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Sport as a drama
Lev Kreft
Published online: 05 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Lev Kreft (2012) Sport as a drama, Journal of the Philosophy of
Sport, 39:2, 219-234, DOI: 10.1080/00948705.2012.725898

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 Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, Vol. 39, No. 2, October 2012

SPORT AS A DRAMA

Lev Kreft

Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with
aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthet-
ics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of ‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dra-
matic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy
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between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the mean-
ing of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different meanings ‘drama’ has in theory
and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have
to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential
as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account
contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life,
and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits’ definition of game, Gadamer’s
idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss’ account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual.

KEYWORDS aesthetics of sport; the dramatic; everyday life; drama; theater and
sport; performance

Sport can be noble, nasty, attractive, beautiful, aggressive, boring, educa-

tive, healthy, daring, ugly, graceful… Some of these epithets may be aesthetic,
some may be not. In principle, everything concerning sport could be examined
from aesthetic point of view as well. But what key can open the box with heading
‘Aesthetics of Sport’? Which of aesthetic attributes is crucial for philosophical
examination of sport? How to think sport aesthetically?
Here is my argument:

(1) To develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as

philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life.
(2) To start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful or
‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dramatic.
(3) To analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with
analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of perfor-
mance.

ISSN 0094-8705 print/ISSN 1543-2939 online/12/020219-16

Ó 2012 IAPS
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2012.725898
 220 LEV KREFT

(4) To get at the meaning of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different

meanings ‘drama’ has in theory and everyday communication (drama as
action, drama as complex action, drama as mimesis of action, drama as
theatrical form and institution).
(5) To map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some
features of sport which determine its dramatics first (body involvement
in action, the role of actor/athlete in sport performance, imitation and
pretense in sport, dramatic aesthetics of involvement in sport), and its
potential as spectacle after.

1. Sport and Aesthetics of Everyday Life

As Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s (1985) proposal for new philosophical
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discipline, aesthetics appeared in 1735 to fill in the missing part of logic: exami-
nation of laws and rules of sensual and perceptive knowledge. While existing
part of logic treats what is common to a group of objects as their denominator
and concept, aesthetics as logic of the sensual offers knowledge of particular,
concrete object from all aspects accessible to sensual experience. The work of
art is perfection of sensual verbal communication because it communicates
individual, concrete and particular aspects of sensual knowledge.
Unexpectedly, introduced as humble discipline of lower abilities, aesthet-
ics became philosophical success story: ‘Anyone who inspects the history of
European philosophy since the Enlightenment must be struck by the curiously
high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions’. (Eagleton 1990, 1). During
this process, however, it experienced many reductions, to become ‘pure
aesthetics’, religion of beauty and of beautiful art. This reductionism became
target of criticism from time to time, as did its tendency to lose any contact
with actual contemporary art. When art itself left realms of institutionalized
beauty, and clearly showed its wish to get back to life again from its lofty
place at metaphysical heights, and when everyday reality experienced aestheti-
cization, be it with commodity fetishism or beautification of environment,
aesthetics had to change its scope from artistics (philosophy of art) and calis-
tics (philosophy of the beautiful) to much broader field of all kinds of pleasant
and unpleasant sensitivity again. During second half of the twentieth century,
aesthetics went through process of self-criticism which exposed all its
reductionisms one after another, and even self-accusation of ‘philosophical
disenfranchisement of art’ (Danto 1998, 63–80). It was found guilty of missing
all aesthetic phenomena but artistic ones, and of treating art in a metaphysical
manner which should be abandoned long ago. Jean-Marie Schaeffer criticized
and examined history of aesthetic and its contemporary fate (Schaeffer 2000,
Schaeffer 2006) to get rid of metaphysical speculation which occupied at least
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 221

continental aesthetics for around 250 years, and to prevent further reduction
of aesthetic dimension to artistic dimension (Schaeffer 2006, 2–3). Terry
Eagleton found out similar consequences of ideology of the aesthetic as Arthur
Danto did of philosophical disenfranchisement of art:

