Playtime

Collective Effervescence

2012-01-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Natalie Hunter for offering this guest post about Collective Effervescence. Natalie is based in Seattle and writes for Online Schools. Here she goes...

Collective Effervescence and the Ritual of Play

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, French sociologist Emile Durkheim contributed greatly to the study of people and our relationships in groups. One of the most important theories he contributed was that of collective effervescence, and how it explains the origins of our desire to commune and connect to each other through ritual, play and sacred gatherings. Why is play important, and what role does it have in our adult lives?

History of Collective Effervescence

Before we discuss the rituals of play, let's first understand the meaning of collective effervescence. The most complete definition describes it as a “perceived energy formed by the gathering of people as might be experienced at a religious service, sporting event, carnival or riot.” The presence of this perceived energy makes people behave differently than in their daily lives. Durkheim first outlined the theory of collective effervescence in his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim studied the basis of religion in a tribe of Australian Aborigines and the separation of the everyday work of their lives - the profane - from the sacred rituals they performed together.

thanks to Aboriginal Art Store for the picture

Recent Developments in Collective Effervescence

The experience of collective effervescence has been shown to help us relate to others and create a stronger sense of community and shared purpose, improving mental health. For example, a University of Chicago study gathered evidence suggesting that suicide rates were lower than average among groups who actively shared common beliefs, and pointed to the potential role of collective effervescence through group rituals in this relationship.

Although the theory originally illustrated the purpose and influence of group worship, it also can be stretched more widely to describe the same experiences in group activities and events.

How does a theory about worship and ritual relate to why we play? We share, perhaps, a fundamental need to connect with others, not just in the daily transactions of our lives but also in more profound ways. Many people associate the word play with childhood and do not see a direct correlation or need in our adult lives. A look back at our history, however, finds that people of all ages play, and that play is a form of ritual that taps into a deeper human experience. In her book Deep Play, Diane Ackerman describes play in its purest form as an experience of "collective exaltation," or as rapture or ecstasy. When we play together, having fun in large groups, it brings us joy and makes us feel connected.

thanks to the Autralian Institute for Applied Spiritual Technology for this picture of Kirtan

Consider the massive appeal of team sports across the world. Every fan knows the rules and rituals of the game, and anyone who has ever attended a sporting event can attest to the frenzied high that exists among thousands of cheering and screaming fans.

thanks to The Guardian for the picture

Many adults participate in formal and informal leagues and teams, volunteer groups and/or religious gatherings. The rituals and traditions associated with forms of play like this bond us together in a common experience, one that can transcend the mundane routines of daily life. When people volunteer in a group, whether in building a Habitat for Humanity house or serving in a soup kitchen, they tend to feel connected to the other volunteers and can feel almost giddy afterwards. Other group activities such as workouts like Zumba or Yoga, have the potential to be a place where adults can express themselves through play and experience the joy of collective effervescence.

The famous Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi captured our need for play and ritual when he said "Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." Our society, and our world, functions because of our need to seek the sacred in life – that sense found in the company of others. That desire for the rules and rituals of play, of coming together to experience that collective exaltation, makes our world a better place – and we are better for it.

'Il n'ya pas de mouvement sans rhythm'

2012-01-10T01:41:00.001-08:00

Joy and Sorrow

2012-01-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Rachel Kessler was an author and facilitator.

“As we attempt to invite joy into the [situation],” she writes, “we must always hold these two paradoxes: the coexistence of light and shadow; and the joy that may be intimately associated with pain, fear or even anger. Perhaps the word ‘poignant’ best captures this quality of joy.”

A dig into Kessler’s work and writing reveals compelling ideas and approaches. She’s author of the Soul of Education and founder of the Passageworks Institute that runs social and emotional learning programmes in US schools.

“I don’t think I experienced real joy,” she writes, “until I was 34 years old. ... I knew that from that moment on, my life was about discovering and expanding the joy in my own life and in the people I touch. … In the weeks that followed, the word spirit emerged from my mind. I did not know what it meant, since I had experienced no religious upbringing… My encounter with joy had awakened my spirit.”

When we go into that space of joy and what we might call ‘spirit’, Rachel has found, we often find all sorts of things other than joy.

“If we focus on joy, images of suffering may rear up and even take over. So often when I ask students or teachers to think of a positive story, several are flooded first with sad memories; when I ask students to think of their gratitude, they can remember only what they want to complain about.” (Kessler, Soul of Education, 2000 p73 – 80).

In The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Malidoma Some expresses a similar relationship between joy and sorrow in the Dagara culture of Burkina Faso.

“Villagers gauge the amount of grief that is built up in them by the barometer of their joy. When emotion has been fully unloaded, the rush of joy that fills you up can last for days or weeks. When that feeling of joy subsides, grief is again building up and will soon require another release.”

He argues that we need regular opportunities to release our grief so that we may experience again the joy that resides behind it.

This suggests that joy lives in the heart and soul, tangled up with many other feelings. Practices that open up the heart and soul, by implication, need to be ready to accept and welcome all that may be found there.

By extension, “Joy ok, sadness not allowed” may be a superficial proposition which is neither useful, effective, attractive nor realistic.

Peak Experience

2011-09-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

My boss is interested in peak experience. He wonders if there is a recipe.

"You will search in vain for a Maslovian recipe to create peak experiences," writes life coach and 'philosophical counsellor' Tim Lebon. "The reason is explained in Colin Wilson's New Pathways in Psychology (page 19). Wilson asked Maslow whether you can create peak experiences at will.

"No, Or almost entirely no!", Maslow asserted. " In general, we are "Surprised by Joy".. Peaks come unexpectedly .... You can't count on them. And hunting them is like hunting happiness. c's best not done directly. It comes as a by-product, an epiphenomenon, for instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task you can identify with".

"Colin Wilson thinks the above is only partly true. He thinks they have a structure that can be duplicated (p. 21). The preconditions are energy, vigilance, alertness, preparedness.

