What soccer can teach us about freedom | Marc Bamuthi Joseph

The two places

where I feel most free

aren't actually places.

They're moments.

The first is inside of dance.

Somewhere between rising up against gravity

and the feeling that the air beneath me

is falling in love with my body's weight.

I'm dancing and the air is carrying me

like I might never come down.

The second place that I feel free

is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch.

My body floods with the chemical

that they put inside of EpiPens to revive the dead,

and I am weightless,

raceless.

My story is this: I'm a curator at a contemporary arts center,

but I don't really believe in art that doesn't bleed or sweat or cry.

I imagine that my kids are going to live in a time

when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy.

I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture

as much as the next guy,

but give me something else to go with it.

Lift me up with the aesthetic sublime

and give me a practice or some tools to turn that inspiration

into understanding and action.

For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports.

When I was making my latest piece /peh-LO-tah/

I thought a lot about how soccer was a means for my own immigrant family

to foster a sense of continuity and normality and community

within the new context of the US.

In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity,

I wanted to think through

how the game could serve as an affirmational tool

for first-generation Americans and immigrant kids,

to ask them to consider movement patterns on the field

as kin to migratory patterns across social and political borders.

Whether footballers or not,

immigrants in the US play on endangered ground.

I wanted to help the kids understand

that the same muscle that they use to plan the next goal

can also be used to navigate the next block.

For me, freedom exists in the body.

We talk about it abstractly and even divisively,

like "protect our freedom," "build this wall,"

"they hate us because of our freedom."

We have all these systems that are beautifully designed

to incarcerate us or deport us,

but how do we design freedom?

For these kids, I wanted to track the idea back to something that exists inside

that no one could take away,

so I developed this curriculum

that's part poli-sci class, part soccer tournament,

inside of an arts festival.

It accesses /peh-LO-tah/'s field of inquiry

to create a sports-based political action for young people.

The project is called "Moving and Passing."

It intersects curriculum development, site-specific performance

and the politics of joy,

while using soccer as a metaphor for the urgent question

of enfranchisement among immigrant youth.

Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras

now living in Harlem,

or you're a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants.

You love the game.

You're on the field with your folks.

You've just been practicing dribbling through cones

for, like, 15 minutes,

and then, all of a sudden, a marching band comes down the field.

I want to associate the joy of the game with the exuberance of culture,

to locate the site of joy in the game

at the same physical coordinate

as being politically informed by art,

a grass-laden theater for liberation.

We spend a week

looking at how the midfielder would explain Black Lives Matter,

or how the goalkeeper would explain gun control,

or how a defender's style is the perfect metaphor

for the limits of American exceptionalism.

As we study positions on the field,

we also name and imagine our own freedoms.

I don't know, man, soccer is, like,

the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together.

You know? It's like the official sport of this spinning ball.

I want to be able to connect the joy of the game

to the ever-moving footballer,

to connect that moving footballer

to immigrants who also moved in sight of a better position.

Among these kids, I want to connect their families' histories

to the bliss of a goal-scorer's run,

family like that feeling after the ball beats the goalie,

the closest thing going to freedom.

Thank you.

(Applause)