InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

It’s 7:30 PM in China and 7:30 AM on the east coast of the United States. Twelve women have gathered to welcome Chun Fang to Sustaining International Sisters (SIS) and InterPlay. We will play for one-hour only and have no more than 12 SISters. Hence the term “sislet.” “-Let” is a diminutive suffix that attaches to nouns to denote smallness (i.e. booklet, piglet). A usual SIS: InterPlay gathering will last two hours and have more than 20 women. Online Global SIS connects women globally to form friendships through InterPlay, an active creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body. As we grow our SISterhood, we are discovering that newcomers need to “move at the speed of their bodies” both in language and playful movement, voicing, and storytelling. SISlets give us the opportunity to offer incremental steps into the world of InterPlay, offering “bite-size” explanations about InterPlay tools and forms. When “playing” globally, language becomes a “thing” of importance. InterPlay...

Sustaining International Sisters (Global SIS : InterPlay) met on April 24th to celebrate Chiara Pilloton's birthday and wish our Muslim SISters Ramadan Mubarak! Chiara is a SISter living in Rome, Italy, alone and is in her 3rd month of quarantine because of the 2020 Pandemic. In the photo below is Chiara with the "crostata" she baked for herself. Happy Birthday to  Chiara Pilloton  quarantined in Rome, Italy,  on ZOOM!  In attendance for  Chiara's  SIS birthday party were SISters from Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, Mexico, Venezuela, China, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, England, Laos/Thailand and the United States. InterPlay is an amazing way to bring international women together in an environment that is nurturing, supportive and FUN.  And the FUN we had! Yay! We InterPlay "babbled" about birthday related words - cake, cards, ice cream, and parties. We did "I - could - talk -  abouts" on anything related to birthdays pa...

Zoom! Zip! Zam! Eeeeeek! What sound is made when you pretend to lift the lid off the top of your head? Does it pop, crackle, and snap? Maybe it makes that swirling, sizzling and exploding sound of fireworks!  What movement might you make as you open up your mental lid? Does your mental lid need to be unwound? Does it have little windows that need to be unlatched? Or do you have rusty hinges that require special care as you open it? For the April Online Global SIS: InterPlay 2020, Canan Arikan and I invited our international SISters to play around the spaces we create for our minds.   InterPlay  cofounder  Cynthia Winton-Henry  writes about giving the mind more space by taking off your mental lid in her book,  Move: What the Body Wants :   “It turns out that we hold our minds in too-small a physical space, a box the size of a skull. To think outside of the box, you’ve got to let your mind be as big as your bodyspirit. Your mind w...

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 ...

ONLINE CLASS PHOTO. For our final online Total Body Communication class, students were asked to wear hats and sunglasses for a class photo. Here we are! Like magic, we assemble for class, two-dimensional square after square, we build the class body. Students pop-up on screen as if they’ve traveled through a Harry Potter “portkey” or the “Floo Network.” And, they can “disapparate” just as easily either unexpectedly because of a bandwidth failure or purposefully by “cloaking” themselves when they turn off their video cameras. This class is “Better Speaking: Total Body Communication,” and I am the lecturer implementing Applied InterPlay to teach this class for internationals studying English at the Georgia Tech Language Institute. Total Body Communication is about teaching both the whole student body – the individual’s body (mind, heart, body and spirit), and the class community comprised of those student bodies. Can the student body(ies) be engaged online through the ethersphere...

In life, "we are not asked if we will play. That is not an option. Play we must. The option is how." -Anthony De Mello  How will we “play” the ins-and-outs of our lives? We have choices. Daily, I repeat this mantra – WE HAVE CHOICES –   to the international students in my class, "Speaking English Improvisationally," at the Georgia Tech Language Institute. During our 36 hours of class time over a two-month period, we explore how to communicate authentically through improvisation activities. We have within our reach at any moment a vast range of communication options available when speaking in English.  As literally and figuratively “players” on a world stage, I invite these international professionals and students to "play" around with both their physical and vocal range to see what they can discover about who they “might be” when they are speaking English while living and participating in American culture. As most of us know, each language an...

Why teach improvisation in the ESL classroom? I combine both typical improvisation activities and my expertise in InterPlay, which is an active creative improvisational system that unlocks the wisdom of the body, allows the trained educator to do the following: -tap students’ creativity -implement students’ personal material -request a different level of student investment which can be powerful and playful. -involve students in the creative process which is stimulating and health promoting. -allow students to respond to information immediately (current issues, interests, and concerns) -impact students’ lives beyond the classroom by building confidence and personal sense of power and providing skills to deal with the unexpected Here, in this activity,  "The Expert and the Interpreter," international students are engaged in listening to each other - really listening. They are asked to read and attempt to understand the body language of the experts who are speaking in t...