Playfight

The playfight on Sunday evening was a truly singular experience. One that I simply can’t imagine happening in Canada – or indeed, in any other city I’ve ever lived in (or for that matter, any city I’ve ever been to). Strange especially because there are only two other contexts I can think of which recall this particular kind of physical dynamic. One is childhood roughhousing (which you’ll know especially well if you have siblings). The other is passionate sex. 

However, it was made very clear that nothing about this experience was intended to be erotic. It’s intensely intimate and fervent, but not arousing. Although at the same time, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this might be the single best thing you could possibly do to get better at sex – which is to say, to understand how to read, handle, and relate to someone else’s body and physical instincts. 

As I’ve described my experience to various people, I’ve kept making these comparisons, often receiving the same puzzled reaction–

“Surely it’s more comparable to wrestling? Or to martial arts? Or dance?”

Indeed, the founders of the club describe the activity as “playful, cooperative wrestling”. And for sure; it’s held in a martial arts studio. The comparison to dance actually may be closest. But these are athletic activities that are (to varying extents) based on choreography and competition. Playfighting is less structured. It’s entirely intuitive, and there’s no winning. And it is far more playful than any of those things.

Let me explain properly. 

I entered the dojo with my new friends Roma and Rike – all of us drenched from the rain (which, as it happens, nearly convinced us to abandon our plan to try out the playfight at all). We entered a matted room with 15 people, each in pairs, sliding and grinding on each other on the floor (but I promise – there was nothing erotic about this). The one man who wasn’t partnered, Dominik, introduced himself as one of the co-founders. He explained that the group was warming up with Bodysurfing, and invited us to put down our things and join in our own time. 

Before I knew it, I was on the floor surfing against the body of a bald German man I’ve never met before.  

The second warm-up was introduced as the Birth Tube. I feel the need at this point to insist that this wasn’t an orgy.

At this point we were a group of twenty, invited to place ourselves on all fours and line up next to each other, creating a long tunnel underneath our bodies. One by one, the person at the back of the line would army-crawl through the tube. As soon as a person crawled underneath you, you were to drop the full weight of your body on them. The result was the hilarious and physically gruelling process of strangers attempting to drag themselves across the floor under the full gravity of multiple adult bodies (most people were middle-aged) crushing down on them at any given time. 

Dominik, with a perfectly straight face:

“We usually do this naked, with oil.” (Again, I promise this wasn’t an orgy).

Laughter was the soundtrack to the entire evening. Often, bodies are quite funny. And I quickly realized that I was getting an answer to the questions I’d asked in the last piece I wrote about nature of language barriers and the particular difficulty I’ve found feeling that some people are “off-limits” to me in Berlin. This was a space that never stopped echoing with joyous non-verbal conversation.

We gathered around for Dominik’s explanation of how the night would go (he generously offered to make it bilingual, mostly for my benefit):

1. Playfighting happens only between two people. A person who is ready to fight will search the room for a partner and extend an offer through eye contact or hand signals. They must wait to receive a clear “yes” or “no”. If there is an agreement, they approach each other in the centre of the room and check-in to discuss whether either person has any physical injuries, sensitive areas, or other preferences they’d like to note.

2. There are two rules: 

1. If either person says “STOP,” taps twice on the mat, or taps twice on the other’s body, the movement being performed ends immediately. 

2. No actions intended to injure or cause pain are allowed. Although, there are nuances where some specific kinds of rough body play or “mutually agreed mindfully inflected pain stimuli” are permitted.

3. Playfights begin when the ring is free and both partners are ready. There is no time limit; the fight ends when one someone is exhausted, doesn’t feel like it anymore, or wants to end at a high point.

This was one of the spaces I’ve felt the safest in, perhaps in my entire life. Mostly – and of particular interest to me, given my work – this can be attributed to how the dynamics between fighters were governed by performance and audience. 

The perimeter within which the fight occurs is formed by the bodies of the onlookers. This is essential for two reasons.

First, from a physical safety perspective, the circle of people act as bumpers to prevent the fighters careening off the edge of the arena. Second, everybody in the circle are witnesses to everything that plays out inside of it. The mere presence of an audience transforms the dynamic into a performance that ensures accountability (even if the participants choose to fight blindfolded).

Perhaps this is a remark on the impressive power of looking. Sustained eye contact is (somewhat notoriously) one of the most powerful tools we have. Many cult leaders attribute their rise to power based on their resolve not to break eye contact when first meeting strangers (potential recruits). People who learn to use eye contact with full confidence (often through various forms of meditation training) tend to find that they can get nearly anything that they want from certain strangers simply by holding eye contact intensely. (As such, this can often led to exploitation).

We know that to be looked at can be deeply uncomfortable. Simply being seen is a jarring reminder that we exist. We can trace this back to the development of object permanence; extremely young children tend to believe that things only exist when they are seen. We are quickly trained to learn that objects persist in reality even when they leave our field of vision; but the fact remains that direct visual perception is one of the strongest ways of coming to know that something exists. As such, to realize that someone has been looking at you can produce the effect of being jolted awake from a dream; you become instantaneously self-conscious in the fullest, most literal sense – perhaps even more intensely than if you were to look at yourself in a mirror. 

To be looked at and touched in this way, by a stranger who devotes you their full and undivided attention, is one of the most powerful reminders of the fact that we are living. I often think that one of the only things we can confidently say about why we are here at all is that we are here to remind each other that we are, indeed, here.

