By Lars Hazelton
It is Sunday evening at Gerlev Sports Academy. Slowly the big sports hall is filling up with young people. They chitchat in smaller groups glancing at each other. This is the first evening of their folk high school stay. A teacher stands at the centre of the floor. “OK, let us begin; hold each other’s hands and form a big circle”. Hesitantly, the students take their positions looking around at all the unfamiliar faces. “Look at one particular buddy on the other side. When I say ‘go’, you run to that person and circle around him or her. Ready – set – go.” Everybody runs across the circle and the initial nervousness and excitement dissolve in physical movement. Laughter bubbles up all around while everybody chases around to circle their chosen buddy who is chasing somebody else. This simple game builds on a classic and traditional game, The Winking Game or Kispus, as we call it here at Gerlev. It is a game about order – chaos – and order again, because everybody ends up standing in the circle. What happens when we start playing like this, is that we get “out of our heads and into our bodies” where joy resides – we move from brain to heart.
We see it over and over again here at Gerlev Sports Academy. What you can achieve with play. Games creates community and ties a group together. That is why it is a good idea to begin to play at once instead of waiting until friction and problems have arisen. But play is not a quick-fix: In my experience, you cannot play with somebody you have no sympathy for at all; there must be a certain will to meet “the other”.
Playing – a state of happiness
When we play at Gerlev, it is not primarily in order to use playing as a tool for something else, but because playing has value in itself. When you go into playing – a term vi use about the kind of flow that arises when you get absorbed by the game and more or less forget about yourself – you enter a kind of wakeful non-consciousness. This is a state of happiness. As I see it, the idea of play and learning is all about transferring the enormous amount of energy in playing to learning – in order to borrow from it and make learning more fun and more effective. It is also possible to implement playful elements in learning, but strictly speaking I do not think learning can be made into play. The two spheres are simply different, and I do not think anything good comes out of an attempt to turn everything into a game. However, I often wonder why kids are not seriously taught to play. Human beings have an instinct for play, but how we play is a question of culture, and being a good playmate takes schooling. If you are good at playing, you will have friends and surplus energy, also for learning and work; it is as simple as that.
Play in itself without any kind of agenda is underestimated in society today, and I am convinced that the folk high school is one of the few places where play is given a real chance. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if it were not for Gerlev Sports Academy and the folk high school tradition, traditional sports-games would be extinct in Denmark today. At the folk high school, we are allowed to experiment with ourselves and each other and spend time on something that is directed by a goal inside ourselves rather than by external measures and demands for results. If we, at the folk high school, can agree that something makes sense to us, to society and to the future, and if it lies within the quite wide scope of the folk high school’s educational purposes, we can do it. This is what we do with the traditional sports-games and have been doing at Gerlev since the 1980s.
A new link between theory and practice
I have spent all my adult life communicating traditional play and games and it has all grown out of Gerlev Sports Academy. When I was a student at the school in 1981-1982, no research in traditional play-culture in Denmark existed. But already in the 1970s, Gerlev Sports Academy – with Ove Korsgaard as principal – had begun to snatch at the heels of the big sports organizations like a critical terrier.
People criticised the homogenization of sports and began to research the societal, sociological and humanist aspects of sports. An Institute of Sports Research was founded, the so-called Idrætsforsk. The sport and play researcher Jørn Møller cultivated his research field as traditional sport and play culture and tied it closely to the practices of the Sports Academy. Today, this goes without saying at the universities, but back then, it was ground-breaking to link practice and theory in sport and body culture. Meanwhile, at the folk high school, experimentation and creative thinking were flourishing.
Finding the essence of play
From the beginning we were aware that play is different from sport. Sport is driven by a goal outside the participants themselves; there are fixed rules that must be followed because a union has laid them out, usually there are spectators, and the goal is to win. In our definition, play also follows fixed rules, but the rules may be changed if the participants agree on it.
We revived the traditional games and were concerned about how the games could make sense now and in the future. Contrary to many other countries where the main objective is to preserve the traditional games in an archaic form, we have always been concerned about discovering the essence of the games. On that basis we can then adapt the game to the present time and different target groups, situations, places, weather conditions etcand so on. When we play, there is no ‘Olympic Committee’ or ‘National Union for the Game of Tag’ who can tell us that what we are doing is wrong.
When Gerlev started this, and Jørn Møller established The Sports Historical Workshop in 1983, the traditional sports games had more or less disappeared from the body culture in Denmark. In many other countries, there are national federations for these kinds of games, and they are a part of popular cultural life. In Denmark, we had to revive it all, but this had the advantage that we were not bound by ideas about preserving the games in a particular form. Thus, when we play at Gerlev, we use traditional materials like wood, metal and rope even though it would sometimes be easier to use synthetic materials. This provides a sensuousness that most people greatly appreciate. But we do not walk around in ‘traditional folk costumes’. And when we travel around to present the games all over the country, we will often bring Panna Cage and parkour-gear along. We believe that the spirit of playing is that it develops and adapts to culture and time. In the Middle Ages, no one felt bound to play the games as they were played in the Viking Age.
Playpark, playship, play for life…
The experiments carried out at Gerlev Sports Academy gave rise to the idea of building a playpark where the results of our research could be presented. This became Gerlev Playpark, which opened to the public in 1999. Today, Gerlev is a knowledge centre for playful movement, the Gerlev Centre of Play & Movement. In collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark, we have researched into the culture of play for decades. Indeed, Gerlev is a hotbed for a whole range of projects with the purpose of awakening the desire for playfulness in order to create happiness and quality of life. At the moment, fourprojects merit particular attention: The Playship, Living Playculture, Play for Life and HandiPlay.
Play as balancing and break
When the students come to Gerlev, they have typically chosen the folk high school to get a break from the pressures of grades, to excel in a particular sports discipline or to find out what to do in the future. At the same time, they are introduced to play. Everybody will meet it during their first couple of days, and they also get an introduction to the school subject ‘games’ where we immerse ourselves in the old games, develop them and experiment with them. None of the students has chosen Gerlev in order to play, and many start out with the idea that play is for children. In fact, this is a widespread impression in our society. However, most of the games we use are in fact games for adults and historically play is not something that is only connected to childhood. The students here at Gerlev realize this. And through play, they discover new aspects of themselves. They experience themselves physically and in a community. They run out of breath and get sore muscles. They discover the versatility of play – from wrestling to pétanque. Some of them get so taken with this that they want to immerse themselves in it and choose ‘play’ as their subject. Others experience play through other subjects, as the teachers at Gerlev are good at implementing play in all subjects. Play rubs off on life at Gerlev in general.
I see a tendency for adults to reclaim play. When you walk across a park in sunny weather, plenty of youngsters and adults are out playing and in our playpark in Gerlev more than half of the visitors are adults who come without children. When we are out presenting our projects from the playpark, we also bring with us the folk high school’s values and we can see that this makes a difference. For people with disabilities with whom we make play-projects. For cities where different actors are gathered at our playship to identify a shared vision for their city etc. Here, the play creates a space for development that is different from what is otherwise dominant in society today.
Play is primarily important as a break and to create balance. Conversely, the folk high school is a space for development where one can experiment and be driven by one’s own developmental goals – as opposed to the goal-oriented teaching in the educational system in general. I think there is a need for both. But in the last 10-15 years, the developmental space that is represented by the folk high school has been narrowed. Therefore, it makes me happy and optimistic when I see that so many young people choose to attend a folk high school and leave Gerlev with the experience that play is also for adults.