Phil Porter. Incorporating elements of dance, drama, storytelling, and music, InterPlay is a way for people to use non-discursive means for communication and self-expression. The InterPlay web site proclaims,
InterPlay is a global social movement dedicated to ease, connection, human sustainability and play. Unlock the wisdom of your body!
InterPlay integrates body, mind, heart and spirit. . . . InterPlay is devoted to fun. It teaches the language and ethic of play in a deep and powerful way. If you are convinced that seriousness is the path to inner wisdom, then you might want to look elsewhere. If you would like to become a “recovering serious person,” then InterPlay might be for you.27
InterPlay is intended for secular as well as religious groups, but it has a great appeal among many people who are affiliated with churches or other religious bodies. Under a heading noting “InterPlay with people where they worship helps spirituality become a whole body experience,” their website lists hospice and chaplaincy organizations as well as several churches as places to connect with the wider movement.
The leaders of InterPlay make no claim that what they do is art, and those who participate in its events and ongoing activities report the deep healing and spiritual growth that such participation promotes. However, by combining the experience and practices of various artistic disciplines with the notion of fun and play that is embedded in their very name, the notion that art and fun are somehow synonymous moves even more deeply into the collective understanding, both within and outside the church.
While understanding art as play, as self-expression, as community building, or even as therapy is not incorrect, such notions address only part of what art is for those whose primary vocational identity is artist. When artists talk about making art, they tend to call it work. Of course, artists do sometimes say that they are going to “go play in the studio,” but often when they say that, they mean that they are going to experiment with something new, do something light or inconsequential, or make something outside of their normal production. Attention to an ongoing project, however, is almost invariably considered work.
It is not accidental that a painting or sculpture is called a work of art; or that a musical composition is often given a number preceded by the word opus, the Latin word for work. For the serious practitioner, for the person whose primary vocational identity is that of artist, time spent in the studio is unequivocally work.
While such linguistic distinction may seem to be, itself, trivial, it leads churches (as well as society at large) to devalue what artists do and know. Unlike most other vocations, the arts can be practiced as a hobby, a spare-time activity done for relaxation and pleasure. Lawyers, doctors, or truck-drivers might pick up a guitar and strum for an hour or two in the evening as a way to unwind; a social worker, file clerk, or auto mechanic might throw paint onto canvas as a way to process a particularly stressful afternoon; a nurse, plumber, or CEO might join a local theater club as a way to make friends. For people who derive their primary vocational identity in non-art ways, their engagement with the arts, even as practitioners, often is not essentially different in character from slowpitch softball or fishing. It may be very important to them, and they may even become quite good at it, but it is understood as a delightful extra to the daily work which pays the bills and often brings a great deal of professional satisfaction of its own.
Artists, on the other hand, see their art-making activities as primary, as central to their understanding of who they are. This is not necessarily a matter of economics or even how many hours each day are spent in making art. Many artists are gainfully employed in some other occupation. But, among artists, this is known as one’s day job, done in order to pay the bills. For them, the real work of painting or sculpting or writing or composing is done as a second shift, often late into the night, and to the exclusion of adequate sleep, attention to relationships, or anything that might be a recreational activity. For serious artists, to make art—whether as an economic activity or as largely unpaid second shift—is a vocation in the true sense, a calling from God to work that, like ministry or medicine, is both burden and gift. When others assume that it is simply creative release, rather than real, serious work, artists tend to bristle.
Some artists do use the word play to describe what they do. Musicians play instruments; actors may refer to themselves as players; and, of course, what they are acting in is called “a play.” However, this understanding of play is not intended to imply some innocent, childish, useless occupation. Rather, it derives from an older sense of the word, which implied not so much frivolity as exercise. This sort of play, like professional sports, is seriously intentional, taking years of daily practice to do even marginally well.
The problem, then, is in equating what artists do with what is done merely for fun, as though they were weekend bowlers, or four-year-olds pretending to be superheroes. While a case can be (and sometimes is) made for the serious nature of this kind of play, as well, especially in connection with the socialization of children or the mental and spiritual health of adults, that is a discussion for another time and place. The point I am making here is that when the disciplined practice of art is trivialized as a childish pursuit, recreational hobby, or therapeutic technique, artists feel marginalized and misunderstood, left out of a conversation in which their own hard-won skill and knowledge is devalued by a culture where how hard one works is the marker of seriousness and commitment.
Spiritualizing Art: Art as Savior
Artists hold a special status in Western culture. Simultaneously revered and dismissed, they are presumed to possess a unique insight into the way the universe works even while they are ignored as irrelevant to the important work of the world. The starving artist is a common cultural trope, as is the artist as revolutionary, outsider, flaky, or weird. These stereotypes are largely the invention of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and were intensified by the writers, painters, and composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lurid stories of Van Gogh going mad and cutting off his ear, of Cocteau and Baudelaire using cocaine and opium, of the enthusiasm for séances and automatic writing among the adherents of art movements such as Dada, of the general aura of licentiousness and debauchery surrounding the avant-garde, are circulated as evidence that artists are somehow different from ordinary people. Not only do they, themselves, live dangerously; their very existence is often seen as dangerous, as a threat to the morals and mores of the rest of society. Today, many artists continue to cultivate this aura of edginess, having internalized the role that society has given them.
In this discussion, I am speaking of artists quite broadly, to include not only practitioners of what might be called high art—concert music, opera, ballet, theater, painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, and the like—but also movie stars, pop singers, designers and others whose work falls under the general label of creative. Society tolerates—and sometimes even celebrates—the flamboyant clothing, the excessive use of alcohol and drugs, the flaunting of sexually charged extravagance, in part because the presumed reward to society is that the artists will return from their perilous journeys outside the ordinary with something precious to share with everyone else.
The reality may be quite different. Many (or perhaps most, it’s hard to know) artists live much more sedate lives. They get married, they worry about their kids’ schools, they pay their taxes, they go to church. If you met them on the street, you would not assume that they are any different from accountants, teachers, salesclerks, or waiters. For the most part, at least once they are out of art school, artists live like everybody else.
But the stereotypes persist, perhaps because there is a way in which artists are, in fact, different, and because this difference does sometimes lead to odd behaviors. Having trained their eyes, their ears, their minds to notice things that most other people do not, and to produce things that point to that noticing, they do something that people who are not artists perceive as outside the normal range of abilities. To paint a picture, to compose a tune, to choreograph a dance—these things seem marvelous, magical,
