Artist, PhD student Moys Anthea

Trickster Tactics: Playing with the Rules

Over the past decade, I have created a diverse body of performance work that adopts a playful approach and a desire to create art that is inclusive, participatory and inspires a sense of agency in the world. Growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, one of the aims of my practice is to inspire a sense of empathetic human interconnectedness through play. In 2013 I created a project called “Anthea Moys vs the City of Grahamstown” that, through a series of contests where I single-handedly challenged several teams to their own games, attempted to collectively reimagine winning as the act of learning from and with instead of conquest over another. In line with my current practice-as-research PhD, the two practices developed in the UK and South Africa will foster new interdisciplinary and culturally diverse dialogues and aim to highlight the potential this work has for deeper human connectivity and transformation. The Saari residency will allow me to reflect on these practices and experiment further with peers in the practical and theoretical exploration of the liberating qualities of play in relation to the rule-bound characteristics of sport through performance. if playing the game in sport is not only about winning, what new role can sport play in the world today and how can the performing arts be used as a tool to investigate this?