"The fact that the full text of Religions, Values and Peak Experiences is to be found in the Psychedelic Library suggests another possible way to have peak experiences ... The current author would suggest that creativity, love, contact with nature, sport, meditation, parenting are other possible sources of peak experiences. There is also a connection worth exploring between peak experiences and flow, and between peak experiences and the writings of Viktor Frankl."

Let's Celebrate 365

2011-09-08T03:02:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Hunter has spent 35 years documenting ancient rituals and festivals in 60 countries. His photographs can be seen in his touring exhibition Let's Celebrate 365.

"Sing-sings in Papua New Guinea form an important part of cultural life as they represent an opportunity for the clans to express their tribal solidarity. I saw the black snake dance performed by the Apenda clan when they attended a sing-sing in Leh, near Morobe." The Guardian

See his website for more.

Rites of Life

2011-09-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

"Everywhere people mark the decisive moments when they pass from one stage in life to another. For more than seven years photographer Anders Ryman has travelled the world documenting such rituals.

"His ambition has been to span all inhabited continents, all major religions and all stages of life, encompassing both the traditional and the modern."

www. ritesoflife.com

Stuart Brown's properties of play

2011-07-28T08:12:00.001-07:00

from Play, p17:

“Properties of play:

Apparently purposeless (done for its own sake)

Voluntary

Inherent attraction

Freedom from time

Diminished consciousness of self

Improvisational potential (“we aren't locked into a rigid way of doing things. We are open to serendipidy, to chance.”)

Continuation desire [it makes you want to do more of it]"

The Fun Fed at Wellbeing in the City

2011-07-05T03:41:00.001-07:00

I don't look this cracked out in the whole thing...

"Storytelling is a God-given gift."

2011-07-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

Listening to the radio on May 18 I heard Jeffrey Archer say:

“Storytelling is a God given gift.”

“But where does that storytelling instinct come from?” The interviewer asked.

“I think that’s God-given. I always say to young people when they say to me, ‘I want to write a book Jeffrey,’ and I say ‘well you have to decide whether you’re a writer, or whether you’re a storyteller. And storytellers - like ballet dancers, and like opera singers, and like painters - it’s a God-given gift. Writing you can do it on a good education, marvelous command of language, good upbringing, that all helps, but storytelling, it’s a gift.”

My ears perked up.

The storyteller is one of Stuart Brown’s player types.

As is the kinaesthete (Archer’s ballet dancer perhaps,)

And the artist creator (Archer’s painter)

And I have added another, The Musician (Archer’s opera singer.)

I am reminded of Brown’s belief that "When people know their core truths and live in accord with what I call their 'play personality,' the result is always a life of incredible power and grace." (Brown, 2009)

I’m not a Christian, but there seems to be a theme between these men’s language; would a life lived in accord with your ‘god-given’ gift not be a life of incredible power and grace?

I think also of the importance of uncovering and living in accordance with your purpose that is central to the spiritual practices of many cultures. (See, for example, Malidoma Some’s account of Dagara ideas around this).

And I think of Bill Plotkin’s writing about the soul.

Are our player types somehow our ‘god given gifts?’ God meaning what you will; that which we come into the world with, the irrepresable well spring of aliveness within us that wants to flow and causes suffering if we try to pave it over.

I interviewed the team last year in an attempt to identify our player types. Each person, when they came to the area about which they were most passionate, used the language of ‘let me’, Let me host, let me sing, let me perform, let me move, let me make you laugh, let me tell you a story.

And I wonder if our player types are somehow our soul’s preferred medium.

In the Fun Fed we think a lot about joy. At the moment we’re thinking about it in terms of softening the controlling part of you – that which tries to ensure success and avoid failure – and making space for the feeling part of you – that which loves, cries, plays, and feels joy.

I tend to call these parts the ‘casing’ and the ‘creature’; others seem to call them the ‘ego’ and the ‘soul.’

So, if our work, ideally, somehow calms the controller and brings out the soul, do our souls speak in different languages and are our play preferences what those languages are??

The preferences are as follows:

Brown’s preferences:

The Storyteller – creates, shares and relishes stories

The Artist / creator – paints, sculpts, cooks, gardens

The Joker – spots and delights in opportunities to create laughter

The Kinaesthete – plays in and through the body

(Brown also identifies The Explorer, The Competitor, The Collector and The Director, but my boss has rejected these as not relevant to the Fun Fed [with some disagreement from the team]).

I’ve added

The peformer – loves to play before an audience

The musician – finds home in sound

The engineer – delights in making and fixing things; precision, physics, timing.

Parents not playing much with kids

2011-07-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

Just stumbled across this article from last year's Guardian. I've edited it right down. The full version is here.

Parents are forgetting how to play with their children, study shows

Family games becoming 'lost art' as survey cites overwork, boredom and generation gap

Amelia Hill
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 August 2010 16.04 BST
Article history

Photograph: Elly Godfroy / Alamy/Alamy

One in five parents say they have forgotten how to play with their children, with a third admitting that taking part in games and activities with their family is boring, according to research.

But while more than half the children questioned for the report by Professor Tanya Byron said they want more quality time with their parents, one in 10 said they know that their parents feel family playtimes are dull and a waste of time.

The State of Play, Back to Basics report interviewed 2,000 parents and 2,000 children aged five to 15 about their play habits. It concludes that play is in danger of becoming a "lost art" for British families, with 21% of parents admitting they no longer remember how to play and struggle to engage their children in creative and imaginative activities that will help their development. ...

"Nearly one in three parents choose to play computer games with their children thinking that's what their kids will most enjoy," said Byron. "However, nine out of 10 children said computer games were something they would rather play on their own, while three-quarters said they would prefer to spend time with their parents enjoying more traditional pursuits, such as challenging each other at board games or playing outdoors together."

Time pressures were also cited by parents, with half of those interviewed blaming work and chores for reducing the amount of quality time they are able to spend with their children. Nearly a third of children said that they were aware that work worries prevented their parents from playing with them.

Play is super important for healthy development during childhood, for wellbeing and fulfilment throughout life, and for the quality of the parent-child relationship.

We should get a move on with our parent-child play workshops.

