The city’s apparently inexorable slide into recession might just mean more participants in the free and public pillow fights, Easter egg hunts, and other strange and chaotic monthly happenings staged by Newmindspace, a trippy group of “urban bliss disseminators.” Last November, at their largest local event yet, 4,000 people wielding cardboard light sabres appeared in front of the ROM Crystal and staged a battle royale, gleefully walloping one another under black lights brought in for the occasion. This month, they’ll host a massive, shimmery soap bubble fight at Harbourfront as part of the Luminato celebrations. The group accomplishes the unlikely feat of making Toronto seem less toil and trouble and more, well, fun.

Kevin Bracken and Lori Kufner, a pair of U of T seniors who met at a 2004 rave, are the organization’s masterminds. Part art project, part carnival, part free public dance party, their events (they’ve hosted more than 50) are inspired by everything from Dr. Seuss to Burning Man to Christo’s Central Park spectacle, The Gates. But underneath the bubbles and the fairy wings, Newmindspace happenings are also a savvy protest against the commercialization of public space and a culture in which fun is the closely guarded domain of sports teams and entertainment conglomerates. Shunning permits and avoiding parks (“fun ghettos,” as Bracken calls them), Newmindspace wants people to break out of routines and assert their ownership of the city.

They’re not the first group of young activists to use play as a revolu­tionary tactic. Abbie Hoffman famously gathered thousands of people together to use their psychic energy to levitate the Pentagon and end the war in Vietnam. The difference, this time, is that it’s international: the so-called “urban playground movement” has adherents in some 60 cities and 27 countries worldwide (Newmindspace claims its own e-mail list is 10,000 strong). And it’s the speed and ease of organizing via the Internet that makes it all possible.

Such po-mo sensibility is also writ large in Newmindspace’s claim that their protest is non-partisan. A declaration of political affiliation (whether its animal rights or the NDP), Bracken says, would doom them to irrelevance. The events are open to everyone, and more and more people hauling strollers and baby backpacks are turning up for the antics. www.newmindspace.com