Agiant rubber Pilates ball soared high in the air at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, while below it, actors and artists traded body-checks and elbow jabs.
A scrum of a dozen were playing a freeform sport called circle rules football. The point of the game — 30 percent soccer, 20 percent rugby, the rest pure Dada — was to pound the ball through a single, soccer-style goal that sat, like an object of Druidic devotion, at the center of a ring of orange pylons.
One player punched the ball with his fist. Hey, hands on that guy! Wait, hands are allowed. So are shins, chests, forearms and — ouch — faces, apparently.
As the match raged on last Sunday, players dribbled the giant ball awkwardly on the turf as if it were a basketball borrowed from Claes Oldenburg’s garage. At one point, the goalie for each team wrestled each other to the turf Greco-Roman style beneath the crossbar, while a player on the wing swatted the huge ball violently onto a blanket far from the field of play, where a young couple were sunning themselves with their toddler son. Out of bounds!
Wait, there are no boundaries.
It’s art, get it?
Greg Manley, a 24-year-old actor who lives in Brooklyn, created circle rules football three years ago as an experimental theater project at New York University. Since then, the game has inspired a plan for a league of its own and has been played in more than eight cities around the country, including Puerto Rico, and in Prague.
The game is also one of a growing number of highly conceptualized art-sports that have been invented in recent years by young artists and promoted on YouTube and other Web sites. These sports, like vikingball, class-conscious kickball and straightjacket softball, are supposed to be competitive games, but also art.
Circle rules football, for instance, is intended to highlight the common thread between improvisational theater and athletics, an improvisational performance in its own right. “Everything inherent in theater is inherent in sports,” Manley said. “Drama is conflict, and there’s no better conflict than the Super Bowl.”
Like Manley, many artists say their absurdist sports are an outgrowth of the contemporary art-world trend toward participatory art, which is intended to break down walls between artist and audience. But beyond the high-mindedness, the skinny-armed aesthetes also seem to be on a personal mission to reclaim sports from the bull-necked athletes of their youth.
Sure, like other young ironists who wear vintage 1980s T-shirts and listen to Of Montreal, the adherents of art-sports could just play dodgeball and kickball on weekends. But by creating their own games, they are making a statement that sports can be something different in this steroid-pumped, travel-team era — namely, fun.
“It isn’t about proving yourself,” said Scott Peterson, a 23-year-old actor, of circle rules football. “It’s about having fun, playing — both in terms of ‘a play,’ and ‘playing.’”
Matthew Slaats, of Staatsburg, New York, conceived “1 v 1,” an alternate-universe form of one-on-one basketball involving a paddle-wheel and ice tongs. Michael Coolidge, a 31-year-old Canadian artist, is the Abner Doubleday of mini-bowl transformodrome, basically bocce ball crossed with mini-golf. Abby Manock, a Brooklyn performance artist, created bag tag, a relay where competitors change into costumes — polar bear, bag lady — as they race to scoop detritus like milk cartons or old stuffed animals into color-coordinated trash bins.
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