Play and parenting

2011-07-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

Play, work and creativity

2011-07-01T02:57:00.000-07:00

In the book Play, 2009, Stuart Brown suggests that early play helps us to find our creative preferences:

“If we look at a life over time, and observe the origins of many artistic expressions, they are rooted in early play behaviour that gets encouraged by natural talent and richness of opportunity in the environment. Watch a two-year-old who is drawn to music spontaneously dance to the beat of a summer band concert in the park. Fifteen years later, that kid my be a consummate pianist or just spend hours humming and strumming a guitar. But the draw to rhythm and music were kindled by spontaneous playfulness when the band started playing during that long-ago summer.

The emotions that fostered this embrace of music were not verbal nor a product of thoughts like “I think I'd like to be a musician.” They were prompted by a deeper, more primal process, which I believe Jaak [Panskepp] has captured in his descriptions of processes that link brain stem (movement) to limbic (emotional) to cortex (thought).” p62

“After taking play histories of Nobel laureate scientist Roger Guillemin and polio researcher Jonas Salk, I realized that what they were doing in the laboratory every day was playing.” p63

“The work that we find most fulfilling is almost always a recreation and extension of youthful play.”

(Yup. Personally, I spent half my childhood singing and dancing around the house, garden and nearby woods, and the other half divided between playing with maths, other kids, and looking at the sky or the ceiling and asking questions like, 'I wonder if I can think without language.' My personal and professional life is pretty much the same now. Less maths.)

“If we let the play drive express itself well into adulthood, as we are built to do, we find opportunities to play everywhere.” p70

I see an example of this!

1989:

(neck brace was probably due to characteristic physical jumping around recklessly)

2009:

(there's a piano there you just can't see it)

Notes from Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch

2011-07-01T02:32:00.000-07:00

“There is an old Sanskrit word, Lila, which means play. Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction and re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos. Lila, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of God. It also means love.” p1

“Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisors are like priests; they are thinking only of their god.” Stephane Grappelli, quoted on p4

“I am a musician. One of the things I love best is to give totally improvised solo concerts on violin and viola.... My experience of playing in this way is that 'I' am not 'doing something'; it's more like a following, or taking dictation.”

“There is the story of one of Bach's pupils asking him, 'Papa, how do you ever think of so many tunes?' to which Bach replied, 'My dear boy, my greatest difficulty is to avoid stepping on them when I get up in the morning.' And there is Michelangelo's theory of sculpture: The statue is already in the stone, has been in the stone since the beginning of time, and the sculptor's job is to see it and release it by carefully scraping away the excess material.” p4

He explores questions of how “inspiration of any kind arises within us, how it may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life, and how it is finally liberated – how we are finally liberated – to speak or sing, write or paint, with our own authentic voice. Such questions lead us directly into territory where many religions and philosophies, as well as the actual experience of practicing artists, seem to converge.” p5

“Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.” p10

“In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is a journey into the soul.” p11

“Our subject (play) is inherently a mystery. It cannot be fully expressed in words, because it concerns the deep preverbal levels of spirit.” p12

“...the prerequisites of creation are playfulness, love, concentration, practice, skill, using the power of limits, using the power of mistakes, risk, surrender, patience, courage and trust.”

“And the struggle, which is guaranteed to take a lifetime, is worth it. It is a struggle that generates incredible pleasure and joy. Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those imperfect attempts is an occasion for delight unlike anything else on earth.”

“The creative process is a spiritual path.”

“As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business; I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business.” p21

“Being, acting, creating in the moment without props and supports, without security, can be supreme play, and it can also be frightening, the very opposite of play.”

“What, then, is this seemingly endless stream of music, dance, imagery, acting, or speech that comes out of us whenever we let it?... Spiritual traditions the world over are full of references to this mysterious juice: ch'i in China and ki in Japan (embodying the great Tao in each individual); kundalini and prana in India: mana in Polynesia; orende and manitu among the Iroquois and Algonquins; axe among the Afro Brazilian condomble cults; baraka among the Sufis in the Middle East; Elan vial on the streets of Paris. The common theme is that the person is a vessle or conduit through which a transpersonal force flows. That force can be enhanced through practice and discipline of various sorts; it can become blocked or bottled up through neglect, poor practice or fear; it can be used for good or evil; it flows through us, yet we do not own it; it appears as a principle factor in the arts, in healing, in religion.” p33

“...everything in nature arises from the power of free play sloshing against the power of limits.” p33

“Play is always a matter of context. It is not what we do, but how we do it. Play cannot be defined, because in play all definitions slither, dance, combine, break apart, and recombine. The mood of play can be impish or supremely solemn.” p43

“...this is the evolutionary value of play – play makes us flexible. By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid.” p43

Joy, temperance and repose...

2011-05-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

"Joy, temperance and repose
slam the door on the doctor's nose."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whoever he was, quoted by Art of Play workshop facilitator Ann Theato

True play is the greatest medicine

2011-05-11T06:43:00.001-07:00

"True play is the greatest medicine: it keeps us young at heart, fresh in mind, healthy in body and youthful in spirit."

- Leo Rutherford

photo from the fun fed

Clown Society

2011-05-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

"Clown society is a term used in anthropology and sociology for an organization of comedic entertainers (Heyoka or "clowns") who have a formalized role in a culture or society."

Sometimes clown societies have a sacred role, to represent a trickster character in religious ceremonies.^{[citation needed]} Other times the purpose served by members of a clown society is only to parody excessive seriousness, or to deflate pomposity.^{[citation needed]}

In the sense of how clowns serve their culture:^{[citation needed]}

A clown shows what is wrong with the ordinary way of doing things.
A clown shows how to do ordinary things the wrong way.

Members of a clown society may dress in a special costume reserved for clowns, which is often a ridiculously extreme or improper form of normal dress.^{[citation needed]}]

While in their costume, clowns have special permission from their society to parody or criticize defective aspects of their own culture. They are always required to be funny. Other persons living within the same culture may recognize a clown when they see one, but seldom consciously understand what the clowns do for their society. The typical explanation is "He's just a funny man."^{[citation needed]}

In the case of the jester at the English Royal Court with his cap of bells and pig's bladder stick he was allowed to make fun of, be indelicate and sometimes downright rude to members of the royal family and their entourage without fear of reprisal.