Aesthetics is thus always a contradictory, self-undoing sort of project, which in pro-

moting the theoretical value of its object risks emptying it of exactly that specificity
or ineffability which was thought to rank among its most precious features. The very
language which elevates art offers perpetually to undermine it. (Eagleton 1990, 2–3)

Wolfgang Welsch introduced his effort to develop ‘aesthetics beyond

aesthetics’ with this characterization of aesthetics:

In short, aesthetics is considered as artistics, as an explication of art with particular

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attention to beauty. I however, as the title of my paper indicates, intend to advocate

an understanding of aesthetics which goes beyond this traditional understanding,
beyond the scope of artistics. (Welsch 1995)

This criticism, however well founded, could be itself guilty of another

kind of reductionism, namely, getting rid of metaphysical flowers but forget-
ting to pay attention to chains which were ideologically covered by these flow-
ers. Metaphysics of art was, as Herbert Marcuse brought out in his case against
socialist realism and Soviet ideological regime, ‘traditionally the chief refuge for
the still unrealized ideas of human freedom and fulfillment’ (Marcuse 1961,
113). Twelve years later, Eagleton somehow repeats this caveat in the context
of postmodernity:

There are now, to parody the case a little, those who would appear to believe that
sometime around 1970 (or was it with Saussure?) we suddenly woke up to the fact
that all of the old discourses of reason, truth, freedom and subjectivity were
exhausted, and that we could now move excitedly into something else. (Eagleton
1990, 415)

To add the final blow, Michael Kelly, editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthet-
ics, searching for reasons that so many invited author’s did not want to contrib-
ute to a book on aesthetics, found out that even in its most (post)modern and
sophisticated edition, aesthetic theories like those of Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida
or Danto, have the problem of ‘iconoclasm, by which I mean a combination of
disinterest and distrust in art’ (Kelly 2003, xi). During its historical process of reduc-
tion aesthetics became artistics, but of such a kind that it became inadequate for
its own object of examination. But this is another story. What aesthetics as it was
cannot support is aesthetics of sport, because to put aesthetics of sport under
 222 LEV KREFT

canonization of the ‘pure aesthetic’ and of artistic metaphysical beauty could

only mean to treat sport in analogy with ‘pure’ art, or even to argue (unsuccess-
fully) that sport is ‘pure’ art.
Among proposals for new aesthetic approach beyond reductionism the
most all-embracing is development of aesthetics of everyday life. The idea of
everyday is at the same time in opposition to metaphysical division between art
and life typical for pre-avantgarde modernism in art, and in philosophical oppo-
sition to scientific view of the world which originates from Husserl’s
phenomenology. In this direction, special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy on
phenomenological study of sport opened some new perspectives (Martı́nková
and Parry 2011). Some thoughts on aesthetics of everyday life were included in
broader studies of everyday life or practice of everyday developed by different
philosophers who did not belong exclusively to phenomenological school of
thought, for instance, Michel de Certeau (Certeau 1984), Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre
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2008), and Agnes Heller (Heller 1984). During last few decades, new studies
appeared which focus on aesthetics of everyday life specifically, as those by Ellen
Dissanayake (Dissanayake 1996), Ossi Naukkarinen (Naukkarinen 1998), Crispin
Sartwell (Sartwell 1995), Yuriko Saito (Saito 2007) and a group of authors
included in Andrew Light’s and Jonathan M. Smith’s The Aesthetics of Everyday
Life (Light and Smith 2005).
Most elaborated and systematic approach is found in Katya Mandoki’s
study Everyday Aesthetics. In the first four chapters, she submits existing aesthetic
discipline to criticism which should open a way for everyday aesthetics (Mandoki
2007, 1–42). Concerning problems of definition of the aesthetic, disciplinary loca-
tion of aesthetics, and distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art, she
opts for aesthetics as multidisciplinary field of ‘elusive phenomenon difficult to
define’ (Mandoki 2007, 6). What we can do is ‘marking its boundaries despite its
blurred edges’ (Mandoki 2007, 6). Among aesthetics’ fetishes, three are most dis-
tinguished and venerated: beauty, art work, and aesthetic object. She calls them
fetishes because they represent reification of subjective relation to object into
object itself, which constitutes aesthetics’ manner of anthropomorphizing things
and investing them with human qualities. ‘The most deep-rooted and problem
ridden fetish of aesthetics’ (Mandoki 2007, 10) is the aesthetic object. Term itself
is already an oxymoron ‘since the aesthetic denotes, by definition and etymol-
ogy, the capacity to perceive, appreciate, enjoy, and experience’ (Mandoki 2007,
10). Therefore, ‘the aesthetic object’ is ‘a product of an aesthetic relation that a
subject establishes with it, and not the reverse (the subject is not the product of
the object)’ (Mandoki 2007, 12). Beside problems and fetishes, aesthetics
produced its myths. There are many, like opposition between art and reality, or
between aesthetics and everyday life; installing disinterestedness as inevitable
characteristics of aesthetic attitude; and universality of beauty preventing
pluralism of culturally conditioned differences to be acknowledged on equal
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 223

