The Architecture of Play

Six months after the conclusion of ALWAYS: Call and Response, a creative development lab fostering an exchange between Palestinian and Australian First Nations artists, Lux Eterna and I conducted the following conversation – as a reflection and reckoning. The residency had created a space for deep dialogue and experimentation; and stepping back from it allowed us to approach our ideas with a fresh lens. What emerged was a discussion that feels even more urgent now, as the world continues its slide toward crisis and complacency. Our exchange is not just a continuation of the residency’s spirit but a call to remain unsettled, to refuse the comfort of ‘returning to normal’, and to insist on shaping pathways for radical, collective futures. 

Travis de Vries: At the outset of our residency, we were struck by the necessity of crafting a shared language – a framework through which we could approach our work, and perhaps more crucially, each other. Given the depth and intensity of the subject matter we were engaging with – personal histories of dispossession, shared experiences of cultural erasure, and the creative impulses born of resistance – it felt vital to establish a foundation rooted in trust and mutual comprehension.  

In our initial discussions, we gravitated toward an unspoken agreement to carve out a common space where vulnerability would not only be possible but safeguarded. We knew that the path ahead would require us to reach past our individual practices and speak from a collective vision, one forged in the fires of truth-telling and the act of bearing witness. How, then, do we bear the weight of our stories while still allowing each other the room to breathe and create? 

Lux Eterna: In addition to codes of the common space, I think of what I’ve been noticing in respect of decolonising my own thinking. Holding several thoughts, streams of thought, dreams and nightmares simultaneously. Becoming aware of the immensity of space and of this container in which we find ourselves – how also, we find the edges of such a space. With regard to how we receive what others say: I notice in my body any sensations or fleeting images in my mind. I record some notes that may not make sense on paper, but jog the memory of what came up. This feels like an embodied expression of extended spaciousness and observation. A technology of sorts, a practice and a skill. Something which can always be refined.  

Perhaps there is a way to refine ourselves in these gatherings and exchanges that makes me curious about ritual. As a way of ensconcing our stories: in the opening, unpacking and closing of them. Ways we can process and integrate them somatically, and ways we can map out symbolic anchor points, topographically within a physical space. I imagine ritual, in respect of sharing stories, may allow us to revisit these anchor points, when we may get lost and/or overwhelmed by the vastness and weight of some of our stories. How might we consider ritual as a technology for gathering and storytelling? 

TdV: I love this notion of ritual as both anchor and pathway. A means to bind us to the stories we carry while also creating a map to follow when those stories feel too heavy to hold alone. I think about the way rituals have always functioned in cultures, especially my own, as more than mere habit or tradition: they are tools for stabilising life and guiding transformation, providing structure and rhythm so that we can approach even the heaviest truths with reverence and clarity. It reminds me that each ritual we engage in, from the smallest gesture to the most elaborate ceremony, becomes a kind of technology connecting us across time and space, grounding us and guiding us forward. 

When I think of our time together in the residency, I wonder if our work, too, could be seen as the beginning of a ritual: each exchange, each shared story, becomes a pulse, a beat that keeps us in sync even as we each bring our unique rhythms to the whole. How might we expand on this idea of collective ritual, not only as a practice of remembrance but also as a foundation for building together something new – something that could last longer than our own bodies? Could our gatherings, our creative exchanges, become a kind of shared ritual that lives on, long after we’ve each moved on from this space? 

LE: Anchors, pathways and maps. Bindings and weight. Stability and transformation. I love that we haven’t assigned too much importance to time. Almost as if time and space were subordinated to what we choose to fill it with and/or how we move through it. I feel a shared redirection of the spotlight back on to what technological advancements are (and were) for us humans – perhaps even the smallest of ‘gestures’ may pull us back to rituals latent in the memory of our cultural DNA?  

Rightly so we ignited a ritual in our residency through gathering and creative exchanges that will live on even after we’ve moved on from this place, but who from our ancestors did we bring with us, whose memories, whose knowing, whose styles of leading and listening informed our behaviours? 

There is a kind of looking back in order to look forward resonance emerging here. It makes me think of family constellation work, whereby gathering with a clearly shared intention and reverence towards our time together invites our ancestors to be present with, to guide and heal us. Though gathering for creative exchange is ritualistic in itself, I’d like us to consider social memory. Asking questions about how we gather, how we institute rituals which may help us bookend our gathering and interchange, yet also open that timescale up to the future? For example, we played a game over three days. The game was the ceremonious grounding ritual that yielded different results every day, even shifting the parameters by which we played. I was most fascinated by and still crave this. Games in and of themselves, are profoundly ritualistic, yet how often do we include, let alone consider play, as acts of social reverence and development?  