Clown societies usually train new members to become clowns. The training normally takes place by an apprentice system, although there may be some rote schooling as well.^{[citation needed]} Sometimes the training is improvisational comedy, but usually a clown society trains members in well known forms of costume, pantomime, song, dance, and common visual gags. Occasionally these include a scripted performance, or skit, which is part of a standard repertoire that "never gets old," and is expected by members of the culture that the clown society is part of.

In Native North America. humor assumes "a sacred position within ceremonials"^[4]; examples are found in Trickster traditions, Pueblo clown societies,Cherokee "Booger" dances, and aspects of the Northwest Coast Potlatch.^[5] Humor is a fundamental aspect of Native American life, and has many purposes related to sacred rituals and social cohesion.^[5]

Source: wikipedia

Bonobos, play and surviving the future

2011-03-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

Isabel Behncke says:

“Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives.

“Play is not just child’s games. For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. It’s where we learn to trust, and where we learn about the rules of the game. Play increases creativity and resilience.

“When you watch bonobos playing, you are seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. Play is the glue that binds us together.”

“Play both requires trust and fosters trust, while at the same time being tremendous fun.

“We sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and outer worlds.

“[In our future], we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. In other words, play is our adaptive wild card; in order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play.”

Play and Games

2011-02-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

“”Play” is different from “game”. Play is the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for its own pure joy. Game is an activity defined by a set of rules, like baseball, sonnet, symphony, diplomacy. Play is an attitude, a spirit, a way of doing things, whereas game is a defined activity with rules and a playing field and participants. It is possible to engage in games like baseball or the composing of fugues as play; it is also possible to experience them as lila (divine play), or as drudgery, as bids for social prestige, or even as revenge.”

Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch, p43

Huizinga's Characteristics of Play

2011-02-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

From Wikipedia, quoting from Huizinga's Homo Ludens: The Play Element of Culture (1938)

I'm trying to decide whether to read this book.

From wikipedia's synopsis it looks like Huizinga's core idea here is that culture itself plays; the dynamics of culture are play; culture is a kind of aliveness at play.

I LOVE lindy :)

2010-11-12T12:03:00.001-08:00

The Return of Swing from emily jeal on Vimeo.

Street Training

2010-09-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

I went Street Training in Hoxton last night with artist Lottie Child and assorted trainees. It was great.

Really spacious, unbounded fun and play. By the end I felt relaxed, expansive and somehow clean.

She taught us what a five year old had taught her about how to play and be joyful in the street.

And then we were off.

My favourite bits were the bicycle bell orchestra, where half the group played rhythms on the bells of bicycles locked up to a bike rack while the others danced, and the welcoming committee, where four people did a kind of swaying dance on one edge of a zebra crossing, while a man crossed over towards them. Upon arriving he looked at them strangely. One of the dancers opened her arms: "Welcome to this side of the pavement!"

Tribe of Doris is the best fun in the world

2010-08-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

It really is.

Go next year.

It's really very hard to put into words why it's so great. But it is. Doris . Usually mid August.

"a new role for the artist?"

2010-06-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

Just opened a wonderful book, new ground lost seeds, with a passage by John Fox.

"...it could be useful to lay down the initial ground rules of a culture which may be less materially based but where more people will actively participate and gain the power to rejoice in moments that are wonderful and significant. These could be where more people grow and cook their own food and maybe build their own houses, name their children, bury their dead, marking anniversaries, creating new spaces for new ceremonies, and producing whatever drama, stories, songs, rituals, images, pageants and jokes that are relevant to re-discovered values."

"In such a context the artist would become facilitator and fixer, celebrant and stage manager, a visionary linking the past and the future, and a shamanic poet, the revelator of what used to be called spiritual energy."

Me! Me! I say aloud, still half through the door, the book just out of its envelope. I've had a strong sense since doing Malidoma Some's element rituals that what my singing is all about is ritual. Somehow. Don't know how. Yet. But somehow this Brionyness that I am is profoundly oriented towards contributing to that.

"Equally of course this kind of artist would also acknowledge the artist in us all and offer testament to the innate creativity recurring in every generation and every community where the intuitive is given freedom."

Yes! Exactly! Me me me! My friend Camilo took a quote I band around and put it on a picture.

Here's a picture of Camilo last weekend. Yep, the guy on the left is Bobby McFerrin. Camilo is now even more my hero than he was last week. Bobby of course remains one of my uber-heroes. And now perhaps John Fox too. He's definitely entered the short list.

And what is play about but "giving the intuitive freedom"?

Nice quote.

2010-05-20T01:23:00.001-07:00

"The most effective way to achieve right relations with any living thing is to look for the best in it, and then help that best into the fullest expression."

- Allen J Boone

I hate healing

2010-05-19T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from a trip to the states. It was my third research trip there. I always come back from that country with pockets bulging with useful finds.

There's a booming 'healing' industry in the US, particularly in California. A lot of the fun things I've been to have been in this category.

I hate the notion of healing. It implies that we are wounded, broken. Imperfect, sub-optimal, bad, needing Work to make ourselves acceptable, normal, good, perfect.

Perhaps acceptable is the key word there.

I spent four days at a Zen Buddhist Monastary in the mountains of New York State, fighting with Buddhist monks who were trying to force me to wake up at 4.30am every morning (1.30am on the San Francisco time my body was on) and meditate for 2 hours, and not do any yoga. I had a good old fight with them and I think we both won in the end.

But acceptance is Buddhism 101. From acceptance grows love, or at least, acceptance makes love possible.

The US has a stronger culture of perfection than we do in the UK. Whether it's about Hollywood or a purer form of Capitalism ('you're not quite perfect - buy more stuff and you will be!') I'm not sure. Ask an American how they are and they'll typically say, "Great!" Aks a Brit and you might get "not too bad." In other words, "I'm bad of course, we all are, but I'm not too bad, not bad enough to stop working functionally, don't worry, carry on."

