The Importance Of Play: Conversing With Rachel Haley Himmelheber
Ada Lambert | September 18, 2024
Last spring, one of Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) creative writing professors, Rachel Haley Himmelheber, taught a course that had been in the works for years called Play and Practice for the Artist.
“I have been interested in studying and teaching play since the pandemic, because I was teaching a class on Toni Morrison, who has books with difficult content in them, and Donald Trump was president, and we were in the midst of the pandemic, and I was teaching my class online, so I thought, how can I support my students who are in this difficult moment in the world?” Himmelheber said.
Himmelheber quickly discovered the concept of play in adults, a thought that has only recently gained traction in the academic world.
“I started doing more research on it, and I developed a first-year seminar called Practicing Playfulness, which I've taught twice here,” Himmelheber said. “Then, I developed an upper-level class which is called Play and Practice for the Artist.”
While teaching the Play and Practice for the Artist course, Himmelheber became even more fascinated with the concept of play and sought opportunities that aligned with her interest in the field.
She found many organizations that taught young children about play but found that there was a scarcity of groups specialized in adult play. Eventually, she came across an organization based in England called the Playful Learning Association that focuses on adults.
“They have a conference, so I started to look into it, and I wanted to propose a conference presentation that would be about the upper-level class Play and Practice for the Artist,” Himmelheber said. “So I did that, and they accepted it.”
Himmelheber asked if students were comfortable with their work for the class being incorporated into her presentation, which many students granted permission for. After the course had ended, she compiled and organized her research along with student work into a unique and playful presentation. She set off for England, where the conference occurred, at the beginning of summer.
“I went to the conference, which was in Brighton, on the coast, and there were a couple hundred people there from all over the world, mostly Europe, and there were only like two other Americans there,” Himmelheber said.
Since the conference was international, Himmelheber met many interesting people from around the world who were engaging with play in their workplaces. Despite it being an academic conference, she noticed that there were a variety of different careers that were attractive to the topic of play.
“I'd say it was about 50 percent academics and then a lot of librarians and people from small businesses and big businesses who do some kind of playful facilitation,” Himmelheber said. “So some people were teachers, but there were also a lot of librarians, and there were business people, and there were nonprofit folks. There was just a more interesting, dynamic mix than you usually find at an academic conference.”
For her presentation, she decided to begin with a more in-depth version of an exercise she did in the Play and Practice for the Artist class where students were asked to think about what types of play they engaged in as children and write them down on a piece of paper.
“We did quite a bit of that in the conference presentation,” Himmelheber said. “Since it's a play conference, they were very specific that they did not want people coming and reading a paper in front of everyone. You had to be doing something, and it had to be playful. One of the things that I did was I made up 40 cards, and I put them on each table. Each card had questions that were research-based about types of play that you might have engaged in. So the hope was you'd pick up the paper and see something that jogged your memory about some play that you did.”
During the presentation, Himmelheber mentioned one of her favorite activities to do as a kid to give heed to the fact that play as a child is bound to look different from play as an adult, but that there are roots under every activity we enjoyed as a child.
“We had some interesting conversations,” Himmelheber said. “I shared with the group that one of the things I loved to do as a child was climb trees, I just got so much joy out of climbing trees, sitting in trees, touching them, being up in the air, being up in the branches. But I have a bad back now, and I don't feel like climbing a tree. I don't think it's gonna hit the same sweet spot for me that it did when I was a child, because physically, I am different, and I also know how much it would suck to fall out of a tree and break my leg, whereas when I was a child, I had no thoughts about that at all.”
This activity opened discussions about how interactions with play as a child can be traced back and reimagined within the boundaries of adult life.
“I used that as an example of how we could drill down into what the pleasure was, and try to find some other places where that showed up in my life,” Himmelheber said. “So I took the physicality out of it and was thinking about the like hopping from place to place, and being able to move around in this one discrete thing. And several group members said, ‘Well, that sounds like what you do when you write a book.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, it is kind of like that.’”
Himmelheber also spent time during her presentation sharing play videos that students made in her Play and Practice for the Artist course.
“They were super impressed. I didn't show them any of my videos because mine were the worst, but I did say that that was one of the innovations of the class for me was that I tried to play alongside [the students] which disrupted a bunch of things in my usual way of thinking about a class,” Himmelheber said.
After her presentation, Himmelheber spent a lot of time attending other presentations, each one different from the other. A presentation that caught her attention was centered around identifying the specific traits that a playful person may represent and allowing people to think about how their personalities may or may not encourage playfulness in day-to-day life.
Another presentation that Himmelheber found interesting was about a multi-player phone game that explores the existential and moral decisions of a post-apocalyptic society. The game essentially had no end goal other than to think about the philosophical decisions at hand.
The presentations at the conference sparked some new ideas for Himmelheber about play and how to go even further with it next time she teaches the class, which will be next spring.
“I wonder if it might be fun to start with a deeper kind of understanding of what each of us likes about play and get to that individual pleasure aspect of it, like what specifically was joyful for you in this activity, because you could have two children playing the same thing, and they got very different kinds of joy out of it, so that could be an interesting thing for me to push on more this time,” Himmelheber said.
Himmelheber also noticed a correlation between playfulness and self-consciousness during an activity at the conference where strangers were asked to draw pictures of one another without concealing the image they were creating. Despite the intention to help people feel less self-conscious about what they were creating, some participants still felt insecure.
“It opened up a lot of interesting conversations about creativity and self-consciousness, and why, when we are explicitly told not to care how the picture looks, we still do,” Himmelheber said. “Someone at my table was like, ‘I'm sorry about my drawing’ and really that wasn't the point of it, but it was hard to shake. So I think play is something where you're usually pretty unselfconscious when you're in the mode of playing, and that's one of the joys of it. So if we're kind of tuned toward being self-conscious, how do we let go of that? And how do we let something more creative in? And what does that entail? I thought that could be an interesting activity/discussion.”
During the class in the spring, Himmelheber selected a novel to accompany the discussions and activities called “How To Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. The novel discusses the effects of capitalism and the “attention economy” which makes it increasingly more difficult to spend time focusing on creating as a form of expression rather than a means of productivity. When work is created as a product, there is often a fear associated with the implications of widespread opinion and perfecting the work itself.
“Play is important for people who do creative things, for artists, because it can get very grim when you're just thinking of making it perfect, and we want to be open to possibilities and that its okay to make mistakes,” Himmelheber said. “That's one of the things about play, is that failure is baked in, right? Sometimes you lose the game, or sometimes you don't do a good job at something. And the nice thing about play is you can just stop. It allows you, in a way, to practice failure which can be really important for people in general, but definitely for creative people.”
In practice, Himmelheber has found that incorporating play into her life has allowed more space for creativity that is not directly correlated to productivity, and by doing so, she has been able to create more often and freely.
“In terms of my own life, I would say it's just been huge to start trying to really be playful as an adult,” Himmelheber said. “It sounds like it should be easier than it is, but there's a lot of pressure to act like an adult like to not lay on the floor or to not use this table as a spaceship. We worship at the altar of appropriateness as grown-ups, and it's soul-killing.”
The concept of play has shifted her idea of how to exist in the world and through her courses, she hopes to help students find outlets that will enrich their lives and support their creative endeavors.
“[Play] has kind of taken over my academic brain life,” Himmelheber said. “I think that play and joy and having fun might be the most important things in the world.”
If you are interested in taking the Play and Practice for the Artist, the course will be offered in the spring through the creative writing department, so keep an eye out for it.