Further, whether you blindfold yourself for the fight or not, you are an inviting a sensory expansion, where you come to engage senses that most of us tend to forget about. At there risk of being slightly esoteric, I’ll remind you that in addition to the five basic senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), we have two senses that are less commonly discussed: the vestibular and proprioceptive senses (otherwise known as the balance sense and the body awareness sense). 

Proprioception, for example, is critical when rock climbing. It is the sense which informs you of the position of your body parts in space with our having to look at them. This and the vestibular sense are at work in a variety of activities, but rarely isolated for our attention. An activity like playfighting at times reduces the range of your sensory experience solely to these last two senses. The very nature of your experience is fundamentally changed simply because of how unusual it is to navigate almost entirely through these lesser-loved perceptive avenues. 

I had four fights. 

Fight #1 was with an older man who kindly extended and invitation to me very near the start of the evening. I think he realized I needed help breaking the ice. He asked (again, potentially in part for my benefit) to go in slow motion. Our fight was rhythmic and funny, but stilted. I clearly wasn’t very confident at this point, and was intensely aware of my instinct to try to prove something to the onlookers around me. But I was getting more comfortable every minute. And I was pleased to see that among all the fighters, any moment of disjunction was greeted with immediate concern. You would see it instantly arise on the face of any partner who feared they’d accidentally caught the other person’s limb in an uncomfortable way.

Fight #2 was with Roma. We’re both climbers, and although we’ve known each other only about a week, we are quite comfortable. There was a good deal of hurling each other across the floor, pinning and rolling, very much in a brotherly way. He’s built bigger than me – I’d clamber onto him to drag him down, before he’d flip us both over, leaving me a fraction of a second to escape from underneath. 

Fight #3 was with one of the most entrancing people I think I’ve ever seen. The Bearded Man (think the dwarves from The Hobbit, but pasted onto the chin of a lean, muscular frame). His arms were both sleeved in blackout tattoos, and he had a deep smile etches into the corners of his eyes. This man was absolutely captivating to watch. He must be an experienced dancer, or gymnast, or martial artist. In any case, his movement was inhuman and graceful. While other fighters seemed guided by the question of what they could do to overpower their partner, his choices were governed entirely by what would be most fun. I was thrilled when he made eye contact with me, and excitedly met him in the ring. Our fight was a dance, a perfect tornado of motion. At one point he hoisted me into the air with his arms and legs (in a kind of aeroplane pose), and I flapped my “wings” to laughter around the room. At the end of the fight, with me utterly exhausted, he’d pinned me down and playfully thrashed his beard over my face. Roma also had the chance to fight him, and sung similar praise.  

Fight #4 was my only fight with a woman. She’d been incredibly rough in a previous fight, so I had a sense of what I was getting into with her – but didn’t quite expect this fight to be the most violent of all (I have her to thank for two bruises on my arms and my swollen lip). This was a full fledged war, both of us attempting to pin the other person to the ground with no possibility of breaking free. There was a deeply animalistic quality to this one. While it was impossible not to enter a variety of erotically charged positions – which inevitably, I think, took on an extra weight because of the gender dynamic – it must again be stressed that there was nothing sexual here whatsoever. 

To be sure; it may appear so from the outside. Your legs intertwine, your breathing is heavy, and often your faces are right next to each other. You’re tossing each other around, rolling, hugging, mounting, pinning. And a caveat here is that some of the regular fighters were quite happy to take the fight in a more sensual direction. Space is made for those who have this kind of interest. Some fights were tender, others involved slapping, clawing and biting – one man ended up with a massive hickey on his chest from a woman whose jaw was quite determined to rip out a chunk of flesh. 

But at the end of the day, the fight was whatever you wanted it to be.

At one point during the final playfight – a 15 minute bullfight-like spectacle between two of the regulars (one of whom also happens to be the co-founder of Berlin’s Sensual Fightclub) – a guy in the circle called for the male fighter to stop, insisting that he was being too rough. The leader of the group dismissed this; things were clearly and enthusiastically consensual, and both fighters knew very well that they could end things at any time.

The entire event was a beautiful example of people refining one of the most effective and powerful approaches toward consent; what Michelle J. Anderson refers to as the Negotiation Model (writing in the context of rape reform), which has quickly come to overshadow the comparatively primitive No Model and Yes Model with which many are familiar. Anderson’s Negotiation Model is concerned with an ongoing mutual consultation between partners as to ensure an understanding and respect for the comfort, boundaries, and desires of each throughout the process. It is this kind of model upon which the dynamics of the playfight club are based.

I’ve allowed myself to tumble down a bit of an intellectualized rabbit-hole… 

The truth is, this was really just a great deal of fun. I’ve made an active effort recently to surround myself with people who appreciate having fun. This is far from the sense of going out to a party to drink (which absolutely has its place). I find that many times when one enters a typical party, one spends a healthy part of the evening figuring out how to convince themselves (and others) that what they had can genuinely – really, I promise – be described as fun. 

When you meet people like Toronto’s Neon Riders, whose raves rides, mass water gun fights, pillow fights, and beach get-togethers are explosions of connection, music, dance, nature and spreading love; or the wholesome psychedelic art parties held at WNDRLND studios; or even a simple night out (or in) for dinner with good friends around a small table… you realize that certain people have found a way to craft spaces where a wholesome, intimate, exciting, riotous, and deeply playful sense of fun whisks you back to childhood. Berlin’s Playfight belongs on this kind of list.