For all the perfection presented to us on screens and pages of all sorts, the human reality is one of far, far less perfection. "Take a look around this room," I said to an American friend in a conversation on the topic. "Ain't nobody (humm I do sometimes take a little of the vernacular when I'm over there...) in this room that looks, speaks, thinks, feels and acts perfectly all the time." We looked around at the overweight, pasty, pockmarked, motley crew in our diner and that seemed very clear.

In the UK we don't seem to have such a culture of perfection, or - perhaps as a result - of 'healing.' We seem instead to have a culture of 'love the grit' and 'Personal Development.'

I like this. I like the idea that we are where we are, and we accept that. Any effort that we put into the quality of our own beings might be called personal development - developing onwards from where we are now, even though where we are now is perfectly acceptable.

Acceptable - and so loveable.

But - but - yesterday I started to feel that there is perhaps something in this healing notion.

I arrived back at Heathrow on monday feeling like a different person.

I've had a back to back series of full on, great fun, and sometimes profound experiences. I've cried about ten times, shouted loud in anger (very unusual for me - I blame the raging fire I was instructed to shout into, with two more big fires on either side of me), laughed a lot, felt joyous, confused, and honestly, in love with quite a few people and groups in quite a few different ways.

Day 1 (I won't go through all the days) started with a Bodytales session with Olivia Carson. I was in a pair with a beautiful French Californian woman. "Name a body part, and a sensation," instructed Oliva, "and then improvise with sound and movement from there." My partner went first. She stretched forward thoughtfully on the floor where we were lounging, and then said seductively: "Yoni... Vibrating."

My British ass was shocked to the wall and it took all my energy not to raise my eyebrows and stretch my eyes open like golfballs as she proceded into a tender and beautiful sound and movement improvisation spattered with words about pleasure, pain, safety, protection, childhood, risk, and courage.

Next it was my turn. I started far more safely with the piece of skin between my eyebrows, and tension. Whilst playing with the wall and doing handstands and stuff, my small voice in my tummy seemed to gain direct access to my mouth and started to talk about creature and casing. Creature being the tender singing soul in your tummy that loves; Casing being the protective business woman that keeps the creature away from harm, faces the world boldly and Gets Stuff Done.

It became a theme of my trip. The possibility of living in your creature seemed to arise. Here we get tender and I get cautious about writing more.

What is the casing, I thought as I wandered into Waitrose on monday dazed, jetlagged and undefended to restock my fridge - what is casing but a bunch of scar tissue that has come up to protect the tender creature?

That was the only perspective from which this popular American notion of 'healing' seemed to make sense.

If it is possible to live primarily in your creature rather than hiding in your casing... If healing is about mending the wounds and scar tissue that cover your creature up...

I get uncomfortable with these ideas now I'm reacclimatising to British culture. A barrage of protestations and anxiety about the development of a culture where people are endlessly talking at length about their own shit comes up.

But I'll tell you this.

In three weeks of full-time playing-for-a-living, with four days off for a bit of goatherding in the hills above Big Sur (Amazing - I've found my calling...) - my casing thinned and my creature strengthened. And I seemed to develop all these amazing connections with people; was told frequently how much people liked "my energy" and my presence; I faced a bunch of ugly issues in myself and they all came out of a deep pocket in my heart like a troupe of scraggy teenagers who'd been caught and lined up and presented themselves to me and explained what they were all about and we talked and they gradually seemed to dissolve or shower or move on or something, and I found myself loving as much or in some ways perhaps more than I have ever done in my life.

"Play makes love," I wrote in an email to the team one delicate morning. "...play is beautiful. Play is magical. Play is potent. Between couples, friends, families and strangers, play makes love."

Maybe it's the way that it thins the casing and brings the creature to the fore, or quietens the ego and amplifies the soul, or repositions the truth lines so they're wider apart and lots of truth that was in the hidden peripheries now comes into the sharable territory between the two lines, or repositions the lines of acceptable self-expression so that you can do more before a person than sit and speak in order to communicate - you can do a handstand, climb up the windows, wiggle and shake, scream and jump, shout and cry.

Writing this from well-behaved London it sounds scary and weird and hippy and dangerous and threatening.

But experiencing it as a free traveller in the states, it felt that way sometimes too to be honest - but the challenging rumble into the strong concrete of my casing did something to me.

Our work continues.

Ok my favourite bits were:

Theatre Games with the wonderful Paula Shaw
Ecstatic Dance in Oakland
the incredible Jejune Institute on 580 California Street, San Francisco. Don't google it, just go if you're ever there, sometime Tuesday - Saturday before about 2.30pm, go to the 16th floor and say you're there for "the induction"...
Dance Jam in Berkeley
Vocal Playgroup with Aharon Wheels Bolsta
the Water Ritual with Malidoma Some
Being a goatherd
Hanging out on Charlie's off-grid farm with No Motors or Electricity
and little bits of everything else.

Hurrah for California :)

Play and self-expression

2010-05-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Is play a form of self expression? A time when you let rather than try.

Could our play preferences be thought of as our preferred routes of self expression, me through singing and movement, her through stories; him through making things?

Does play allow a broader range of behavioural possibilities through which you can express yourself?

I feel a need for spaces where I can move, sound and speak in unconventional, free, expressive, true and unpredictable ways, free from judgement.

Where are those spaces?

In Berkeley I found myself crying and dancing secretly in a big disabled toilet in the cinema, secretly on the dark quiet backroads on my bike, a secret bicycle dance dressed with my tears

I had no home.

Improv Everywhere

2010-04-20T08:03:00.001-07:00

Player Types and Celebration

2010-03-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

I'm doing some work on play preferences and I haven't drawn conclusions yet.

But it looks like play preferences are dotted randomly around the population and are to some degree innate.

So in any given group of people you will have musicians, dancers, artists/creators, storytellers, jokers, directors and so on.

And between them, as I suggested in the previous post, they have all that is needed to create a fantastic celebration.

It helps, I guess, if people are able to know and develop their play preferences in life.

