Play as a Radical Practice

In-Person workshop, Facilitated May 2025

When was the last time you truly played? Maybe it was a quick card or pickleball game with friends, or maybe it’s been years, lost to the urgency of work, deadlines, and the serious business of adulthood. 

Many of us have learned to exile play to childhood or moments of “deserved” leisure, as if joy and imagination are luxuries rather than necessities and essential parts of life. At Mazorca, we believe play isn’t just a break from reality; it’s a powerful way to reshape it. In the context of folks organizing for social justice and collective liberation, play can be a practice of possibility and liberation. It invites us to loosen the grip of what is and open up to what could be. 

I remember as a chiquita making up wild stories with friends in the woods behind our school. We transformed bushes into volcanoes, streams into oceans, and ourselves into dragons, witches, heroes, and rebels. In those make-believe worlds, we weren’t just escaping, we were rehearsing! Testing out different roles, imagining new dynamics, and stretching the limits of what we were told was possible. We laughed, we created, we stumbled into other ways of knowing. Even as children, we were world-building, sometimes replicating norms, but just as often pushing against them.

In our facilitation, play is a key world-building tool. After all, play is not trivial; it can be revolutionary. It makes space for new ways of relating, being, and dreaming. It can support us in unlearning patterns of control and domination and instead cultivating curiosity, connection, and experimentation. In movements for justice, play can be a strategy, a sanctuary, and a spark. It reminds us that joy, imagination, and creativity are not byproducts of liberation but integral components in the journey.