TdV: Your reflections on play as ritual strike a chord. Thinking back to A Quiet Year, I realise it became a kind of grounding ritual in its own right. Each day we returned to this imagined world; moving within its parameters allowed us to step slightly outside our personal narratives. It’s a tool I’ve used before – with teens at the Powerhouse Creative Studio in Parramatta and with First Nations groups exploring collective language – precisely because it allows people to shift perspective, to ideate without having to immediately confront the full weight of lived experiences. Yet, even in the midst of play, the shadows of our stories lingered. We could observe them from a distance, perhaps just for a moment, before inevitably returning to them with new insights, maybe even with new questions. It’s a tool that, while imperfect, can create a framework for these perspectival shifts, offering space to dream in ways rarely afforded to us. 

But I find it’s never as simple as escaping into imagination. Play doesn’t fully shield us from trauma; it lets us walk around it, perhaps peer in from an angle, but we can’t sidestep the realities that cling to us. And we shouldn’t – our stories aren’t things to be tidied up and put away. As marginalised voices, we’re often placed in a role where our culture is museumised, held in stasis. But no culture exists untouched; it evolves and bends under each new interaction, holding our stories both old and yet unfolding. Even in play, we bring the weight of all that with us, shaping the world within the game as much as it shapes us. 

LE: At first glance, faced with a choice in your response between two questions, I feel like I’ve been invited to read a choose-your-own-adventure story.   

I feel that playing games and performance craft are some of the furthest things from escapism. In them I have always discovered a concentrated presence that is relational to more and many, in contrast to the austere duality of patient and therapist, for example. I bring this up, because the moments I’ve experienced in play/performance-making have been equally if not more restorative than those in psychotherapy, if we are talking traumas and histories.  

The play is the work.  

Yet it must be supported by those eternal luxuries: time and space. I’ve believed in carving out time on a project, and/or expecting things to come up for people when working closely and intimately with them. When I used to teach performance, very personal histories and experiences, unwelcome in other social settings, always found a way into these spaces. However, given the greater emphasis on epistemological justices in recent times, I am becoming aware of the need for more time for the debriefing, the shared witnessing of each other, in such moments to truly acknowledge another’s being beyond the colonial lens thrust upon everything.  

Our current written dialogue is encouraging a deep reflective processing of our residency. Writing is a powerful tool for insight, pattern recognition, and meta-awareness. We’ve been able to distil our experiences into practical tenets that could inform our next gathering. Understanding writing is not everyone’s way, how then can we oscillate between play and writing, while still privileging the oral traditions of our respective cultures?  

TdV: Lux, your thoughts on play as work really resonate with me. The idea that spaces of play, like performance or games, can be more open and relational than structured therapy taps into why I’ve always been drawn to these methods. Play provides that unique framework where we can explore heavy things, not in isolation, but in a shared experience. There’s a different depth in approaching our stories collectively, almost ritualistically, as something we live through together rather than merely dissect alone. 

Your question about bridging play, writing, and oral traditions feels like a natural extension of what we’re trying to create. Writing can help us distil and reflect, but it’s not the only way to process or share meaning – especially for those of us connected to oral traditions. Spoken words have a presence and adaptability that writing can’t always capture; they allow us to respond in the moment, to bring the past and present into conversation, embodying memory in ways both immediate and enduring.  

I wonder if we could structure future gatherings to honour both the fluidity of play and the grounded reflection of writing or oral exchange. Perhaps we could initiate sessions with play or performance as a grounding ritual, using it to step outside ourselves, and then flow into reflections – whether spoken or written – that emerge more naturally from the experience. It’s about allowing each form to hold space in a way that respects both individual processing and communal resonance. 

So, as we consider future residencies or projects, could we consciously design these gatherings to balance all ways of knowing? Maybe this blend, giving equal weight to oral, written, and corporeal forms, could bring us closer to a practice that feels fully integrated – one that honours our stories whatever form they take. Though how do we turn these rituals or forms of play into serious business and governance within the context of nation building?  

LE: I appreciate your direction, considering how we take what we do beyond the art residency and gallery/performance spaces, turning creative initiatives into main pillars of society instead of merely events to be enjoyed passively. This is serious business.  

Coming up with communal rituals of play – the forms, experiences, and parameters during gathering and co-creating – may be likened to game design. We become aware of the container in which we find ourselves. There is also a deep educational element in becoming architects of new ways to re-educate ourselves. Governance is rarely discussed in the context of education, despite the assertions of psychoanalysts and revolutionary figures in our heritage about the importance of education in building better futures.  

Governance and world/nation building require a social code other than the dominant one of our times – one that artists and designers already play with in compounding education, rituals of play, integration,* listening, reflection, and shifting perspectives. Considering and experimenting with social codes can be seen as prototyping alternate pathways and states. Our creative time is foundational, yet it requires long term discipline and commitment to build what we do into a main social pillar. Actively moving outwards into the civic space not only as artists but as visionaries, speakers, spearheaders of creative projects that cause ripples long after the event has passed. 