And it also helps, I guess, if tradition sets a backdrop for what to do, so that you don't have to start from scratch every time.

Christmas and Player Types

2010-03-23T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Artist/Creators gather and make decorations; the wreaths, the ball-balls and streamers, the holly and ivy and mistletoe, the table decorations and candle decorations and long shiney lametta. Not to mention the costumes and food...

The Performers and Jokers get together to prepare the pantomimes.

The Musicians prepare and lead the singing; they provide the fiddles and the bells, pipes and drums.

The Kinaesthetes prepare and lead the dancing.

The Storytellers create the magic in the tiredness of the night around the winter fire.

The Directors make it all come together.

The Explorers come home, most years, bringing newness with them.

Let's make up some dances.

2010-03-23T03:15:00.000-07:00

Notes from my Brazil notebook...

On the telly I’m seeing the Forro and Frevo processions, the Afoxe and Maracutu, the tribal and the samba.

They’ve all got dances! Songs, rhythms and dances that are theirs. We don’t have dances. Let’s make some dances! Let’s make them up! Let’s get people who can do that kind of thing to make them up! And then do them again at special times.

Christmas dances. “Tomorrow will be my dancing day” - What dance was that? I’d like to dance at Christmas. Let’s find or make Christmas dances!

(Muito obrigada a Luciana Cavalcanti para o foto)

The Engineer who ran away with the circus

2010-03-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

We ran away with the circus for a day on Saturday and identified a new player type: the Engineer.

Circus performers are engineers. They play with physics, forces, angles, distances, timing, in an incredibly precise way. Engineers like puzzles, spatial and strategic challenges, tight rules, having to work precisely within the rules in order to achieve something. I think Engineers probably like Achieving something.

Circus lovers are also Kinaesthetes, who love to be in their bodies, and Performers, who delight at their moment before an audience.

So if your child is a kinaesthete, performer and engineer, watch out, they may well run away with the circus.

Strangely, I was then sent a link to this fun blog this morning, about the Engineer who ran away with the circus.

Personally I like the look of the 'Caterpillar...'

Fasting and Feasting

2010-03-15T04:30:00.000-07:00

I've been finding fasting and feasting fun.

I did my first fast last summer after I met a man who told me all about his fasting, and it felt like what I needed. Following his model, I just took water and green tea for two days.

I felt great.

Since then I've been doing a one day fast about once a month, and loving it. It makes me feel clean and simple. It seems to dissolve a hard cast of crap and niggles that seem to grow up around me.

Just looked it up on wikipedia, to discover a big bunch of health benefits associated with it, and to learn that fasting is a core part of Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism (funny though, when for a Hindu or Muslim a fast tends to mean no food, liquid, smoking or sex, for a Catholic it's limiting your food consumption to one big meal and two small meals in a day with no snacks...), the Bahai faith, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and an observant follower of Judaism will fast for 6 days a year.

So, in atheist western culture I guess people generally don't fast, or only fast to lose weight.

But there's something very beautiful about it when it's not about weight loss.

Humm..

Tom Hodgkinson on fun

2010-03-11T03:10:00.000-08:00

"When competition is kept in the realm of play, then it is fun, completely pointless and enjoyed for its own sake. Who, for example, would want to give up playing darts, snooker and croquet? Games are ancient and they are fun. Thirteenth-century Catalan courts, for example, loved games and would throw oranges at each other for days on end. There is a wonderful description quoted by Linda M. Paterson in her study The World of the Troubadours:

"...[The admiral's] sailors had two armed boats prepared, the flat-bottomed kind that go up river. On these you could see orange battles taking place; they had a good fifty tree-loads sent from the kingdom of Valencia ... The celebrations lasted more than a fortnight, during which time no man in Saragossa did anything but sing and make merry and play games and enjoy himself."

How to be free p86-7

Big thanks to Fun Fever for the photos

Under Water Rock Out

2010-02-28T05:14:00.000-08:00

An AMAZING night last night

They put a big floating stage in the sea about 100m from the shore.

A band started playing and people started stripping off, jumping in the water and swimming out. My friends had come to the beach without their swimming things, a form of self-torture to my mind, so I left them and joined the dancers in the water.

It was blinding. Two reasons I think.

Firstly, there's no precedent for under water dance moves, so you just move instinctively any way you want. You're free.

Secondly, no one can see you. I loved this part. You can shimmy and shake all you want, and it doesn't matter an iota what you look like. I probably looked like the love child of a spastic alien and a mermaid, but who cared? Not me.

Thirdly, you're also dancing with nature. It sounds hippy but it's ace. The sea has its own ideas about where your body is going, and you have to dance with that too. You are dancing with the sea. Under the full moon and beautiful wispy clouds going past.

Ok, one more, you're weightless.

As the set went on the band heated up and we water dancers got more and more wild, till the singer was rampaging round the stage like Dionysus, the guitarist was doing a solo in an almost complete back bend, and we water dancers were hitting and kicking the water like crazy to create a massive, splashy, collective climax.

Amazing.

Samba De Roda

2010-02-28T05:04:00.000-08:00

Samba de Roda totally rocks. "De Roda" means in a circle; it´s samba singing, dancing, drumming and music playing without any audience, everyone involved. Videos to come soon. I´m going to see if we can find it in / bring it to England.

Sydney

2010-02-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

I met Sydney on my first night here in Salvador.

The night was electric. Magnificent.

I´d taken my first five steps into town with some brandnew friends when, as if from nowhere, appeared a funky band of female drummers marching through the streets, wiggling and banging out fantastic rhythms. My new friends and I, grinning ear to ear with the delight of finding this place and each other and the music and the fantastic chayasa bar we´d just come from, after whatever miseries we´d all just left behind, started Boogying On Down.

"Eh you dance good" said Sydney, appearing out of nowhere, dancing artfully beside me. "You come my Samba classes," he said, "I teach you good." He grinned and boogied away down the street, revealing his Dance school name and email address on the back of his t-shirt.

I can spot a potential great facilitator a mile off and he was one. He had the perfect fun fed energy.

Well, sir, I thought quitely to myself, You´ve just talked to the right person.

