"Transformative Aesthetic Dimensions in Young Boys' War Play: Exploring the World Through Kinesthetic Musicality" - Ebba Theorell (Stockholm University)
The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2025
This text is based on the article, Transformative Aesthetic Dimensions in Young Boys’ War Play: Exploring the World Through Kinesthetic Musicality, Journal of Aesthetic Education, which is based on the thesis: Force, Form, Transformations: Kinesthetic musicality and bodyworldning in boys war play (Theorell, 2021). https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1605845/FULLTEXT02.pdf
Prologue
It took me by surprise that our sons began engaging in war play at such a young age, already when they were around two years old. Despite what we considered a peaceful and “gender-neutral” upbringing, they gravitated toward violent scenarios and toys. Initially, I attempted to stop the play, but without success.
Recurring themes included superheroes, knights, battles with different kinds of toy or fictive weapons, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Ninja Turtles, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, as well as pirates and other combat-related characters. I observed a similar dominance of play involving strong forces, particularly among boys I encountered both in my work in preschools and schools and in my free time. I was critical and sceptical of war play from several perspectives. For example, there appeared to be a commercial interplay between the toy industry and popular culture, and war play seemed to represent masculine ideals that I feared could be normalised through this violent behaviour. What seemed to unite parents and educators was that we often felt provoked, embarrassed, angry, ambivalent, and frustrated when confronted with these seemingly unstoppable games. With mixed feelings of concern and a sense that something was not quite right, I began to observe more attentively how the adult world responds to children who engage in war play.
Most educators and parents I spoke to expressed disgust toward this type of play, ignored it entirely, or communicated their disapproval in other ways. I also discovered that it is very common for preschools and schools to adopt zero-tolerance policies toward war play. Educators in one municipality where I worked for a period even told me that their social services and the police advised preschools and schools to ban war play completely for preventive purposes. On the internet, I found numerous blogs, parenting magazines, and online forums where anxious and frustrated educators and parents discussed the issue. During these early explorations, I realized that the hostility toward young children’s war play was much greater than I had expected. This harshness was mainly directed towards boys. The combined force of this adult negativity eventually became overwhelming for me and made me wonder how such attitudes might be experienced by the children themselves. I tried to imagine what it would be like to encounter this kind of response from the adult world for an entire day, a week, a year, or even several years. I could find almost no examples of anyone defending war play, apart from “let-it-be” arguments such as “boys will be boys” or claims that nothing could be done about it. Above all, I never encountered the idea that war play might contain something meaningful or interesting and began to question whether this one-sided approach overlooked important aspects of the play.
These questions led me to seek answers from the children themselves. Instead of turning away when they played war or action games, I began filming them in order to observe the play more closely. What I saw surprised me. For example, the children were extremely careful not to touch one another during jumps, kicks, and fencing movements. They seemed able to calculate the distance to a friend with a margin of only a few centimetres – or less – while performing complex and dynamic movements. Movement appeared to be the most central and attractive aspect in early childhood war play (2021).
Introduction
Rough and tumble play, action play, superhero play and war play are distinguished by children using toy weapons, powerful words and emotions, a lot of movement and by playing a war or some kind of fight. It is not about real fights, but about pretend fights. According to previous research on war play I have found, it is mostly boys who are drawn to war play and therefore it is mostly boys who encounter prohibition, disinterest and even aggression from adults (Knutsdotter Olofsson, 2003; Malloy & Mc Murray-Schwartz, 2004; Tullgren, 2004; Halvars-Franzén, 2010; Lagerström-Dyrssen, 2018;
Niu, 2018). Despite this, boys continue to play war or hero-related games, generation after generation. Why is their passion for war play so strong? In both upbringing and education, we have a hard time getting out of habitual patterns. This leads to stereotypes being maintained, no matter how much we want and try to get away from them. Does this one-sided negative adult view of war play risk alienating boys from our communities and is there a risk that something is lost if we never see any creative aspects that war play generates? War play is a complex phenomenon and there are of course aspects that can be problematic, just like with other kinds of play. It raises questions that extend from private family relationships to major societal issues that concern how destructive masculinity norms are created and maintained. War play is played from generation to generation, but the findings in these studies suggest that in each transfer, each repetition, variations of its meaning and expression are transformed. What kind of new meaning do boys three to nine years old invent in their physical war play?