What may be some of the new/other roles undertaken by artists, beyond creative spaces, to make our imaginary and playable worlds serious business for society?   

TdV: Lux, your framing of governance, education, and play as interconnected threads feels both compelling and demanding. The idea of rituals of play as a foundation for governance, as tools for rewriting the codes we live by, feels like a reclamation – but also a challenge to ourselves. Are we prepared to take what we experiment with in these spaces and apply it in ways that genuinely ripple outward? Or are we content to keep it contained, safely framed within residencies and galleries? There’s a risk here of remaining in the abstract, of indulging in navel-gazing under the guise of reflection. 

Integration, as you describe it, feels like the antidote to that risk. Taking the time to sit with what we’ve created, letting it shape us, before we act – that’s essential. But integration can’t stop at the personal level. If we’re serious about moving outwards, we need to actively bridge the gap between what happens in our creative spaces and the civic spaces where governance, policy, and community-building take place. Otherwise, we’re playing a game with no stakes, leaving the work of change to someone else. 

Your question about the roles artists might take up beyond these spaces pushes us to confront our own complicity. What stops us from stepping further into these roles? Is it fear of failure, or perhaps a reluctance to give up the perceived purity of art? For me, it’s a question of balance. When we design games or gatherings, we’re already setting rules, building frameworks, and inviting participation – acts that mirror governance. But how do we expand that work without being paralysed by the weight of expectation? 

So maybe the challenge to ourselves is this: Are we brave enough to see our experiments not as ends in themselves but as prototypes for something larger? Can we accept the discomfort of applying our imaginative tools to the messy, unpolished realities of civic life? And if not – if we can’t or won’t – then what are we really doing here? Are we just entertaining ourselves for a moment, or are we building something that can hold the weight of collective dreams and become the groundwork for sustained, systemic change? 

Let’s not let ourselves off the hook. How do we push past these thresholds of abstraction and take responsibility for the worlds we imagine? And how do we ensure the work, though serious, still allows space for the joy and play that brought us here in the first place? 

LE: Thank you, Travis – your questions are relevant and necessary, and I value anyone who steers the conversation into ‘but how are going to do this?’ In answer to your final question: I say discipline. Cadences of discipline around work and play.  

Yes, integration is not just personal, yet our creative days could perhaps benefit from a little more time to reconvene from individual integration into collective resolve. This may take the form of a closing ritual and/or a commitment to actions that ensue from our gathering into our respective daily worlds, while continuing to see how they are discussed, received, and supported with and by others.  

I have a tendency to see everything, art especially, as process work. Nothing is finite; all is exploration, experimentation, dialogue. In several languages other than English, living beings are described as processes. Systems are processes. As opposed to what Byung Chul-Han describes as ritual, for example, repetition (as prescribed by our current capitalist neoliberal frameworks) is the death knell of play and philosophical inquiry. And there is discipline in freestyle exploration, as there is in the oscillations between play and periods of focused work. 

There is governance inherent in producing work, and there are many scales to production. Some are more comfortable with the responsibility of a large endeavour; many others will shirk away from it, wanting to focus on their myopic bubble. I’ve been guilty of this. However, the last thirteen months have radicalised my practice, and even though I had a pro-social focus in dance cinema and ecological reciprocities, it wasn’t until a genocide started taking place against Palestinians in Gaza, and the consequent political theatre in which the world’s ‘free’ countries named atrocities as freedom and freedom as terrorism, that I realised there is a need for us to work together in ways like never before to dismantle colonial structures.   

I think that though artists have been exalted as visionaries, our creative wares tend to be passively enjoyed as a pastime. We’re patronised by consumers with disposable income and time, or bureaucrats and funding bodies who ordain the worthy. We build new worlds all the time, yet society seldom acknowledges our architectural powers through appointments to official positions. We’ve been cosplay visionaries for them: they like to enter and try on new worlds, but are unwilling to really invest in any changes that compromise habit and comfort. We need to start rupturing that and move beyond the prison of the white cube or the proscenium arch or the screen. Artists in the past formed strongly charged avant-garde collectives that aggressively challenged the status quo. In fact, to do something that caused pearl-clutching was a flex. In my earlier days of teaching creative & performing arts, I frequently shared Cesar A. Cruz’s quote (by now almost a cliché): ‘The role of the artist is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ 

Yet it’s not just about being perverse and disrupting for disruption’s sake. Because too much disruption thwarts flow. To build new worlds we need continuity, focus, relationships, and process-oriented resolutions. Beyond spaces, such as residencies, for us to experiment, develop, and distil our thoughts in, could we begin to consider what we do as community-building initiatives and apply for local and state government ‘business’ type grants to grow offshoots into other fields (law, commerce, urban planning), as a basic example? 