terms. Among these myths is also synonymity of art and aesthetics built on the
ideology of art which ‘seals off all non-aesthetic aspects of artistic production’
(Mandoki 2007, 30) and shoves all aesthetic aspects of non-artistic production
aside as impure, therefore non-aesthetic. Also, myth of aesthetic experience is in
itself another oxymoron, because experience is aesthetic, sensual and perceptive.
We can speak of artistic experience, so that ‘We can consider as well that there
are sports experiences, sexual, religious, touristic experiences we may have when
practicing sport, sex, religion, or travelling’ (Mandoki 207, 34). Finally, aesthetics
as it was developed through 250 years of existence, is afraid of undesirable
aesthetic experiences, putting beautiful under inspection and leaving ugly alone,
not to speak of disgust, the abject and similar aesthetic categories. Tendency
towards construction of separated metaphysical world of pure aesthetic pushed
away all everyday impurities, preventing aesthetics to become what its start
promised: investigation into aesthetic (i.e. sensually perceptive) comprehension
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in its wholeness.
To demarcate aesthetics beyond traditional aesthetics with its reductions,
Katya Mandoki proposes aesthesis denominating ‘processes that involve the
subject as a live being open and receptive to the world’ (Mandoki 2007, xi), so
that aesthetics is the study of the conditions of aesthesis. ‘Aesthetics refers to
the particular nature of subjectivity that makes it sensitive, receptive, or porous
to its environment’ (Mandoki 2007, 48). This is very broad field, however, and
covers not only human receptiveness but all living beings, and all their contacts
with the world: the whole life. To give aesthetics less broad and undistinguished
field of examination, I propose that aesthetics should deal with those sensitive
openness and receptiveness where self-awareness of ‘being alive’ is perceived
or felt.
The joy of being alive was proposed as a starting point of aesthetics by
Jean-Marie Guyau as a component of our relationship with the world, and
source of our striving for the fullness of life (Guyau 1927, 42). This does not
mean that all our sensations and perceptions are aesthetically relevant, but it
means that all our sensations and perceptions can become aesthetically
relevant under certain conditions (Guyau 1904, 37). What kind of conditions?
Prague Linguistic School and its leading aesthetic expert Jan Mukařovský
distinguished practical functions of our relationship with the world from the
aesthetic function. According to him, aesthetic function makes us aware of
being-in-the-communication and of being-in-the-world as bodily, sensual
beings because it turns attention from informational content of communication
to the way we are in the world: it is a sign of existence of non-conceptual
reflection present in our sensorial, sensual and perceptive touch with the world
(Mukařovský 1986, 8–9). The aesthetic function can appear anywhere and at
any time, on purpose or by chance, and it can accompany other functions,
support other functions, or even, as in modern Western art, dominate over
 224 LEV KREFT