The night rampaged on in an explosion of magnificence generally involving wonderful people, wonderful music, wonderful dancing.

I bumped into Sydney again later and we ran around town, high as kites from each other´s energy, Samba dancing here there and everywhere, him teaching me this and that, everyone staring at these two larger than life balls of energy rampaging around town.

...

I´ve been trying to go to his classes and it turns out they don´t exist. I asked him for the email address on his shirt the next day, and it turns out it´s not his. He speaks better English by a long way than other potential facilitators I´ve met here, but he can´t read or write, I´ve realised. Many people here can´t.

He was messing me around with info about classes so I made what I realied is a professional mistake and came straight out with what I wanted and why. "I´m here to make connections with amazing people," I said. "Maybe you could come over for a month and teach dance in England. Maybe. But Sydney, I need to see you teach a class. When are you teaching a class?"

That night I saw him lead the dancing in a big procession through town. They do this great thing here where three or four dancers stand in a line at the front doing some simple repetetive moves that the crowd copies and it is GREAT fun. He was fab. "Come see my dance school!" he said afterwards, and I followed him to a tiny favella room, his home, where he sleeps on a thin matress on the floor. "Sydney, this isn´t a dance school," I said. "Yes! Yes! I teach samba here...."

Jesus, I think. This guy´s probably on crack. I´ve got a good instinct for people and I can tell he´s good. I´ve no need to fear. But by this point I´ve 98% rejected Sydney as a person to work with because he´s not always honest and it would clearly be just too difficult to work with him. But that aside, we´ve become friends and I want to help him a little bit.

His friend Macambira has a little drum school I´m going to in a minute. Macambira has an A6 piece of paper with his weekly class schedule printed on it, B&W, nothing special, but it does the job.

"Why don´t you have one of these?" I asked Sydney just now. "I don´t have the money", he said. It´t not really that, though, I think; it´s because he´s illiterate and he hasn´t figured out how to get around that barrier yet. "I could make one for you," I said. "But I need the information about when and where you teach. Can you find a consistent place and time, and let me know, and I´ll make you a flyer if you want."

He looks down, and then tells me that his classes don´t work because he doesn´t have a stereo and people like to dance to music. He can´t afford a stereo. He can´t afford cards and can´t pay rent on an indoor dance space. His face turns darker and his honesty gets deeper and he tells me he hasn´t eaten for three days. He rants about the economic situation behind the happy faces for tourists and how fucking hard life is here.

It´s clearly, famously true.

He reveals a totally fatalistic attitude about the lack of opportunity and support here. I´m struggling to figure out the chicken and egg relationship between his attitude and his situation.

And the entrepreneur in me starts roaring.

People, everywhere, somehow create projects out of nothing. I´ve seen it all over Brazil and India. I´ve done it once and I´m preparing to do it again. It´s fucking hard but if you are worthy of people´s trust, if you are doing something good, you´ll find what you need and you´ll make it happen.

I tell him as much. "You´re letting yourself down with your own attitude," I say. "This city is full of spaces and stereos. If you´re good to people they will lend them to you. If you tell the truth people will trust you. If you believe you can make things work you can make them work. But you don´t believe you can make them work and so they don´t work. Even here, right now, you´ve got an offer of free flyers, and you don´t believe it´s possible, so it´s not going to happen."

It develops into a passionate argument in a garbled mince of English and Portuguese about possibility, attitude and context.

Until I walked away.

I´m leaving the day after tomorrow.

And at some point in the mean time, I´m going to try to find out what it the Salvadorean equivalent of Grameen bank, The Hub, Unltd, the things that make it possible for people with nothing but talent to create something from their talent, like the organisations who have made my career possible, and if they don´t exist here, I´m going to wonder aloud why the hell they don´t.

:)

2010-02-28T04:54:00.001-08:00

I recommend friday nights in Salvador, Bahia, and staying at the Centro Cultural do Bispo

I'm done hunting fun

2010-02-19T12:23:00.001-08:00

Holi morning in India was one of the most fun mornings of my life. I didn't look for it. It found me.

I’m done fun hunting.

Fun hunting is no fun, no fun at all. You find simply the absence of fun 97% of the time, hang out with people who are far less fun than your real mates, work in a language so unfamiliar if feels like you’re trying to walk through solid air every day, sweltering heat, everything unfamiliar, all the time.

I’m going to change tack totally.

I’m here a month. For the first two weeks I’ve been working hard, almost incessantly, feeling a pressure to not let people down, to come up with the goods. So I’ve been looking very actively for, to over-simplify, fun. And I don’t think I’ve ever had so little fun in my life.

So for the next two weeks I’m going to try Not Trying to have fun. For he who ties himself to a joy does it’s winged life destroy. Happiness By the Way. And all that.

I’m going to buy a bloody guitar, (I was a fool to come away without an instrument), work on another project entirely, get near to a beach again, and if I stumble across any fun at all, well then I do, and that’s the way it’s always been before, and if I don’t, then speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

The End.

Holi festival, India

2010-02-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

I'm not in India. But the last post made me think of it.

Holi is super fun. A city-scale colour and water fight. Thanks to the good people via flickr for pics

What Candomble is like

2010-02-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Ceremony was in two parts.

The first part of the ceremony was a lot like the Sufi Zikhr I did in California; a proscribed and precise sequence of small, repetitive, rhythmic movements that everyone does together in form and formation, to live music played by people who are also committed participants. No-one has to make any creative decisions. It’s not about any individual. The individual is consumed within the group, which together becomes consumed, ideally, by spirit.

After the first part everyone went and had a jolly good meal, I made some friends and relaxed (having made an entrance like a giant 100 watt lightbulb that set everyone blinking, a foot taller and seven shades lighter than any woman in the room). The friends were an English speaking (yippee!) young Swiss woman who’d grown up in Brazil, and a young Brazilian journalism student approaching her initiation into the Candomble community where she was not to be a Marie Santos, it was already decided, but something else, probably one of the women who looks after the MS trance dancers, wiping their brows, fixing their costumes continuously like fussy mothers… As part of her development into Candomble she’d had to spend two periods of 21 days alone in a bare room with food brought to her, to cleanse her. The worst thing about it, she said, writhing on her seat in an expression of unbearable frustration and desire, was going for 21 days without making love… for a Brazilian, unthinkable!

