The Imperative of Play: Beyond Existing Maps

What do we do when the ways we’ve learned to respond no longer help us create anything new?

Fear and anger can be clarifying. They can show us what matters. But they can also narrow us—pulling us toward certainty, toward taking sides, toward organizing ourselves primarily in opposition. Even those of us committed to building something new can find ourselves repeating what we already know how to do.

This workshop starts from a different place: that we don’t need to know what to do in order to begin creating.

Play is a way of working with that not-knowing. Not as a break from reality, but as a method for engaging it—where people can risk, experiment, and build with what is, without having to resolve everything first. Play makes room for us to be more than who we are, and in doing so, to create more than what we already know.

Together, we will engage in a series of collective experiments—small performances of creating—that invite us to shift from reacting to building. Carrie Lobman will share examples from recent work with communities across the world, where people are using play to navigate conflict, sustain collective projects, and create life in circumstances that don’t easily support it.

This is not a workshop about play as an idea. It is an invitation to play as a way of creating—together—when there is no clear path forward.

Leader Biography

Carrie Lobman, Ed.D. is an internationally recognized sociocultural scholar, educator, and movement-builder advancing play, performance, and human development as practices for social transformation. She is the Leader of Education and Research at the East Side Institute and a professor in the Department of Learning and Teaching at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her work brings her into collaboration with educators, organizers, activists, and communities around the world to develop play as a collective practice for creating new ways of living and organizing in the face of conflict, uncertainty, and social fragmentation.

Carrie is a key organizer of the Performing the World conference and community, facilitates the Institute’s Play, Development and Social Justice webinar series, and co-leads the International Class, its flagship global leadership program. Through this work, she helps build an international community of people using performance and play to grow new forms of collective life and power. She mentors emerging performance activists worldwide and has served on the national board of directors of the All Stars Project. Carrie is the author or editor of three books: Unscripted Learning: Using Improvisation across the K–8 Curriculum, Big Ideas and Revolutionary Activity: Selected Essays, Talks and Articles by Lois Holzman, and Performance and Play: Play and Culture Series, Volume 11.