InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

Sustaining International Sisters (Global SIS : InterPlay) met on April 24th to celebrate Chiara Pilloton's birthday and wish our Muslim SISters Ramadan Mubarak! Chiara is a SISter living in Rome, Italy, alone and is in her 3rd month of quarantine because of the 2020 Pandemic. In the photo below is Chiara with the "crostata" she baked for herself. Happy Birthday to  Chiara Pilloton  quarantined in Rome, Italy,  on ZOOM!  In attendance for  Chiara's  SIS birthday party were SISters from Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, Mexico, Venezuela, China, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, England, Laos/Thailand and the United States. InterPlay is an amazing way to bring international women together in an environment that is nurturing, supportive and FUN.  And the FUN we had! Yay! We InterPlay "babbled" about birthday related words - cake, cards, ice cream, and parties. We did "I - could - talk -  abouts" on anything related to birthdays pa...

Zoom! Zip! Zam! Eeeeeek! What sound is made when you pretend to lift the lid off the top of your head? Does it pop, crackle, and snap? Maybe it makes that swirling, sizzling and exploding sound of fireworks!  What movement might you make as you open up your mental lid? Does your mental lid need to be unwound? Does it have little windows that need to be unlatched? Or do you have rusty hinges that require special care as you open it? For the April Online Global SIS: InterPlay 2020, Canan Arikan and I invited our international SISters to play around the spaces we create for our minds.   InterPlay  cofounder  Cynthia Winton-Henry  writes about giving the mind more space by taking off your mental lid in her book,  Move: What the Body Wants :   “It turns out that we hold our minds in too-small a physical space, a box the size of a skull. To think outside of the box, you’ve got to let your mind be as big as your bodyspirit. Your mind w...

What animal left those tracks in the mud outside your backdoor, or next to the stream where you walk your dog? Atlanta may be a large urban city, but more than just people and their pets live among us. What stories can we tell from animal tracks once we understand how to identify and interpret them? This fun interactive workshop teaches participants about some of Atlanta’s wild animals how to recognize and interpret their tracks and sign, while using improvisational movement and storytelling. (This was our ASF teaser) Dear Readers!   Forgive me for posting this announcement here of my CANCELLED (sigh) collaborative workshop with the Atlanta Festival and two Emory University professors - Tony Martin from the Department of Environmental Sciences and Lori Teague from the Emory Dance Department. Our dream workshop that we had been brewing up for the past several years was cancelled because of the 2020 Pandemic. However, I couldn't resist sharing our flyer, teaser and workshop ...

ONLINE CLASS PHOTO. For our final online Total Body Communication class, students were asked to wear hats and sunglasses for a class photo. Here we are! Like magic, we assemble for class, two-dimensional square after square, we build the class body. Students pop-up on screen as if they’ve traveled through a Harry Potter “portkey” or the “Floo Network.” And, they can “disapparate” just as easily either unexpectedly because of a bandwidth failure or purposefully by “cloaking” themselves when they turn off their video cameras. This class is “Better Speaking: Total Body Communication,” and I am the lecturer implementing Applied InterPlay to teach this class for internationals studying English at the Georgia Tech Language Institute. Total Body Communication is about teaching both the whole student body – the individual’s body (mind, heart, body and spirit), and the class community comprised of those student bodies. Can the student body(ies) be engaged online through the ethersphere...