A Game That's Forgotten it's a Game

One way to think about tropes in general is as a game that has forgotten it is a game.

A game has rules. It has roles. It has things you are allowed to do and things that are seen as breaking the frame. Everyone in it seems to know how to play, but working outside of the frame can make those following the rules feel betrayed, even angry.

Family dinner can be a game. Academic life, religious ceremony, dating, theatre, hospitality, politeness, masculinity, femininity, loyalty, grief, courtship, authority: all of them come with scripts.

But they're not false. Games are not fake. A game is not doing nothing. A ritual is not meaningless; it has form. In fact, form helps us enter meaning. The problem begins when we forget that forms were made by people, and can therefore be questioned by people.

Underneath the seriousness of the game there is a set of rules we inherited without consent. We learned the game before we knew what it really was.

This is why the unfamiliar can feel threatening. It exposes the rules.

I teach a unit on performance art in my theatre history class, using Marina Abramović and Franko B as anchor points before moving into the radical queer filmmaking of Divine and John Waters, the director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. Abramović’s work has tested endurance, presence, duration, risk, and the ethics of audience participation across decades. She asks viewers to notice themselves watching.

Franko B, an Italian-born, UK-based artist, has used his own body as a site of vulnerability, ordeal, beauty, wounding, and political address. In his work, blood, nakedness, stillness, and exposure become impossible to separate from questions of care and spectatorship. These resist the built-in contracts of being a visual product to a sensation-seeking audience. 

Divine and Waters move the question into another register: camp, bad taste, parody, excess, queer glamour, and deliberate offence. Pink Flamingos makes respectability itself look unstable. Hairspray, in a very different key, uses satire and style to expose the rules around bodies, race, gender, beauty, and belonging.

What makes these artists threatening is not shock for its own sake. Their work reveals how patriarchal and colonial cultures “civilize” certain forms of suffering, spectacle, and bodily display while condemning others as savage, uncivilized, perverse, obscene, or merely tasteless.

A saint’s wound can be holy. A soldier’s wound, heroic. A contestant’s humiliation and injury on a reality game show can be entertainment. But a queer, female, migrant, indigenous, fat, abject, or self-authoring body that displays ordeal outside the dominant narrative becomes scandalous, infantile, even deliberately obnoxious.

Teaching this material in an increasingly conservative environment brings friction because performance art and queer cinema resist the predeterminations of inherited protocols. The "weird" re-sensitizes the raw, unscripted encounter. Expectations compartmentalize empathy and communication into refined exchanges that pass as dignity. These are the experiences we say are meaningful, and the others do not have legible experiences.

Abramović, Franko B, Divine, and Waters have punctured the membrane of those invisible contracts. Their work asks what it means to witness rather than consume. What institutions authorize when they frame a body as art. And it asks what responsibility artists have to themselves, and what responsibility audiences have to protect the dignity of the person they are watching, even when the work is designed to disturb, repel, or implicate them.

These questions that are now vividly awakened in theatre training came from artists playing outside theatrical rules.

That is why rule-breaking matters so much right now. In the age of AI, rules will be endlessly remixed and sold back to us as creativity. The machine will reproduce patterns, recombine conventions, and disguise familiarity as invention. Without understanding the frames that made those rules we will be stuck in an echo chamber.

The aim is not anarchy. It is authorship. It is the capacity to enter a form without being swallowed by it. It means possessing ourselves enough to know what is usefully inherited and when the work is asking us to disappear into rival rulesets.

So perhaps the work is to become more flexible players. Training becomes richer when it is diverse: when different methods are treated less like rival doctrines and more like different instruments in an ensemble. Like the interplay of a good jazz group, we can listen across these differences and look to each other as co-authors, rather than simply “serving” the grand narratives that tell us what counts as proper art or proper training.