other, more practical function. It is indeed autonomous (i.e. not oriented

towards our practical hold on the world) and subjective, as traditional aesthet-
ics claimed already, but reduced its claim only to ‘pure aesthetic’ which resides
in disinterested aestheticism of modern art (Bourdieu 1992, 465–509). But it is
not individually subjective. Quite the contrary: the aesthetic function appears
in social and historical context of collective subjectivity.
Mandoki’s elaborated version of aesthetics of everyday life actually
includes sport into its scope as part of socio-aesthetics which is divided into pro-
saics and poetics. Prosaics is aesthetics of daily life, and sport belongs to it. She
does not approve of Wolfgang Welsch’s proposal to accept sport as species of
art, but admits that they have their similarities because ‘sport, like the art, is a
professional public performance for contemplation and enthusiastic, even
empathic, participation of the public’ (Mandoki 2007, 84). The difference
between them lies in ‘their semantic and syntactic density’ (Mandoki 2007, 191),
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where art is multiple and complex and sport is not (which is debatable, especially
if we confront contemporary art and contemporary sport). In sports, ‘it doesn’t
really matter how a point is obtained as long as it sticks to the rules of the game’
(Mandoki 2007, 192): how arts get to their end is for them more important than
getting there, with sports it is the other way around. And sports, oriented
towards winning, are praxis performed in live; their dominant symbol is triumph.
This reduction of sport and sport aesthetics to professional spectacles with
audience demanding triumph proves that even within aesthetics of everyday life
the place of aesthetics of sport still has to be developed, furnished and secured
and such reductionisms seriously questioned. On one side, it is important to note
that sport, even if understood in terms of global association sports (which
excludes many local sport practices and games which are not ‘member of Olym-
pic family’), covers much greater territory than just professional sport games. More
important from aesthetic point of view (even if lesser semantic and syntactic
density than in art is accepted because we still compare in-live performance of
sport – cricket, for instance – with condensed performance of traditional theater)
is another aspect of sport as praxis: it means that sport is practiced by living per-
son(s) and not by theatrical dramatis personae, and that before aesthetic pleasure
it conveys to its public there is aesthetic pleasure it evokes in athletes themselves,
involved in sport with their selves, body and soul included. This transports us to
the question which kind of aesthetic pleasure dominates in sport.

2. The Dramatic and Sport

2.1. Drama and Dramatic
At the beginnings of aesthetics of sport as a discipline, among first
attempts were those which put in front comparison with art, understood in
terms of estheticism’s pure aesthetic, and in terms of beauty as the most
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 225

important category. David Best (1980) was more than persuasive in his efforts
to dismiss such approach which, in extreme cases, put an equation between
sport and art. His proposal to distinguish purposeful and aesthetic sports, how-
ever useful for this dismissal of previous aesthetics of sport false approach, is
not useful enough because it does not allow searching for general aesthetic
dimension(s) of sport as such: it seems to claim that sport, in general, is not
aesthetic. If we look for a way out, we have to start, then, at most general level
– that of game as such. And there is no better way to touch philosophical
account of playing a game than to quote Bernard Suits:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal),

using only means permitted by rules (lusory means), where the rules prohibit use of
more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where the
rules are accepted because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude). I also
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offer simpler, and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game
is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Suits 2005, 45–55)

There is something generally dramatic about game: voluntary attempt

to overcome unnecessary obstacles. In ordinary life we can do without obsta-
cles gladly: life goes on smoothly, as intended, planned and wished for. In a
game, we accept unnecessary obstacles just for the sake of it, because to play
a game can be attractive only if it is not too easy and simple to achieve its
purpose.
But what, aesthetically speaking, is the dramatic? Before postmodernism,
modernism was quite a vague notion. To find more about drama and the dra-
matic, it might help to look into their borders and limits as explained in Postdra-
matic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann (Lehmann 2006). Postdramatic theater, as
one could expect, consists of who knows how many different ways, some of
them not dramatic, some of them not even theater any more, and some of
them still more traditionally oriented. Before that, there was more unified model
of theatrical fiction: an event embraced into meaningful whole represented with
the help of hierarchically used manifold artistic means governed by spoken
word. If we leave insight into what happened in this fictional Garden of Eden
aside, we are confronted with different meanings of drama and the dramatic.
Sometimes it seems that ‘drama’ is used as designation for modern or bour-
geois theater, born in eighteenth century under influence of Denis Diderot and
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as neither tragedy representing people better than
us nor comedy representing people worse than us (Aristotle 1996, 5), but drama
representing people like us in their ordinary but dramatic and touching family
stories. Then, it seems that ‘drama’ is a name for theatrical piece/textbook. But
the moment later it reappears as signifier of any action, which is its original
ancient Greek use. Historically, ‘drama’, similar to ‘praxis’, meant action. But
 226 LEV KREFT