Dodd (1992) warns that war play may normalize violence but also argues that children cannot be completely shielded from violent influences. Even without direct exposure, children encounter violence through the internet, movies, television, and computer games, which may lead them to incorporate aggression into their play. Therefore, teachers and parents need to understand war play better and develop strategies for managing violent elements within children’s play (Dodd, 1992). Research shows that war play is primarily practiced by boys, who therefore more often encounter adult disapproval, prohibition, or interference (Knutsdotter Olofsson, 2003). Despite this, war- and superhero-themed play continues across generations (Malloy & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004). Adults often respond in two contrasting ways: some accept it as a natural part of growing up, while others – especially in Sweden – view it as destructive and attempt to prohibit it. This raises questions about whether alternative approaches are possible and whether the creative aspects of war play are being overlooked. War play typically involves toy weapons, strong emotions, expressive language, and intense movement in simulated fights (Levin & Carlsson-Paige, 2006). Many adults in Sweden and elsewhere view such play with suspicion (Jelleyman et al., 2019). Although it involves pretend rather than real violence, it often worries parents and teachers (Rasmussen, 1992). Consequently, strict rules and zero-tolerance policies are common in schools and preschools. These restrictions partly reflect broader social concerns about violence, including the involvement of increasingly young boys in gang criminality in Sweden (BRÅ, 2024). However, such prohibitions may risk alienating boys and weakening their trust in adults and educational institutions.
Making Room for Children’s Perspectives
War play is transmitted across generations, but children reinterpret it each time. What meanings do young boys create in their physical war play in this period of time? To recognize new meanings, we must understand how they emerge. Wartofsky (1973) describes perception as plastic: representations and ways of seeing the world change over time. New worlds become visible when existing representations lose their dominance. To better understand children’s perspectives, I filmed boys engaging in war play. Early observations revealed that their movements were expressive and skilful and that they carefully avoided harming one another despite the dynamic physical activity. Because movement appeared central to the play, I chose to analyse it through a dance-theoretical framework, which revealed unexpectedly aesthetic qualities.
Movement Categories in War Play
I employed film ethnography as method, and the analysis was inspired by Grounded Theory. The filmed sequences included boys playing physical war play, influenced by fictional narratives such as Star Wars or Spiderman and games such as World of Warcraft and Minecraft. The movement patterns in these films and games are often originally inspired by movement from the Martial Arts, but the children seem to transform them further. The analysis initially produced forty-six movement categories, which were later organized into six broader categories, connected through one core concept: Kinesthetic musicality. This concept further transformed into Kinaesthetic musicality, underlining the aesthetic dimensions in children’s movement intelligence. The movement categories from war play in this study was formulated as follows:
Rhythm
Children create rhythmic patterns in their play, often imitating one another and producing short choreographies through repetition, variation, and improvisation.
Orchestrating Space
Children interact sensitively with the spatial environment. Objects and terrain become meaningful elements of play – a hole becomes a “death trap,” and a tree becomes a lookout tower. Space is not only a backdrop to the play.
Fictional Characters
Choosing a character also means adopting specific movement qualities. Characters such as old and small Yoda, the robot R2-D2, or the evil, heavily breathing Darth Vader offers distinctive, characteristic movement for children to imitate, explore and transform.
Movement Canon
Certain recurring movements form a shared repertoire, including pirouettes, fencing gestures, robot movements, playing dead, and using “the Force” (the outreached arm from Star Wars).
Phrases
When asked individually to demonstrate their actions in the play, the children transformed movements into improvised dance-like solo sequences involving jumps, kicks, and spins.
Aesthetic Attention
Children focus closely on the sensory and expressive qualities of movement, sound, and space, sometimes slowing movements down in order to refine them.
