InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

Happy First Birthday to Sustaining International Sisters  & Happy 30th Anniversary to InterPlay! “There is a ‘we’ in me,” writes Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founder of InterPlay.* That is, “the group” is within each one of us. However, what happens to the “we” when the individual is a refugee, a person seeking asylum, or an international visiting the United States and is feeling like a fish out of water?  Here in Atlanta, our InterPlay community is offering a way for individual international and American women to create a new sense of “groupness,” a new “we” in their “me.” We have created Sustaining International Sisters (SIS), a 3-hour monthly “play and potluck” so that women can begin to weave themselves into a new communal fabric. Each month, we are figuratively and literally stepping across cultural boundaries through movement, storytelling, using our voices in fun and surprising ways and sharing an international lunch together. The InterPlay tools an...

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...

K-12 Educators from Panama. In the first week of March 2018, I facilitated an InterPlay workshop for 23 Panamanian educators at the Georgia Tech Language Institute, who had come to study educational methodologies and techniques for 8 weeks. I was invited to introduce them to “Applied InterPlay for Educators,” in a short two hours. In this photo, we had fun posing to demonstrate the “seriousness” of being teachers. I can tell you why I use InterPlay in my classroom as an instructor of English as a Second Language at the Georgia Tech Language Institute and a Certified InterPlay Leader! First of all, InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body. It is a thirty-year-old improvisational system that uses movement, storytelling, voice and shape and stillness, to support authenticity and foster ease and joy. Among the many reasons that InterPlay co-founders Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter , developed it was to be a tool for building comm...