praxis is the other of theory, while drama is the other of linear continuum of
praxis. Theater is ‘an imitation of action (praxis)’ (Aristotle 1996, 10).
Which meaning of ‘drama’ to apply then? Is it action, mimesis or imita-
tion of action, complex action (which Aristotle found in well-developed tragedy),
or special genre of theater? All four are interwoven within Lehmann’s analysis.

2.2. Theater and Sport

If we start with drama as a name for bourgeois theater which started
with Diderot and Lessing, we have two different statements, one coming from
foundations of contemporary postdramatic theater (Brecht 1995), another from
aesthetics of everyday life (Mandoki 2007). This kind of theater is what Bertolt
Brech called dramatic theater, and confronted it with sport, mostly boxing
events, because sport is real action and dramatic theater is fictional boredom
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(Kreft 2011). On the other side, however, we have Mandoki’s remark that sport
does not possess semantic and syntactic density of theater, a position which
probably does not take into account postdramatic theater, which covers many
different practices, starting from those which depart from dramatic theater as
historical convention, and arriving at those which cannot be understood as
mimesis any more. For comparison between sport and theater we can get
some help from Paul Woodruff who, in The Necessity of Theater, introduced
analogy between theater (Hamlet) and sport games (American football),
conditioned by his understanding of theater which includes sport as a kind of
theater because theater is ‘the art by which human beings make human action
worth watching, in a measured time and space,’ (Woodruff 2008, 39) Analogy
between theater and sport game was examined in Anthony D. Buckley’s article
as well (Buckley 2006), only to show that certain sport matches can happen in
accordance with Aristotle’s characteristics of tragedy. Woodrow is different and
more general. His proposal is to stage Hamlet as a game, and to think about
football game as a theater, to find out what limits appear from such analogy
on theatrical side of it. From his point of view, sport or sex games are two
cases of theater, but not ‘ideal specimens’, no, ‘the sex show, the lopsided
football game, the interminable baseball game, the dull demonstration of pie
making – all of these are specimans of theater, but they are bad specimens’
(Woodruff 2008, 64–66). They are human action worth watching, and have a
lot in common with performances of Hamlet or Antigone because they too
need roles to fill, rules to follow, a measured space and time, and some other
common features, which draw the attention of onlookers. But they are bad
specimens because they are not ideal examples of definition: sometimes they
represent action worth watching in a measured time and space, and
sometimes they do not because, for instance, in sport game final result might
be obvious long before the game has finished. These does not mean that sport
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 227

game, cooking lesson, or sex show can’t be ‘good specimens of something

else’ (Woodruff 2008, 66), but not of theater.
In conclusion, we are confronted with theater which is complex drama
like Hamlet, which makes it a complex action of such semantic and syntactic
density that sport’s drama can be only bad specimen of it (and only sometimes,
as Buckley claims, structured as complex drama), but also with postdramatic
theater where we can find theater which does not follow rules of dramatic the-
ater, that does not represent complex action, and possesses less semantic and
syntactic density that certain sport games, especially those with ball where two
teams are confronted. We can call ‘theater’ any human action worth watching,
including view of neighbors cooking in their kitchen, or, having sex on their
terrace, but perhaps we should introduce another name for it, not just to
escape confusion but to delineate a place where all these different practices,
including classical theater, can feature as different, but good specimens.
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2.3. Performance and Sport

Being alive is to perform. Human beings perform many complicated and
complex roles, from being son and daughter to being old, from being good
worker to being good boss, and from being nice to being dangerous and
threatening.
Among proposals which include theater and sport under another and
broader categorization, performance theory seems to be the best choice
because it covers everyday life performing as well. At the beginning of Perfor-
mance Theory, Richard Schechner presents two of many possible systematized
views of performances; one is ‘The fan’ and another ‘The web’, both presented
in graphic, but also verbalized form. ‘The fan’ consists of different types of
performances put in order of appearance, where

Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of ani-
mals (including humans) through performances in everyday life – greetings, displays
of emotion, family scenes, professional roles, and so on – through to play, sports,
theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude. (Schechner
1988, xii)

In ‘The web’, the same types of performances are arranged in their

mutual interaction. In the center of the web is Schechner’s own ‘environmental
theater’, which is, as he too admits, no accident, but still an arbitrary choice.
This gives us right to put sport as one of performances in everyday life at the
center, and examine Schechner’s theory from our central point of view. If we
take his performance chart, where he compares play, games, sports, theater
and ritual by 13 circumstances (special ordering of time, special value of
 228 LEV KREFT

objects, rules etc.), games, sports and theater have many similarities. Between
games as such, and sports, there are only three slight differences: games need
special place often, sport always; games appeal to others often, sports always;
with games, audience is not necessary, but with sports it is usually there. There
are only two differences between sports and theater, but these two are sharp
and fundamental: sports do not possess symbolic reality – in theater, symbolic
reality has to be produced; and theater is scripted which sports are not
(Schechner 1988, 12). Script is ‘all that can be transmitted from time to time
and place to place’ (Schechner 1988, 72), neither scenario nor rules but the
basic code and formula of the events which presupposes somebody as
transmitter who can teach the others how to perform.
Sport is dramatic as such, and the dramatic is its basic aesthetic category
which comes first, before the other categories which can appear in sport, or in one
kind of sports, but are not fundamental part of sport’s aesthetics like the dramatic
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is. First reason to find dramatic aesthetics in sport is character of its rules which
demand lass efficient way to reach the goal, but there are other reasons as well,
because the main obstacle on the way are the others with their skills and abili-
ties to reach the same goal: beside obstacles as such, we have to accept that in
sport, there is play and counter-play. To examine the dramatic in sport, it is bet-
ter to understand it as action and complex action than to search for theatrical
element in sport. There is enough reason to compare sport with theater, even
dramatic theater as its special kind, but when we go into this direction, we have
to remember that sport is not mimetic and not pretense: in sport, athletes
appear and perform as themselves. Therefore, aesthetics of sport, on one side, is
one of the aspects and one of disciplines which belong to aesthetics of everyday
life and not to philosophy of art; on the other side, aesthetics of sport covers an
activity which is not an ordinary aesthetic practice of everyday but its performing
practice, executed under special circumstances, and fits well within different kind
of performances, as one of its special and historically developed fields.
What makes sport different from ordinary aesthetic which appears in
everyday practices and encounters, and what makes sport performance
different from mimetic, imitative and fictional performances, and what kind of
consequences this difference has for the dramatic of sport? This question calls
for aesthetic approach to historical and taxonomic sources in ritual, in play and
in game.

3. Sport, Everyday Life and Life

Hans-Georg Gadamer1 starts the second part of Truth and Method with
the concept of play. It comes first because from Kant and Schiller on it ‘played a
major role in aesthetics’ (Gadamer 1989, 102). Gadamer, however, thinks that
their orientation on freedom of creativity was too subjective. Through approach
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 229

