InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

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 ...

EMBODYING THE PLANT OR ANIMAL. Participants were invited to become seaweed moving in the ocean current.   Alligators, dolphins, ghost crabs, pelicans, live oaks, and wasps - oh my! InterPlay Atlanta, Emory University, and the Georgia Coast Atlas all partnered to offer “Communicating the Science of the Georgia Coast,” a  fun- and facts-filled event as part of the 2019 Atlanta Science Festival.   This two-hour “playshop” took place on Friday, March 15 th  at the Little Five Points Community Center Café. From 7:00 to 9:00 PM, Certified InterPlay Leader Ruth Schowalter co-facilitated this highly interactive and energetic science communication workshop for adult and teen participants with her husband — scientist and author Dr. Anthony J. Martin. As a Georgia coast expert, Tony offered “micro-lectures” about its animals, plants, and ecosystems, while Ruth engaged participants in improvisational storytelling and movement-oriented activities that reinforced ...

Have you ever thought about how you might embody the difference between weather and climate change? Do you know the difference? Well, we had tremendous fun playing around with those concepts at the InterPlay - Atlanta Science Festival 2018 workshop, “Communicating the Facts: More than a Feeling"  ( see the workshop description below ). Thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s demonstration of “Weather versus Climate Change” on “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” (see this  video ), we invited pairs of people to play with this concept, with one person as climate change and the other as weather. The climate change partner was asked to choose a destination in the room and to walk to it in a fairly steady line, while the weather partner was given the task of moving (dancing?) erratically in front of or behind or around their climate change partner ( Yes, we played music ). Then we had the partners reverse their roles. In this way, each got to experience either the steadfastness of the cli...

InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body Exploring Evolutionary Concepts in Community at the Atlanta Science Festival TRILOBITES GONE MAD!  Improvising trilobites in an InterPlay "Walk Stop Run," participants make eye contact before going into a "lean" or making contact with another trilobite. This photo was taken at the end of the activity after participants had been invited to create a "Trilobite Party." (photo by Ruth Schowalter) Written by Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader and educator   (Reposted from InterPlay Atlanta, March 2016) “Trilobite Eyes” was a comment one participant left on Facebook beneath the group photo of the  InterPlay   workshop my scientist husband and I facilitated on Sunday, March 20 for the  2016 Atlanta Science Festival . After all, we had done the activity, “Walk Stop Run,” adding “the lean” using “Trilobite Eyes,” to ask another person’s permission through eye co...

InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body.  SCIENTIFIC FACTS ARE REAL. Do you need support responding to "opinions" about scientific facts like climate change, pollution, and endangered species? Science is more than a feeling! Let's play around with making effective and respectful replies! InterPlay joins the Atlanta Science Festival on March 23, 2018. Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader, is offering a unique and fun way to communicate scientific facts in collaboration with two Atlanta scientists. "Communicating the Facts--More than a Feeling is 2-hour improvisational workshop, which gives participants (teens and adults) a chance to engage their kinesthetic imaginations and affirm just how successfully they can communicate scientific facts, while also providing the means for addressing false or misleading information. The main goal is to help participants develop proactive skills for communicating environme ntal scie...