Improvising the World Anew:
Vygotsky, Whitehead, and the Spirit of Performance Activism
“Just as electricity is equally present in a storm with deafening thunder and blinding lightning and in the operation of a pocket flashlight, in the same way, creativity is present, in actuality, not only when great historical works are born but also whenever a person imagines, combines, alters, and creates something new, no matter how small a drop in the bucket this new thing appears compared to the works of geniuses. When we consider the phenomenon of collective creativity, which combines all these drops of individual creativity that frequently are insignificant in themselves, we readily understand what an enormous percentage of what has been created by humanity is a product of the anonymous collective creative work of unknown inventors.”
—Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) was a pioneering Russian psychologist whose work emphasized the social and cultural foundations of human development. He believed that imagination, emotion, language, and play are central to how individuals grow, learn, and become who they are in relationship with others. In the quote above, he invites us to consider what happens "whenever a person imagines, combines, alters, and creates something new." People do this constantly in their daily lives. A parent invents a new bedtime story on the spot. A cook tweaks a recipe to suit what's left in the pantry. A gardener tries a new arrangement of plants. Someone reorganizes a cluttered drawer to make it more functional. A teacher adapts a lesson in response to the mood of the room. A neighbor offers an unexpected gesture of kindness that changes someone’s day. These are all “drops of individual creativity”—small, often unnoticed acts that, in the words of Vygotsky, contribute to the anonymous, collective creativity of human life. Even seemingly mundane tasks—folding laundry, making a grocery list, rearranging furniture, fixing a leaky faucet—can involve acts of improvisation, adaptation, and invention.
Alfred North Whitehead offers a cosmological framework that resonates with this insight. He speaks of the universe as composed of drops of self-creative experience—each a moment of immediacy and subjectivity—that together constitute the cosmos. These moments are called “actual entities” or “actual occasions of experience.” Crucially, an actual entity is not merely an object in the world, observed from the outside; it is the subject of its own immediacy. It is alive to itself and for itself. The unfolding of each actual entity, in the immediacy of its becoming, constitutes its very being. Being, in this view, is inseparable from becoming.
Yet this self-creativity never arises in isolation. It is always a response to a world inherited from the past—whether recent or distant. In this way, creativity is inherently relational. In the case of human beings, the world we inherit is shaped most immediately by our relations with others. Together with those others, are examples of what Whitehead calls “societies.”
In Whitehead, societies are not limited to humans: a molecule is a society; a nervous system is a society; an ecosystem is a society; a galaxy is a society. In fact, the entire universe is a vast complex of actual entities—of momentary drops of experience, each with a life of its own—each of which is dependent on others. In Whitehead’s philosophy, other actualities are “immanent” within any given actual entity, just as it is “immanent” within them. The image is Buddhist in spirit: the universe as a luminous network of interdependent events, each both a part of the others and distinct in its own becoming. Even the living whole of the universe—even God, for Whitehead—is immanent within the universe, even as more than the universe. And the universe is immanent within God. There are self-creative events, but there are no isolated substances. Everything is in relation; everything becomes through participation in the becoming of others.
The Ensemble as a Society
One unique kind of human society is an ensemble—such as when a group of people improvises responses to one another, creating a shared story or solving a practical problem together. They build upon what others have offered. Friends planning a last-minute dinner party, children inventing a new game, coworkers troubleshooting a technical glitch—these are everyday ensembles.
When shaped by the tradition of improvisational comedy, the ensemble adopts a spirit of “yes, and” rather than “no, but,” not knowing what the outcome will be in advance, but enjoying the process of co-creation nonetheless. They play together, and in this playing, they create themselves—relationally and creatively.
