Creating Space for Interfaith Engagement
“Play” as a Tool for Community Formation
by jem Jebbia
I catch the hissing cat and quickly toss it to the person next to me. “Hiss!” Someone gently underhands the cranky baby across the room. “Wahhh!” “Woosh!” The sound of a rusty knife cuts through the air. The objects continue to trade hands carefully – it would be disastrous, should they collide.
In a room full of student interfaith leaders, none of these items actually exchange hands. The game we are playing is named for the three imaginary items – “Knife, baby, angry cat.” It is an improv game often used to warm up for theater and drama work as an ice breaker, or to increase one’s ability to engage in multisensory activity. As an exercise, I encourage students to use this game to arrive in the space, to practice “presence in the room,” just as I do with my own daily meditation practice.
As a former college chaplain at a large research university and as a current doctoral student studying historic instances of interfaith and inter-religious cooperation in what we today call the state of California, I am interested particularly in what makes interfaith cooperation successful. Which practices, needs, and tools allow people with fundamentally different experiences of the world to build relationships?
A key part of this story is the fact that spaces for interfaith engagement, and thus interfaith relationships, are not equal. The scholar and author bell hooks described this reality in a chapter of her book Belonging: A Culture of Place (1998). She notes that while inequality is inevitable, reciprocity is achievable through caregiving and receiving. Not every participant in an interfaith space feels safe and able to share or communicate, and communication is unique in each of us. Yet building a culture of sharing and commitment to care for each other can create authentic community. It is what successful interfaith engagement demands.
Interfaith dialogue rightfully plays an important role in building relationships across difference – we need to learn to speak, listen, hear, and process together. Just as people learn in different ways, people communicate distinctly. In a time when much of our interaction is based online, communication is further complicated by issues with tone and humor, rapid responses, and lack of accountability in anonymous spaces, among other things. I suggest that the use of “play,” which can consist of improv games, exercises, and body movement, provides an alternative tool for in-person interfaith engagement. It can open the floor for dialogue and justice work together, without restricting learning to language and verbal exchange.
The Theatre of the Oppressed is an educational movement that began in Brazil when theater visionary and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Augusto Boal developed theatrical techniques for social and political activists. Boal, heavily influenced by the educator and scholar Pablo Freire and his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, considered “play” to be a form of liberative communication. For individuals that have experienced race, gender, or class-based trauma, or other forms of oppression that live in the physical body, play can open modes of expression that dialogue – that is, speaking and sharing – can inhibit. In the process of building and deepening interfaith relationships, we as facilitators and participants must realize that verbal story sharing and speaking holds the real possibility of demanding participants perform and re-live pain and trauma.
So practically, how do games and exercises provide an alternative to dialogue circles? Instead of naming specific games, I highlight three types of activities that serve various goals in interfaith engagement. Websites like the improv encyclopedia offer specific definitions and instructions.
Allowing for Authentic Being and Becoming
First, games can build relationships and community by providing a mode of expression. During an interfaith dialogue and dinner meeting one snowy evening, students at the university where I worked gathered in a circle facing each other. Instead of introducing themselves with the typical list of information – name, year, major, and the dreaded “fun fact” – some student leaders led the group in stretches and simple body movements that “shook out the day.” After this exercise, the student leaders allowed a space for silent reflection. Beginning a gathering with body movement or silent reflection allows people to “arrive” in the space to feel authentically in the group.
Photo: Wikimedia
It also allows individuals to become aware of the tension or anxiety they hold – whether from work, school, or daily life, and in the vulnerability of the space. In planning these stretches, facilitators should consider a few ways to make the space accessible. First, body movement represents an ableist exercise without alternatives. Thus, offering choices in movement and the ability to not participate is essential. Second, offering name tags with the ability for participants to share personal pronouns lessens the chance of participants misgendering.
I believe a key aspect of successful interfaith engagement is navigating uncomfortable and challenging conversations, especially in acknowledging privileged and oppressed identities and experiences in the room. These conversations create space for real leadership development to happen, since interfaith leaders will always need to understand their positionality when working with people of different traditions, cultures, and proximity to power and privilege. At the same time, the reality for college students and others engaged in interfaith work is that these conversations and types of engagement are difficult to catalyze.
While the students I serve are hungry to learn about their fellow students’ experiences and world views, rarely do they seek out disagreement or conflict. Students at universities where I have worked sometimes describe interfaith circles as “preaching to the choir,” meaning while they may hold different religious identities, they tend to agree on socio-political platforms and ideology, or avoid acknowledging the differences. Much of this stems from unawareness that the space itself might be unwelcoming and inaccessible for students who do not feel safe enough to be at the table. As facilitators, it is our job to create room for discomfort and at the same time, space to learn when harm is committed. For example, how should we respond when a participant makes an ignorant claim about another's community?
I believe we, as facilitators, should address the issue out loud and immediately, to promote group learning and to demonstrate that students who do encounter harm have aspiring allies in the room. Activities that involve “disassociation” can model discomfort due to conflict. A simple example is to have participants walk around or sit and point to different objects in the room and name them with the incorrect name. If I point at a chair, for example, I might say “book!” If someone else points to the chair and says, “shoe!” this models conflict. It shows participants that multiple truths can be held together in the room. The group can even talk for a few minutes about how expectations might be held accountable and how the initial discomfort of unlearning and re-learning is important in an interfaith engagement space.
The Fruit of Generating Trust
As the group builds relationality and trust, participants can use the space to find agency in claiming their own stories and experiences. Dialogue, this act of sharing, is a great way to process and understand together the self and group aspirations of each participant. Games or activities involving “becoming” get to the heart of what play is – assuming characteristics, mannerisms, and ways of being in the room (and the world) that allow participants to reclaim power lost in harmful and traumatic experiences.
Photo: Pixabay
Activities like this involve participants taking on a character that represents their ideal self. This can involve humor and fun, of course – individuals might take on the role of a beloved teacher, an older sibling, or a mentor to imagine how it feels to participate in another’s liberation (I use “liberate” here in honor of hooks, Boal, and Freire’s work). The goal of these activities is to explore how it might feel to heal and trust the present community. A reflection on this role-play creates an aspirational goal: What would interfaith engagement look like in this room if it allowed everyone to experience growth?
Of course, interfaith engagement spaces can always work toward better accessibility, and using play should evoke a few questions. Do the games demand standing, sitting on the floor, walking, or speaking out loud? Is there a requirement that everyone participate? Can attendees leave early or come late? These questions and others offer an opportunity to answer needs that may arise in the room.
At the heart of interfaith engagement, I believe there is no stronger way to form community than building enough trust for people to share their needs, knowing they will be welcomed and met.
Header Photo: Wikimedia