of subjectivity, we miss the seriousness of play. At the beginning should be

ontology of play. Taken seriously, play still retains its purpose, but under specific
condition: ‘Yet, in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active
and caring existence have not simply disappeared but are curiously suspended’
(Gadamer 1989, 102). This suspension is curious indeed: the player knows that
play is only play, and that it needs, consequently, a worldly purpose to become
something serious. But this purpose is suspended because it is external: it is vis-
ible as an excuse for playing before we enter the play, but when play starts, it
disappears. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself or herself in
play. At the core of relationship between play and its player is the structure of
play which absorbs the player into itself. Play is a place of reality where we can
enter through suspension of any external purpose; it becomes unsuspended
part of reality when external purposes take the play over.
The place of sport is a place under suspension of everyday reality, but
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still part of life, not of dreams. Players play the play, not the other way around;
still, absorption has to be there, so that at least for a moment the play
becomes the only real way to live your life. Play will turn into a game, and
movement will become drama (action); both game and drama require goal,
purpose and end which play and movement as such do not. Such a turn
requires more than just introduction of rules. It presupposes involvement of
subjectivity taking over the process. In game, people appear as actors within
their own identity and as persons of a game who develop their game-identity
through their place in a game and repeated action. From this point of view, rit-
ual play and sport game are definitely different, as much as ritual play and the-
ater are different (by the way, this is a difference which annoyed Plato: instead
of sacred ritual, we get performance staged for the pleasure of spectator). Even
if games in principle developed from rituals, they had to be transformed and
changed. This transformation is what we can see in Gahuku-Gama approach to
football described and analyzed by Claude Lévy-Strauss. In already hybrid
situation in-between ancient rituality and imported modern sport game, they
decided to play as many matches as necessary to even the score, which Lévy-
Strauss commented as ‘treating a game as ritual’ (Lévy-Strauss 1966, 31). His
interpretation had many echoes in different disciplines, from philosophy of law
to philosophy of sport, where Arlei Sander Damo’s article on football and
aesthetics proposes three analytical categories: disjunctive ritual, attachment to
club, and absorbing play (Damo 2011, 82–91). What Lévy-Strauss describes is
disjunctive contest of football put under rule of conjunctive end demanded for
ritual reasons (re-established harmony):

Games…appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a dif-

ference between individual players or teams, where originally there was no indication
of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and
 230 LEV KREFT

losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; in conjoins, for it brings about
a union (one might even say a communion in the context) or in any case an organic
relation between two initially separate groups. (Lévy-Strauss 1966, 33)

When ritual and game understanding of play meet, as in this typical post-
colonial situation, a solution which maintains stability of cosmic perspective and
unity of community has to be found. This demonstrates when ritual becomes a
game: when disjunctive effect wins over conjunctive end. What Gahuku-Gama
achieved was not transformation of football game into ritual again, but transfor-
mation of hierarchical value-list which comes out as result of game into equality
between subjects again. The subject of ritual is the whole, the subject of game
are its actors: individual or team subjectivity wins over equality of all members
of community.
Mandoki is partly right: traditional form of theater may have more semantic
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and syntactic density than sport. But theater is not a game, in spite of Woodruff’s
comparison, and its thrill is always one step behind attractiveness of reality itself.
Edmund Burke offers good comparison of the effects of tragedy:

The nearer it /tragedy/ approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all
idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it
never approaches to what it represents. Chuse a day on which to represent the most
sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no
cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting
and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when
their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high
rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the
emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the
imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. (Burke 1987, 47)

The drama of sport games, has more attractiveness than theater because
it is not representation but the real thing. In sport games, we are involved as
its actors, consciously taking the risk of disjunction as their outcome. The
dramatic of sport games is more existentially dense and aesthetically attractive
than the dramatic of theater, or mere play, at least for actors-athletes who are
not dramatis personae but real persons taking risk in disjunctive play and finite
game. Action and movement in sport are not mimetic. On the other side, what
makes sport different from everyday aesthetics is staging which does not
necessarily need special or even monumental buildings or places. It can start
anywhere, at a place which allows necessary body movements, and offers
enough space for chosen game. For many sports special equipment is needed,
but in most cases it can be improvised; not under serious associations, of
course. But what is always needed is characterization of place as place for
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 231

sport, and limitation of space of the game (in advance), limitation of time (not
necessarily in advance), and bargaining about the rules applied. For game to
start, its place has to be separated from the other space, at least symbolically
or even virtually. This separation is thin: it is still part of everyday life, and it is
not limited to sacred places or ritual moments in time, but it is not ordinary.
This thin limit between ordinary life and sport means that sport does not have to
be as near to life as possible, but never to cross the line, because the line between
sport game and ordinary life is a line drawn inside territory of everyday life. In
life, one does not accept the rules voluntarily, because we cannot enter and
leave it freely. In sport game, we accepted what goes on afterwards, and can
withdraw from it. They call appearance in sport games half-pretense, in com-
parison with traditional theater, but there is no pretense when you are inside
sport game. In principle, sport is not ‘deep play’ for its actors-athletes. It is seri-
ous enough to be dramatic, but there is big difference between sport game
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and gambling, and between modern sport and ‘deep play’. Watched from out-
side, sport game is not serious, it is just a play; experienced from inside, especially
by players themselves, it is serious but playful, not dead serious as ‘deep play’.