If we are influenced by Vygotsky as well as Whitehead, we can speak of ensembles as Zones of Proximal Development. As Lois Holzman explains:
"This term [Zone of Proximal Development] was coined by Vygotsky and is probably what he’s best known for. It was one of the ways he tried to convey that human learning and development emerge from, and exist in, the social spaces people create together, rather than within any individual. A Zone of Proximal Development is an environment that allows people to go beyond what they can do alone. Little children spend their days in these environments, which invite and support them to do what’s 'proximal' to their current abilities, to play at speaking, reading, dancing, and so much more. They might not yet know how to do those things, but the people around them do. And these people don’t just speak, read, and dance on their own—they encourage the little non-knowers to join in, to play and perform as speakers, readers, and dancers, even though they haven’t yet mastered those skills." (Lois Holzman, The Overweight Brain, p. 154.)
Holman's point is that we adults, too, can enter into and help create such social spaces, such zones of proximal development, such 'societies' to use Whitehead's language. We, too, play.
Playing All the Time
If play has something to do with the spontaneous self-creativity of each moment of experience, then most of us are playing all the time. This does not mean that we do it consciously, or that we are not also partly determined by the situations we face and the worldly conditions that shape us, both positively and negatively. But we are always playfully responding—if not consciously, then unconsciously.
We may be playing without knowing we are playing. That is, we may act as if the play were already written—as if we are simply following a pre-given script handed down by culture, habit, or history—when in fact we are co-writing the play even as we perform it. For Whitehead, the future is not fixed or fully determined; it remains open, not-yet-decided, until we make our decisions and respond to the world in creative ways. What appears to be repetition may contain hidden freedom. Even within structured roles and constraints, we are improvisers—agents of becoming—capable of reshaping the narrative through how we act, relate, and imagine.
Indeed, thinks Whitehead, it is arguable that the entire universe evolves through play, that is, through the self-creativity and imagination of actual entities, both in their novel and in their repetitive (law like) behavior. When we gaze at the heavens above, or at the soil beneath our feet, at other animals and plants, at hills and rivers, and at ourselves, looking deeply, we see the spirit of play at work. And, for Whitehead as for Vygotsky, the spirit includes feeling. Vygotsky writes:
Feeling and Play
For Lev Vygotsky, play is not simply about external behavior or fantasy—it is deeply affective. In his writings, Vygotsky emphasizes that imagination and emotion are inseparably intertwined. Feeling is not an afterthought to thought or action; it is central to the generative process of becoming. In childhood development and adult creativity alike, play allows individuals to enter into new emotional states, to rehearse different relational possibilities, and to explore identities beyond their current circumstances. Play is thus a way of feeling into the world—not passively receiving impressions, but actively shaping one’s emotional relation to what is possible. In this sense, feeling is performative and transformative. It arises within action, not apart from it, and it shapes how we perceive and engage with reality. Vygotsky writes:
"Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one’s thoughts but also to be talented in one’s feelings as well. The emotional part of the personality has no less value than the other sides, and it also should be the object and concern of education, as well as intellect and will. Love can reach the same level of talent and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus." (Vygotsky)
Whitehead offers a metaphysical parallel through his concept of prehension. Prehension is the feeling of one actuality by another—the most basic unit of relation in his process philosophy. Every actual entity begins by prehending its world, not through cold analysis but through affective responsiveness. Feeling, for Whitehead, is the very fabric of experience: we inherit the world not abstractly, but emotionally, bodily, and relationally. In this light, play can be understood as an improvisational unfolding of prehensions, in which each moment includes inherited feelings from the past but responds to them with novelty and creativity. Like Vygotsky, Whitehead sees emotion not as peripheral, but as central to becoming. Play, then, is a mode of affective experimentation—of reshaping the felt contours of the world through interaction, imagination, and shared experience.
In short, for Vygotsky and for Whitehead, we human beings - and in Whitehead's case, other sentient beings, too - are playful, improvisational, feeling beings. This does not mean that we are always happy. We suffer terribly, But it does mean that our very essence is creative and affective.
Performance Activism
This recognition—that we are always improvising, even when we think we are merely repeating—opens up powerful possibilities for how we understand personal growth, social change, and collective life. When we become conscious of the improvisational nature of existence, we gain the capacity to engage it more deliberately, more creatively, and more communally. We can step out of passive repetition and into active authorship.