There has been a distinctive shift in my personal journey over the past few years – from the deeply subjective and solitary to the relational, pro-social, and world-making. I didn’t understand where it was leading at first and resisted, but given our current geo-political fractures, I realised my instinct was guiding me on this path. I’ve also discovered in having and making more time to go outward that people (mainly in law, as that’s been my obsessional vortex of late) are willing to make time to discuss artistic and trans-disciplinary approaches. My practice now consists of connecting, exchanging knowledge/experience, and creative ideas, whilst seeing these synaptic touch-points as relational nodes on new social maps.  

Do we simply walk into existing places and roles? Or do we create them and form new councils ourselves? How do we, as artists, (like certain Elders and children), become more dignified pillars of society? How can we create valued resonances for social capital? What might these pro-social/inter-field maps for the approaching era look like? 

TdV: Lux, your response resonates deeply, and I find myself reflecting on the profound challenge and opportunity embedded in your words. You call upon us, as artists and thinkers, to hold ourselves accountable to the roles we claim – or could claim – in society. Your shift from the subjective to the relational mirrors the necessity of our collective moment: to leave the safety of the white cube and step boldly into spaces where art becomes governance, where creation shapes law, commerce, and planning. 

You’re right – discipline is central, as is the courage to confront the structures that confine us. We must ask ourselves: Are we willing to move beyond critique into the practical, systemic work of building? Are we prepared to create spaces of shared governance and responsibility, where our roles evolve from experimenters into societal pillars, without losing the spirit of play and process that defines our practices?  

For me, this dialogue has been an extraordinary exploration of possibility. The idea of building new councils or mapping relational nodes between disciplines is not only inspiring but necessary. We’re at a juncture where the role of the artist must expand from visionary to active participant in shaping the future. Your call to apply for ‘business’ grants to extend our work into fields like law and urban planning feels especially urgent – it’s a tangible way to ground our ideas in the civic space. 

Lux, collaborating with you in this way has been a true honour. Your insights have illuminated the depths of what it means to practise art as an act of world-building, and your ability to fuse relational thought with radical action is profoundly inspiring. I feel privileged to have shared this space, where we’ve challenged each other to push beyond the limits of our individual practices and consider how our work can truly reshape society. 

To close, I’d like to hand the final word to you – not as a question but as an invitation to leave the reader with a provocation. What seed of thought or call to action would you plant in their minds as they step away from this exchange and back into their worlds?

LE: Thank you firstly, for your deep questions and clarity in directing our very expansive dialogue into concise foundations. There’s a deeply human aspect to your deliberation which hasn’t compromised the comprehensive nature of our interchange, by reducing anything down to summary points. I still get a rich sense of the largesse of moving beyond our ideas, intentions, and respective art practices. Equally so, it has been a privilege to receive your creative and inquisitive generosity.  

My final provocations revolve around awareness of leadership, hospicing, and revolution. 

Are we ready and willing to take up or encourage those suitable, to give them more space so as to allow them to become the strong pillars of our societies? Such positions entail much responsibility, so how are we willing to share and support each other?  

Good systems are built by good people living relationally, not atomically. For me this means getting out more to find and foster rightful communities. Having open and honest conversations to help shape what we are starting to build together – whether it be in business, politics, education, an art project, revolutionary action, etc. Getting comfortable with contrasting ideas and negotiating. Discomfort and conflict are not the bad things most people seem to think they are. Relational skills are a craft, which become finely tuned over time with frequent application.  

Feeling an immense curiosity about good leadership, I keep asking myself each day: who are the adults in the room? Who is already leading well? What qualities do they exhibit? Who is sharing their gifts with their communities? Who brings people together and demonstrates responsibility in maintaining good relational practice? Yet, also where, how, and by whom are the checks set for leaders when they become too headstrong? I guess we’re looking for those who are walking from behind their community and not in front.  

In light of our recent explorations into creative world building, we can say that much of what we do as artists is imaginative futuring. However, before forging space and discipline for such emergence, what must we undo? How can we foment prime peated conditions from which the best of us can emerge? We need to foster awareness around what we no longer require and lay them to rest, lest we move forward into new worlds with all the same controlling mechanisms. The elegance of subtraction isn’t given as much credit as it deserves.  

We also find ourselves in unprecedented times – a revolution lurks on the horizon. Not referencing our current historical moment would make our ideas nebulous. This approaching decade is crucial for our individual and collective development. How can we use this imminent upheaval to hospice what is predatory, hierarchical, and egoistic – to welcome in gifts and legacies of relational, dignified, and compassionate living for future generations? Imagine a caravansary stationed on this revolutionary journey: in it we must each leave behind parts of our respective lives and identities as we pass through a portal to another world of better leaders, relational resonance, and time for play.  

In Zen terms: ‘let go, or be dragged’.