InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body, and I am fortunate to the have the opportunity of offering InterPlay to my community in many venues - science  and  business communication, English language fluency, empowering women who have resettled here in the United States, and  creativity! Recently, I had the pleasure of bringing the gift of InterPlay to my community YMCA. On a Friday night in the middle of September, as a way of giving to my YMCA community in Atlanta, Georgia, I led participants in making marks, telling stories, and “leaping” from these “storied lines” in movement - knowing that through play we can “dance” with our creative spirits.  By making taking incremental steps - one mark, one move, one story, one partner at a time - we find the way back to the juiciness of our imaginations and into the flow of infinity. And we do it in the company on the “playground” with others! Wheee!  I'm so thank...

Using InterPlay in the English Language Classroom A license to play in the classroom! Imagine these teaching objectives for an elementary English as a Second Language class called “Talk More”: 1) Help students find more comfort and ease when speaking in English. 2) Increase students’ sense of English language efficacy and communication confidence. This past May, being given the permission to use “pure”  InterPlay  in a 3-week intensive English “Talk More 1” course consisting of 18 hours of instruction, thrilled me! I would engage the “whole student body” – body, mind, and heart! This kind of “whole body” engagement was going to be especially important in this unique class comprised of students from two distinctly different cultures – six Panamanians and six Japanese! I expected the students from Panama to have more expressive ease than students from Japan, but I didn’t know how this 50/50 combination would blend the differences, allowing the students a give-and-take ...

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...