Working Class Ballet/Christmas Day Truce 1914

“Working Class Ballet/Christmas Day Truce 1914” is one of six books I designed as part of my MFA Show 2019 at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. All six books use football as a lens to view politics.

“The display, among others, of any political or religious symbol is strictly prohibited. In the stadium and on the pitch, there is only room for sport, nothing else.”  FIFA, The international governing body of association football. 

This book examines the claims that football or sport is a politely free zone. It examines the games played in No man’s land during the Christmas Day Truce of 1914 and their place as the most ironic of politically free zones. A thought experiment using linguistic collage that is then made visible through photographic collage, metaphorical diagrammatical drawings and illustration. The aim is to explore the topic visually using cinematic pacing and timing that can add more to the topic’s exploration then a traditional text-based essay.  

The text in the book is a series of concepts laid out by Professor of Philosophy Simon Critchley in his lecture Working Class Ballet (Critchley 2017). The lecture is based on his book What we think when we think about football (Critchley 2017) which explores various ideas regarding the phenomenology of football within society. I have taken these concepts out of conventional society and placed them into No man’s land during the Christmas Day Truce of 1914 to further explore ideas of politics within sporting environments. Key concepts from Working Class Ballet are placed over a temporary war zone, a space where madness and horrific behaviors are standard but have been temporarily halted for one day and one game of football. Phrases used by the Professor like “where one is lifted out of the everyday into something ecstatic” (Critchley 2017) and “with the future open and uncertain.” (Critchley 2017) hold a completely different weight and resonance when placed in this environment.  

These games of football in 1914 were not just the most ironic of political free zones but also a tragic utopian temporary space. The book homes in on the individual away from the collective experiences. This pre-conscription working class ballerina was motivated to go to war by a propaganda packaged as nationalistic play. The individual soldier plays out the last game of their life in a frenzy of ecstasy and mourning. Where memory and childhood are intensively reflected on through football in a final act of contemplation. Played out in a temporary space in the most temporary and unrepeated of moments— one game, one day, as time is suspended and distorted through play.