This walk traces the history of queer and marginalized communities reclaiming sports spaces in New York City, from the surveillance and resistance at the West Side YMCA to the first Pride marches and the joyous celebrations of the Gay Games in Central Park. These sites are not just markers of past struggle: they are laboratories for imagining alternative social orders.
Team sports are not just games: they are microcosms of society, revealing how inclusion and exclusion, leadership and collaboration, and individual ambition and collective purpose interact. On a team, one negotiates difference, builds alliances, practices empathy, and confronts hierarchy – lessons that extend far beyond the field.
By doing so, this walk enters into dialogue with the Performa archive, linking historical and speculative practices of play to contemporary artistic exploration.
Paulo Bruscky’s Collective Football Game (2025) (presented during Performa 13) highlights the transformative potential of group participation, emphasizing collaboration, improvisation, and communal energy in public space. Mike Kelley, whose work Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus (2009) appeared in Performa 09, investigated American sports culture and examined the social dynamics of gathering spaces – from basketball courts to recreational fields – showing how play shapes identity, hierarchy, and belonging. By engaging with the histories of queer communities in New York, the walk resonates with these archival works, situating its narrative within a broader inquiry into how games, gestures, and fields become laboratories for social imagination.
The speculative lens is simple: if our teams can be reimagined, reshaped, and played with joy, perhaps so can our cities, our civic spaces, and our collective futures. In times of great division, this walk envisions play as a rehearsal for hope, a practice in which movement, cooperation, and care can generate new ways of being together – in sports, in community, in society.
By situating these queer landmarks in conversation with the Performa archive, this walk extends the festival’s spirit into the city itself – transforming public space into a stage where art, play, and social imagination meet.
1. West Side YMCA
We begin at the West Side YMCA, a place that looks like just another sports facility, but in 1971 it was the stage for a moment of queer resistance. On August 6th, the Gay Activists Alliance staged a “zap” here – a form of direct action protest. Their target was the Y’s discriminatory policies against gay men. Imagine the tension: a place meant for community, health, and collective play was, at the same time, a space of exclusion.
Here’s the paradox: the YMCA is one of the most famous sporting institutions in the world. It gave us basketball, volleyball, and a whole philosophy that linked physical fitness to moral and social improvement. Yet while it carried strict religious and moral codes, it also offered something else – a rare space where unmarried men, often queer, could live, gather, and quietly find community with each other. It’s no coincidence that “YMCA” would later become a queer anthem.
So when the Y cracked down on gay men, it wasn’t just enforcing rules – it was erasing the very kind of community that had been quietly thriving within its walls.
This was also a space charged with desire – bodies moving, sweating, glancing. The physical intimacy of sport has always carried erotic undertones, especially for those whose desires had to hide in plain sight. The zap protest wasn’t only political; it was embodied, reclaiming the right to gather, to move, to be seen.
This place, then, holds a deeper tension: the promise of sports as open, joyful play – and the reality of exclusion. That tension is the starting point of our walk. Because sports are never just neutral games. They are systems of rules. They decide who plays, how points are counted, what counts as victory. And so do our societies.
This tension between moral order and embodied play echoes powerfully in the work of Mike Kelley, particularly his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus – a live performance commissioned by Performa 09 and staged in the basement gym of Judson Memorial Church. In that piece, Kelley transformed the familiar setting of a school gymnasium into a surreal pageant of teenage rituals – basketball drills, cheerleader dances, pep rallies, and motivational speeches – all charged with absurdity, erotic energy, and critique.
By amplifying the theatricality of these “everyday” performances, Kelley revealed how spaces of recreation and discipline – much like the YMCA – also stage the politics of desire, conformity, and rebellion. His “Empty Gym” sequence, with its pulsing drums and ghostly lights, became an elegy for lost youth and for the fragile social bonds formed through sport. Standing here, in another gym marked by its own history of exclusion and resistance, we can feel that same double edge: how the rules of the game shape not only how we move, but how we desire, belong, and imagine ourselves together.
So, as we stand here, I want us to ask ourselves: If society is a kind of game, whose rules are we still playing by? What would it look like to rewrite those rules, not just to include more people, but to transform the way the game itself is played?
Exercise 1: Gesture re-enactment part 1
– The group stands in a circle.
– Each participant chooses a gesture from a specific sport – something they’ve played, watched, or even just seen (kicking, dribbling, or passing a ball, swinging a racket, a swimming stroke, cheer jump, etc.).
– They perform it once, then the whole group repeats it together.
– After everyone has shared, the gestures can be strung together into a short team choreography.
2. Heckscher Ball Fields
We’re standing here at the Heckscher Ballfields, in the southern part of Central Park. In June 1994, these fields were transformed for the Gay Games IV, an international sporting and cultural event that brought thousands of LGBTQ+ athletes from across the world to New York. Here, softball games were played – but more importantly, a different vision of sport unfolded.
By 1994, New York hosting the Games had symbolic weight. This was the city of Stonewall, of queer activism, of ACT UP, of the AIDS crisis still deeply felt. Holding the Gay Games here was a way of saying: we belong in the heart of the metropolis, in its most iconic public spaces. That’s why Central Park was chosen. Not just as a neutral venue, but as a site of visibility, of confrontation, of joy. These fields – so ordinary most days – became a platform for queer bodies to reclaim athleticism, pleasure, and collectivity.
But the Gay Games were not without critics. Some argued: why do queer people need “their own Olympics”? Does separating ourselves risk reinforcing the very exclusion we’re trying to dismantle? Others noted that they sometimes reproduced mainstream hierarchies, sidelining trans athletes or those without resources to attend. They were both a radical act of reclamation and a mirror of the struggles within queer communities themselves.
