Species with larger brains, and hence a larger prefrontal cortex, can create even more complex cycles of ambiguity.
Playing with play
A core feature of play fighting is that it involves following a species-typical sequence of competition, such as the attack and defense of the nape in rats (figure 5 in part 1). To a degree, the sequence has a predictable pattern. A rat perceiving its partner approaching will adopt a defensive tactic that blocks access to its nape, even if its partner has just contacted its rump, not its nape. The unpredictability arises from the partner in the advantageous position momentarily relinquishing that advantage. For some species, however, a different form of unpredictability can be introduced. In the close cousin of the chimpanzee, the bonobo, play fighting involves competing for access to the shoulder, which if contacted is gently bitten. Typically, two animals approach one another face-to-face then they grapple with their hands and weave in and out, lunging to bite each other’s shoulders while evading counter bites.
Such encounters have a stereotyped predictability about them, and yet they remain subject to unpredictability. On one occasion, I saw a young, juvenile female and an older, adolescent male playing in this way for many minutes, with repeated attacks, wrestles and withdrawals. Then, suddenly, the female came running toward the sitting male as she had done countless times before, but this time, did something different. As he raised his arms ready to grab her as she lunged at his shoulder, she rotated around fully as she jumped toward him, landing with her mouth contacting his groin and her feet grasping his head. He fell backward, chest heaving, mouth wide open, and making noises like human laughter. I suspect that he was as surprised as I was by this unexpected maneuver. She broke the species-typical play theme!
Such “theme breaking” must be even more demanding of the prefrontal cortex, both for the theme breaker and the ability of the partner to identify this correctly as play and not some aberrant action by a demented animal. Yet theme breaking is relatively common not only in bonobos, but also in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. It is less common, but present in some other species of primates, especially some monkeys, such as the New World spider monkey. What these species have in common is a particularly large brain, with a well-developed prefrontal cortex. A demanding social system that entails complex social relationships also challenges the development of the prefrontal cortex in a species. Being well endowed with a prefrontal cortex and confronting a demanding social system appears to generate the kinds of capacities in the prefrontal cortex that can create the ability to play with play that may be particularly valuable as a means of further sharpening those prefrontal cortex–derived abilities.
Humans have these two attributes—a very large prefrontal cortex and an exceptionally complex social system. As such, it may not be surprising that humans are highly playful and play in more diverse ways than any other species. We have taken the heritage we have in common with bonobos and developed it to unanticipated dimensions.6 Art may be the quintessential expression of such playfulness. After all, much art repeats well-known themes, but artists can insert unexpected twists and turns into those themes. This unites the comfort of the familiar with the frisant of the unpredictable, tapping into the roots of what we find pleasurable in play: it is a way in which to explore the unknown while remaining anchored in the known. ♦
5 For further reading, see Charmalie A. D. Nahallage, Jean-Baptiste Leca, and Michael A. Huffman, “Stone handling, an object play behaviour in macaques: Welfare and neurological health implications of a bio-culturally driven tradition,” Behaviour 153 (2016), 845–869; Elisabetta Palagi, “Playing at every age: Modalities and potential functions in non-human primates,” in Anthony D. Pellegrini (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70–82.
6 For further reading, see Angeline S. Lillard, “Why do the children (pretend) play?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21 (2016), 826–834; Sergio M. Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis, “Play and cognition: The final frontier,” in Mary C. Olmstead (ed.), Animal Cognition: Principles, Evolution, and Development (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2016), 201–230.
(Image credit: Nick Cave performers at the Peabody Essex Museum. © PEM.)
Games are designed by all kinds of people and can take many different forms. The festival of independent games known as IndieCade has been finding a way to celebrate the innovations of independent game developers since 2005.
Read the transcript.