Kinaesthetic Musicality
Together, these categories contribute to a central, overlapping concept of kinaesthetic musicality. Analysing war play through dance theoretical frame, reveals a strong bodily sensitivity. The concept of kinaesthetic musicality describes children’s ability to explore and create relationships with the world through movement. It combines kinaesthesia – the sense of bodily movement – with musicality understood as an embodied awareness of rhythm, timing, and expression.
In this expanded sense, musicality is not limited to audible music but involves the coordination of sensation, movement, breath, and perception. Similar ideas appear in Ravn’s (2009) concept of “incorporated music,” in which dancers perceive music through their bodies and muscles. Children appear to use a comparable bodily awareness in everyday life. Infants rocking to the rhythm of household sounds or children moving with natural phenomena illustrate this embodied resonance with the world. Kinaesthetic musicality functions as a bridge between the child and the environment, enabling sensitive and creative interaction. In a demanding play such as war play, this sensitivity helps children coordinate movement, anticipate others’ actions, and avoid injury. To sustain the play, they must understand balance, timing, spatial relationships, and bodily limits. The tension and risk involved intensify their focus and sensory awareness.
The Aesthetic Energy of War Play
War play emerges in a threshold between violence and aesthetics. Many of its movements originate in films, games, and martial arts traditions. Martial arts such as capoeira or aikido combine physical discipline with aesthetic and choreographic dimensions. Over time, practices such as kung fu and karate have evolved from combat training into sports or artistic forms (Ölme, 2013). These aesthetic layers may resonate with children more strongly than violent intentions. The movements often begin as imitation – such as fencing – but develop into explorations of balance, rhythm, and precision. Children may transform aggressive energy into aesthetic experimentation, illustrating Corsaro’s (2012) concept of interpretive reproduction, in which children adapt cultural material to their own concerns. Understanding movement also requires examining perception. Hämäläinen (2007) argues that perception is active and connected to action. Dancers develop rapid interaction between inner sensations and external perception—what she calls “bodily wisdom.” Philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (2015) describe perception as a dynamic encounter between subject and world. Improvisation, according to Deleuze and Guattari, involves risking engagement with the world and blending with it. Similarly, Manning (2012) describes bodies as rhythms in continuous interaction with their environments. In this perspective, movement and thought are inseparable. Sensations, memory, and anticipation merge as the body responds to the world. Manning (2012) describes this process as preacceleration, the gathering momentum that precedes movement.
Force Taking Form
Such body - world interactions are particularly visible in early childhood exploration. Children appear to have a more immediate bodily connection to their surroundings. Their kinaesthetic musicality allows them to sense forces and potential movements before they fully take form – in gestures, sounds, or physical actions. War play provides an intense setting in which this sensitivity becomes especially visible. Through these interactions, children transform cultural expressions of violence into new forms of movement and meaning.
Conclusion
This study proposes kinaesthetic musicality as a theory describing young children’s embodied sensitivity to rhythm, movement, and environment. The concept highlights how children explore the world through physical and aesthetic engagement. Understanding this embodied musicality may help adults rethink their approaches to war play. Instead of focusing solely on prohibition, educators and parents might recognize how children transform cultural expressions creatively. In times marked by war and gender-based violence, I refer to hooks (2004) that calls for the necessity of creating new visions of masculinity informed by feminist perspectives, and I suggest also learning from children’s transformations of stereotyped expressions to develop these new visions. By engaging constructively with children’s embodied creativity, educators may support more inclusive learning environments and address challenges faced by many boys in educational systems worldwide (The Economist, 2022). A greater sensibility, attention and curiosity towards new generations, sometimes subtle, invitations and suggestions on how to challenge and rebuild stereotyped expressions can open for new ethical dimensions to explore together. To begin with – instead of automatically prohibiting children’s war play, we can observe it for a second longer, and try to identify what is actually being explored. A pre-school teacher that is exploring these findings together with her colleagues, recently told me that their broader, more informed gaze on physical war play, has started also to change their approaches and actions towards the war playing children, that they used to see as trouble makers.
Link to my homepage at the University of Stockholm:
https://www.su.se/english/profiles/e/etheo
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