This is the insight at the heart of performance activism, which takes the playful, creative, affective and improvisational capacities inherent in all human beings and brings them to the forefront of social practice. Performance activism invites people not just to reflect on the world, but to perform it differently—to co-create new meanings, new relationships, and new futures through shared activity.
- Community street performances in marginalized neighborhoods, where local residents co-create public stories about their lives, turning sidewalks into stages for shared identity and collective healing.
- Improvised theatrical workshops in schools, prisons, or refugee centers, where participants are invited to “perform their development” by imagining and acting out new roles, hopes, and relationships they’ve never had space to explore.
- Play-based civic forums where people from divided political or cultural backgrounds engage in facilitated role-play or ensemble creation—not to debate, but to co-create new forms of dialogue rooted in shared activity rather than opposition.
- Public dance or movement improvisation as protest or witness, used by activist groups to call attention to climate change, racial injustice, or gender violence—not only through messaging, but through the embodied presence of performance itself.
- Therapeutic performance spaces for elders, children, or people in recovery, where storytelling, play, and improvisation allow participants to rediscover themselves—not through clinical diagnosis or treatment, but through being invited into creative becoming with others.
- Online improvisational collectives, where people from around the globe gather in virtual spaces to co-create skits, share playful experiments, or devise performance pieces about pandemic life, grief, hope, and resilience.
A detailed knowledge of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy is not necessary to catch the spirit of it. The spirit is what matters most. At heart, Whitehead invites us to see not only human beings, but also the living Earth—and indeed the entire cosmos—as an ongoing expression of improvisational creativity. This creativity does not always unfold in beautiful or harmonious ways. It can give rise to suffering, violence, and disintegration as easily as joy, harmony, and transformation. We are not guaranteed to improvise our way toward health. We can—and often do—improvise our way into brokenness. But the improvisation continues, moment by moment, nonetheless.
Those who engage in performance activism are committed to improvising in a different direction: toward a healthier society, one that is creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, diverse, humane to animals, and kind to the Earth—with no one left behind. This is an ideal—a goal. In a Whiteheadian context, we might call it the beloved community, or more expansively, the beloved world. What Whitehead offers is not a blueprint, but a deep affirmation that this spirit—the yearning for justice, beauty, and relational wholeness—is not just a human projection. It is grounded in the very heart of reality. It is woven into the fabric of the universe. That vision can strengthen and deepen the brilliance of Vygotsky’s developmental insights and the transformative promise of performance activism. It says, in effect: Yes, this work matters. And yes, it resonates with the way the world itself unfolds.
Readers will notice that I have mentioned God once or twice in this essay. Embracing the spirit of Whitehead does not require belief in God. But it can include it. For Whitehead, God is not an authoritarian figure in the sky who dispenses rewards and punishments. God is not separate from the world, but the very living whole of the universe—understood as a subject in its own right. We can say to this living whole, “I love you,” “I hate you,” “I miss you,” “I’m sorry,” or even “You don’t exist.” And when we say these things, there is something real that listens: not just a what but a who. Indeed, a you. And yet this something is also within us—as a lure, a beckoning presence that invites us to make the best of our lives and help shape societies grounded in kindness, beauty, and care for the vulnerable.
When we respond to that lure—whether we name it God or not—we naturally want to help create a better world. Performance activism is one way we can do this. It begins not with massive structures, but with small groups of people committed to bringing play, feeling, and improvisation into everyday life. It begins with the belief that something better is possible, and that through collective creativity, we can help bring it into being—for one another, for the Earth, for the fullness of life itself.
Quotes from Whitehead
‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
That an actual entity by functioning in respect to itself plays diverse rôles in self-formation without losing its self-identity. It is self-creative; and in its process of creation transforms its diversity of rôles into one coherent rôle...[This} self-functioning is the real internal constitution of an actual entity. It is the ‘immediacy’ of the actual entity. An actual entity is called the ‘subject’ of its own immediacy.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. This principle states that the being of a res vera is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ The way in which one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality