InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

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...

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...