For decades, sports have taught us to think in binaries: winners and losers, us vs them, strong vs weak. But the Gay Games experimented with another logic: play as belonging. On these fields, queer athletes tested the possibility of a society that doesn’t define itself through exclusion, but through expanding the circle of play.
Yet, despite these contradictions, the Gay Games offered something vital: a rehearsal for a different kind of world. Here, on these very fields, players came together not only to win, but to play as openly queer teams, to show that the joy of sport can be freed from the cages of prejudice. They remind us that sport – at its best – is not about domination, but about collaboration, trust, and the shared rhythm of bodies moving together.
Think of the closeness of a game – the shared breath, the accidental touch, the friction of competition turning into connection. These gestures, too, are part of queer history: moments when the body becomes a language of resistance and desire.
Exercise 2: Gesture re-enactment part 2
The Gay Games showed us how queer people invented their own Olympics, because the existing ones excluded them. If you could invent the rules for the Games of 2028 – not only for athletes, but for society – what would that look like? Let’s try it with our bodies.
– Participants imagine: If sport is a rehearsal for society, what kind of game should we be playing together in 2028?
– Quick brainstorm in duo: participants throw out a few words that describe their imagined game (“cooperative,” “without winners,” “healing,” “everyone scores,” etc.).
– Each duo proposes a gesture for their imagined game.
– Gestures can be shown one by one, then combined or echoed by the group.
3. Sheep Meadow
We’re now at the Sheep Meadow, where the very first Pride marches of the 1970s ended. After Stonewall, people walked here from the Village chanting “Gay Power!” and “Out of the closets, into the streets!” At that time, this meadow became more than grass and sky – it became a stage for a community that refused to remain invisible.
Pride has grown bigger, more visible, more mainstream – yet the question remains: what does it mean to truly inhabit a space, to act together, and create solidarity? How do our bodies, our movements, and our gestures participate in creating community?
Paulo Bruscky’s Jogo/Performance (1971–2013) offers a striking answer. In this game, traditional soccer rules are slightly twisted: each player wears a different jersey, teams dissolve, and no one represents a fixed side or country. For the duration of the event, players relinquish their citizenship status, and competition is no longer about representing a team or a nation. Instead, the movements of their bodies – running, passing, improvising – become a way to explore and challenge social hierarchies, revealing how competition itself organizes social structures.
In other words, Bruscky shows us that bodies have always been political: who we align with, how we compete, and how we move collectively carries social meaning.
In my work, I explore similar principles. I created the game Multiform (2019), in which jerseys are transformable, inviting players to constantly change teams. In Bruscky’s performance and in Multiform, the game becomes an opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a team, giving it a new definition that is fluid, complex, plural, and inclusive.
Here, in Sheep Meadow, we can imagine ourselves as the audience for a team like this – a team without fixed sides, where players are constantly shifting roles, allegiances, and identities. What would it mean to cheer for a team like that? How would support, encouragement, and solidarity look and sound when there isn’t a single side to root for?
To explore this, we will now try a human mic exercise. Each participant (or duo) will invent and voice a short slogan for this fluid, shifting team – what a supporter might chant to encourage the players, celebrate their movement, and make visible the joy, collaboration, and complexity of this unconventional game. As we chant together, we will feel how voice, rhythm, and collective participation can become a playful rehearsal for solidarity and connection.
Exercise 3: Human mic
Part 1: Brainstorming in duos
In duos, participants invent a short, chantable slogan that a supporter might yell for the fluid, shifting team in Bruscky’s Jogo/Performance (or Multiform).
Think about:
– The joy of play without fixed sides.
– Celebration of collaboration and improvisation.
– Support for fluid, shifting, inclusive roles.
Example slogans as inspiration:
– Love the Team You’re Not On!
– No Winners, No Losers!
– Join Whoever Needs You!
– Rules? What Rules!
– Everyone’s In!
Part 2: Human mic activation
The human mic is a form of amplification used in public gatherings or protests (e.g. during Occupy Wall Street in 2011) where large groups of people are present but traditional microphones or loudspeakers are unavailable or prohibited. In this method, one person speaks a short sentence or chant, and the surrounding crowd repeats it in unison, allowing everyone to hear the message clearly.
– Arrange the group: The facilitator positions participants in rows of 3–5 people. This can be standing on the field or sitting on the bleachers.
– Speak and repeat: One person from a duo stands in front of the group and says a short sentence. The first row repeats the sentencetogether. The second row then repeats it, followed by each subsequent row until the whole group has spoken the message.
– Continue the flow: After each sentence, the speaker continues with the next sentence, repeating the row-by-row process.
Facilitator tips: Encourage clear and slow speech, use gestures or pauses to coordinate each row.
4. Bruce Kelly Bench
We close our walk at Bruce Kelly bench. Kelly was one of the gay landscape architects who helped restore Central Park in the 1980s. He died of AIDS in 1993, and his bench here carries a simple plaque with his name and the following sentence: ‘If you seek my monument, look around you.’
Unlike a stadium or a statue, Kelly’s legacy isn’t made of concrete victories. His monument is the conditions of play – the landscapes where communities can gather, rest, and imagine. His work reminds us that care, maintenance, and design are as essential to collective life as scoring goals or winning matches.
In sport, we often celebrate the players. But who shapes the field? Who cares for the grounds? Who makes play possible? This question opens sport as a metaphor for society: the invisible labor of care is the foundation for every collective achievement.
As we end, I invite you to think of this: what if we treated our cities, our politics, even our democracies, as fields of play that need constant care and redesign? Could sports – reimagined – be not just entertainment, but a training ground for how to live together differently?
