When the footlights are off: A Bakhtinian interrogation of play as postupok

Taking a dialogic approach, this paper examines play from the point of view of the player's desire to act upon and through others. As an act-deed (postupok), play is considered as a way of relating to others as well as a means of co-creating and representing subjectivities. With Bakhtin's inspiration, play is seen as an act of agency and of becoming. It generates creative events taking place at the boundaries between several simultaneous intersecting worlds in play ('chronotopes'). We look at how the play acts offer unique means of engaging with others that other social acts do not. Central to our view is the notion that play resides on the boundaries between imaginative and real worlds that exist on the outside of the performative realm, in private, dialogic spaces where 'the footlights are off'. Here players are dialogically oriented to each other, rather than to an audience. As such the paper makes the claim that play, first and foremost, belongs to the players.