InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

Creativity Flowed Like Georgia Streams! Written by Ruth Schowalter, Certified InterPlay Leader On the evening of Friday, March 24 th , 2017, after dinner and the poster session, InterPlay Atlanta’s Ruth Schowalter “broke the ice” for a community of volunteers and environmental researchers who had come together across the state of Georgia for the annual Georgia Confluence. In collaboration with her husband Tony Martin, an Emory professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Ruth offered gentle but energetic steps bringing these people together who monitor the health of the water in streams near where they live in Georgia.   The spacious community room at the Environmental & Heritage Center in Buford, Georgia, lent itself to expansive movement and storytelling that InterPlay provides. This almost 30-year-old improvisational system hailing from California is an active creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body. But how does the “science of monitoring str...

Igniting Your Research Communication Style Through Improvisational Forms written by Ruth Schowalter, Certified InterPlay Leader "I'm a recovering serious person!" When I offer the above statement to a room full of scientists and their college students at the beginning of a workshop, they don't know how to react. Is that a good or a bad thing? Maybe they are much too serious to know how to respond. The goal of my workshop is to offer these scientists recovery from being too serious. But why would researchers want to "recover" from the high seriousness that has served them so well in their investigations and the establishment of their careers as academics?  Let's take a moment to affirm that we want our scientists to conduct their research and interpret their results with the utmost concentration using all of their acquired knowledge and experience. Scientists must be objective when they are at work. They must be "serious" with a capi...

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...