4. Conclusion
What, then, makes sport performance different from other kinds of
performances, and what is dramatic about sport?
Gadamer’s suspension, movement and absorption are decisive features of
sport performance as well. In sport, suspension does not mean that it inhabits
ritual or mimetic space and time, because sport is part of everyday life. What is
extra-ordinary about sport performance, then? Exactly that: it is de()s)portes
because it brings us into another, specially constructed part of everyday life.
‘Sport’ used to signify all activities which went on ‘on the other side’ of ordinary
everyday, which were not under control of order installed and maintained by sov-
ereign power. Contemporary authorities tend to be universal, covering the entire
place and all the time with their power, but sport still remains a place governed
by other rules and by autonomous authorities which belong to civil society itself,
and are recognized by universal state authorities to be autonomous, including
legislative and judicial power. Sport is not mimetic activity which needs, besides
special place which actors and public occupy together, an agreement between
actors and public that what goes on at stage means something different than
what it is, and that persons appearing on the stage are not themselves but dra-
matic personae. If there is any mimetic activity in sport, it goes on during training
time, not during performances. Sport goes on under suspension of everyday life
order, but still inside everyday life,
In sport, there are both movement as such and movement in physical
sense. As in finite game, we have movement from start to end, inside limited
 232 LEV KREFT

space and time, intended to reach a certain goal. Its goal is to reach provided
end. Disjunctive final outcome can be proclaimed when contesting individual
or collective persons can be ranked according to their achievements. In
physical sense, sport has been reduced to those games which rank by skill and
achievements in body movement, so that other former de(s)portes do not
belong to the family of sport any more.

Inside this limited space and time, under rules which describe extra-ordinary
order, absorption turns this limited room for movement from start to goal into
a whole, an entirety where, however, players are not played by the play itself.
They play it, they are actors, and they are expected to inhabit this part of
everyday life as if ‘as if’ = is (Schechner 1988, xiii). This pretense is not theatri-
cal pretense. It means to accept a view sub specie aeternitatis (under aspect of
eternity) which in aesthetics means ability to make the smallest part of the
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world a universe, as in Leibniz monads which mirror the wholeness while they
are just basic particles of world’s structure. This ‘as if’ is limited, it belongs
inside everyday life and in case of sport, it does not produce cosmic whole-
ness. What it produces is wholeness inside limits which is extra-ordinary and
worth inhabiting.
Comparison between sport and art is always possible. But we can get
more insight into similarities and differences if we compare contemporary art
practices, especially those of artistic performance, with broader idea of sport, and
not just spectacular elite sport with modernism’s lofty and contemplative idea of
art.
The source of the dramatic in sport is that sport games are among disjunc-
tive games which demand active personal (individual or collective) involvement,
risk, and body movement towards a goal which is reached at a stage when all
actors get their comparative value measured. To accept such risk freely, without
any real pressure to do so, as in other parts of everyday life where we cannot
decide even if we want to be involved, is nobility of decision to start: one starts
because it is attractive, not because one has to. What follows is a real life drama,
more or less complex, but always personally disjunctive, existentially challenging
and aesthetically attractive.
Sport is action worth watching because it is an action worth doing.

Note
1. For sport philosophy interpretation of Gadamer, I am indebted to Matic Kast-
elec and his article »Play« which was presented at the First Conference of
EAPS in Prague (May 2011) and will appear in Slovene in the next issue of
the journal Ars&Humanitas which is published by Faculty of Arts (University
of Ljubljana).
 SPORT AS A DRAMA 233

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Lev Kreft, University of Ljubljana, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Sport. Faculty

of Arts, Askerceva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: lev.kreft@guest.
arnes.si