Featuring choreographed team coordination, constant demands for improvisation, and the built-in narratives of victory and defeat, sports represent fertile ground for scholarship in performance studies, an interdisciplinary field engaging with performance in all its forms. Unfortunately, notably deficient from the relatively scant research on this subject is a perspective like the one applied by performance studies scholar Andre Lepecki oriented around the effects of regulations on movement. While Lepecki’s article “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics” expresses antipathy to tangible and insidious restrictions on movement, the lessons taught by the development of rules in sports shows how ostensible limits on movement can actually liberalize it further. To illuminate how sports can inform performance studies and related fields, I apply art critic Dave Hickey’s 1997 basketball essay “The Heresy of Zone Defense” to the modern politics of movement, freedom, and rules.
Hickey opens his essay by vividly describing the play shown above, Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s famed reverse lay-up in the 1980 National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals. Yet, he attributes this basket and its beauty not to the unfettered freedom of basketball, but to its strict compliance with basketball’s “liberating rules.” Recognizing the alternative to rules as “perpetual terror, self-conscious wariness, and self-deluding ferocity,” Hickey celebrates the systems of order which prohibit Erving from stepping out of bounds and dissuade his opponents from shoving him. Without such regulations, basketball’s free-flowing beauty would descend into chaos.
Make no mistake, however, Hickey is not unilaterally enamored with the concept of rules. Invoking Thomas Jefferson, he acknowledges that “the liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow.” For instance, he points out that Jackson Pollock’s paint dripping technique was a liberating addition to the art world until it became problematic not to drip. Thus, he posits that “the trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern.”
This fascination with rules explains his infatuation with basketball, which he deems exemplary for “recognizing this moment of portending government and in deflecting it, by changing the rules when they threaten to make the game less beautiful and less visible, when the game stops liberating and begins to educate.” For example, the existence of zone defense, the eponymous subject of his essay, limited offensive players’ movement by allowing defenders to simply patrol an area. In order to free up players to engage in beautiful movement like Erving’s, the NBA prohibited zone defense. Basketball mechanics aside, Hickey is emphasizing the sport’s constant capacity to reinvent itself with the expressed goal of liberating movement. Years after “The Heresy of Zone Defense” came out, the NBA ended up reevaluating zone defense in the modern game and legalizing it, citing the new forms of defensive strategy that could emerge. While Hickey may disagree with that choice, the re-legalization only proves his point regarding basketball’s constant reinvention in favor of freedom.
Although basketball may situate itself on a path towards genuine freedom, the political sphere does not always take such introspective steps. Instead, many policymakers cling to the most simplistic version of freedom they see at the expense of a more powerful brand of freedom of movement. Lifting stringent COVID-19 lockdowns may have promoted freedom in theory, but it restricted true freedom of movement by excluding vulnerable individuals from public life by making shared spaces unsafe or inaccessible to them. Relaxed gun laws may promote freedom in theory, but they restrict true freedom of movement by making people feel unsafe gathering in public spaces, attending school, or participating in protests due to the pervasive threat of gun violence. Unrestricted speech on social media may promote freedom in theory, but it restricts true freedom of movement in digital spaces by enabling harassment, misinformation, and targeted abuse that drive marginalized voices offline. Just like in the case of zone defense, freedom is more than meets the eye.
For both basketball fans and advocates for freedom, Hickey’s prescription is the same: liberating rules. Whether that takes the form of prohibiting forms of defense or creating more stringent hate speech laws, regulations which seemingly limit autonomy may pave the way for a resurgence of true freedom.
Works Cited
Hickey, Dave. “The Heresy of Zone Defense.” Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, Art Issues Press, 1997, pp. 155–162.
Lepecki, André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 2013, pp. 13–27.