‘A Time to Explore and Play Together’
In the second year of its focus on the importance of ‘play,’ the Center for the Arts and Humanities cartwheels into the theme

Peek into any Colby classroom and you’ll see students engaged in serious work—furiously taking notes, passionately debating ideas, and enthusiastically playing hand games. Hand games?
That’s what students in Assistant Professor of African-American Studies Sonya Donaldson’s African American Girlhood course do once a semester. But they aren’t goofing off. “This embodied practice holds so much history and cultural memory,” said Donaldson. “I wanted to bring hand games, ring games, double dutch, all of that into the classroom so students could engage with play in a thoughtful, critical, and meaningful way.”
This is just one example of how the Center for the Arts and Humanities encourages professors to infuse playful themes into their coursework. Annual themes have been a hallmark of the center’s work on campus over the last decade. Its director, Dean Allbritton, associate professor of Spanish, expanded the theme to two academic years to allow professors more time to develop effective, and fun, programming.
“It felt like it was time to explore and play together. It has been a breath of fresh air with fun and movement, but it has also allowed us to think seriously about play and ask questions about who is allowed to play, whose play is seen as work, and whose play is seen as dangerous. I’ve loved seeing how faculty across campus have taken the theme and run with it,” said Allbritton, noting that we often think of play as something you do when the hard work is done.
But what happens when we think of play as hard work?
With the spring semester of the second year at hand, the campus is brimming with playful ideas that bring that answer into focus. From game theory in economics to analyzing hip-hop models with artificial intelligence in philosophy, students get a chance to take play seriously.
A theme designed for playful exploration
Past themes included ideas like Food for Thought, Freedom and Captivity, Boundaries and Margins, and Energy/Exhaustion. Once the center chooses a theme, faculty can apply for course development grants to work it into their upcoming coursework. This also includes funding for guest speakers like bestselling author John Green, who will come to campus April 15 to speak about the importance of play. He is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down.

When play is anything but frivolous
Associate Professor of Performance, Theater, and Dance Annie Kloppenberg has made the study of play integral to her improvisational practice. “I think play gets largely miscategorized as frivolous, when it’s anything but,” said Kloppenberg. “Beyond theater and dance, professional arenas demand a playful engagement with questions, with ideas, with data, to assemble and reassemble the information in front of you and come up with solutions. For me, play is really about discovery and problem solving, which is an element we learn in the arts.”
Last year, Kloppenberg co-taught Improvisational Practice and Performance with visiting instructor Ariana Karp, artistic director at Incite Shakespeare Company Santa Fe. It was a hybrid theater/dance course that culminated in the production Serious Play. “It’s obviously a very deliberate nod to the theme, but also recategorizing how we define play,” Kloppenberg said. “In developing the course, we also wanted to play with ideas and make each lesson an experiment. I love how the theme gave us permission to explore.”

Unlike a traditional theatrical performance like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun—also tied to the theme—improvisation naturally invites more playfulness. “Improvisationally, we work with what’s called a score, which is basically a structure for exploration, like the rules of a game. It’s about putting together things that don’t necessarily belong and figuring out the possibilities of your body and other performers’ bodies in space in poetic and compelling ways,” she said.
Unlocking the imagination in creative writing
For students in Fiction Writing I with Zacamy Professor of English Debra Spark, play provided a welcome break from the feedback cycle of their critique workshops.
“I wanted to include one week in the semester that has no reading and no writing assignments, and is just about play,” said Spark. “I always like to remind my students that anything can happen in their stories. You can jump to 10 years in the future. A flying turtle could appear. You can do whatever you want because it’s your story, and forget the internal critic for a moment.”
To help her students access this playfulness, Spark took her class to the Colby Museum of Art, where they wrote a story game with an Alice Neel group portrait. “Each person writes a line about the painting and passes it to the person on their left, who then writes a second line. But the catch is, they fold over the preceding part of the story, so you can only write a sentence based on what the person before you has written. By the end, we had 14 different stories, and we read them out loud,” said Spark. “All of this is related to what we’re doing in class, but in a much more playful way. We laughed a lot while doing it.”
Spark hopes these exercises—and others they play throughout the semester—help balance the rest of the academic load so they still have room for creative exploration.
“My students are so talented, but they’re really hard on themselves. Playing seems like a great way to take care of yourself and access more of that creativity,” she said.
Embodied history with African American studies
Play isn’t just about your own practice, but a way to build relationships and community. For her African American Girlhood course, Donaldson collaborated with Ashley Nicole Baptiste, associate director of the Jersey City Theater Center, for a two-week hand games workshop that included research, poetry, performance, reflection, and writing.
“The course examines the history, construction, and self-making of Black girlhood, from slave narratives to students’ lived experiences,” said Donaldson. “We spend the class creating community, working together across differences to create knowledge, and that culminates in the playdate.”

Students paired up to each learn a specific hand game they could teach to the rest of the class. “I originally designed this as stations of partners, so students would teach each other. What actually happened was each pair would learn a game, teach each other, and then move together to the next station until the entire class was learning the game together. It was so beautiful to watch the students step outside of what is comfortable to them,” she said.
Donaldson wants her students to feel the way history plays out over time viscerally, not just intellectually. Doing this required students to shake off their conceptions of serious academics. “They needed to learn a new language of doing things, and trust one another. You have to release your inhibitions and be willing to look and feel silly to build those connections,” she said. “Doing this requires a good deal of self-reflection and changes what they bring into the class going forward in a really positive way.”
The serious study of play
Play gives students an accessible entry point into more serious concepts. With playful elements in courses as varied as Computational Thinking, Survey of U.S. History, and Digital Media: Sound as Art, students get to approach their academic pursuits in creative ways.
“As a society, we’re oriented toward a structured learning style that doesn’t allow students to expand their sense of imagination,” said Donaldson. “Yet that’s what you need to be able to engage with critical questions and solve challenging problems. That’s why play appears in my classes.”
“Play can actually be very productive. Play operates on many levels, and it includes encountering roadblocks and interruptions and surprises that are important for us to learn how to move forward and solve the problem together.”
Annie Kloppenberg, Associate Professor of Performance, Theater, and Dance
What has made the play theme extra satisfying is that it’s inspired the greater Waterville community, too, said Allbritton. “We’ve seen it come up at Waterville Creates and at the [Paul J.] Schupf Art Center downtown, and it makes it feel so much more dynamic. We’re responsible for bringing the theme to life in the early stages, but it’s amazing to see how much the whole community has embraced play.”
Though the theme concludes with the close of the spring semester, Allbritton hopes that faculty and students will carry a sense of play with them.
“This theme has brought a lot of amazing energy around the arts and humanities,” he said. “I’m so happy to be in a place where the arts and humanities are celebrated and supported. This is integral to what we do here at Colby, and I can’t wait to see where we go next.”