And then we all went back in for the second part, which was more like the Theyyam rituals they do throughout northern Kerela, India, in December and January. Some people (in this case usually about three men) get to have a pretty wild dance while everyone else watches and then has contact with them afterwards to soak up and perhaps communicate with the spirit that they've channeled through the dancing.

Candomble 2

2010-02-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

I think that something between 50 and 90% of the ‘trance’ states I witnessed last night were some kind of performance, created by expectation, pressure and necessity.

It works like this: some men (chosen men?) drum. Chosen women dance. No-one in the whole community apart from the chosen women ever dances publicly, I’m told. The chosen women are called ‘Marie Santos’. Candomblistas (all or some, I don’t know), live in compounds around the Terreiros, their churches. The communities are deeply hierarchical, with a kind of King and Queen who sat in thrones last night and held most of the ceremony. The Queen / Matriarch identifies which women in the community should become Marie Santos, sometimes before they are born. It takes 7 years to prepare to be a MarieSantos (MS), the youngest of whom are therefore 7 years old.

Marie Santos’ are, I am told, sensitive to spirit and quite good at getting into trances. This is useful because the Orixas (Candomble Gods) have a profound impact on how your life works out, if you’re into them, and you mainly connect with the Orixas through the Marie Santos’ – their energy, words and actions when they’re in a possession trance, and their ability to interpret shells thrown in divination.

Once you’re a Marie Santos, you’re a Marie Santos, and you’re not anything else. You might marry and bear Children, if the Orixas say so, or be celibate, if they say so, but basically it’s up to them once you’re a MS.

Economically, the communities appear to depend entirely upon the MSs, for they generate income through divinations for those interested in their own destinies, and various acts of healing.

All this is to say, when you’ve been trained to be a Marie Santos for 7 years, and that’s your place on this earth, and your community depends on you, and your trance is the way of showing that you’re fit for the job… When it’s time to get into a trance (and it’s a specific point in the ceremony), you bloody well act like you’re in a trance, trance or no trance.

Acting like you’re in trance, as far as I could see last night, involves dancing like you really feel the music, keeping your eyes closed, rocking when the music’s stopped to keep the energy going, and making loud noises from time to time. And occasionally kind of flopping or rolling around.

People like the loud noises. (This comes up again and again and again in the stuff I look into. People LOVE making loud noises. They design them into proceedings at every given opportunity, and if not, they just get pissed and do it anyway.)

If you’re not dancing, you’re probably singing, and you get to do this loud too and have a good old yell at the climax at the end where everybody just basically makes as much noise as possible while the dancers go totally wild.

The lack of freedom in the lives of the MSs feels pretty shocking to my liberal mind, but thinking about it, the alternatives aren’t much more palatable in this provincial economy; look after the kids, cook and clean; work in a shop, restaurant or maybe the bank; for the bright few, work in public services like education, health and local government, and still look after the kids and do all the cooking and cleaning.

So being a bit special and wearing fantastic dresses and getting to boogie like a raver to wicked rhythms probably isn’t a bad end, all in all.

I don’t know what the men who aren’t drummers do. There were six drummers last night, in two shifts of three (it’s intense). (About 40 or so Marie Santos). A handful of men wore ceremonial clothes and sat in the corner being generally encouraging. One of them was a trannie.

The rest stood around the edge in the men’s area (I stood on the other side with the women), holding their hands out to the dancers like you would to a fire, to kind of soak up the vibes. And also, I guess, to say, I'm in, count me in on these shenanigans (and please feed me).

At the end of their bit the dancers go around and hug everyone to share the vibes.

What with dancers and watchers and helpers, the room was totally packed with people crowding at the windows. In a tiny, tiny village in the middle of nowhere, over 130km from the nearest city.

Candomble 1

2010-02-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

One Candomble Ceremony later... my observations and reflections, in no particular order

1. Candomble is heavy.

2. The drumming is fantastic. Very odd sometimes, very strange. But it peaks artfully.

The peak is led by the increasing pace, volume and, importantly, complexity of the rhythms.

I’ve been to ecstatic dance sessions, like Urubu, where the drummers try to create a peak by drumming harder and faster. It doesn’t work. The rhythms must also develop.

(Ha! Just had my first proper laugh with a Brazilian. [Feels like I’m describing an interaction with a pubic hair style]. It’s cheered me up no end. Travelling alone in a town where literally no-one speaks your language, and you can’t speak theirs well enough to joke with them, is totally rubbish. Rosie, the café lady at the bus stand café, and me just had a real joke, of which I was of course the butt, don’t mind, cracked us both up, nice.)

Back to last night... I shared a cab home with the drummer, 2am, wide awake. He was in his twenties, had been playing / studying drumming for 17 years, now he only plays for Candomble, and that’s all he does. It’s a total skill.

I wonder who in the UK can create rhythms and peaks like that, on drums made out of materials that resonate with our insides rather than our temples – wood and skin, not snare drums. I’d like to find them.

Shinto, God and Entertainment

2010-02-18T07:47:00.000-08:00

I've just stumbled across Shinto, the main Japanese religion, that sounds very pagan. Kagura is the name of Shinto dance - think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

thanks to tinonthewing for the pic

Kagura is an artistic expression of the Shinto religion. In Japanese, the term is written with two ideograms, suggesting the concepts of “God(s)” and “Entertainment”. (London theatre blog)

We're in the process of rebranding the Fun Fed. We're doing some deep soul searching about what we're actually about.

I think we're very different to Shinto and Kagura. We're participatory not performative, playful not perfectionist. But there's a thread of connection.

Before, (before before), entertainment, spirituality, and healing were not separate. Now they're largely separate in the UK.

Kagura brings together "God" and "Entertainment". I wonder if we somehow do that too.

Wikipedia says that the Shinto, or 'kami-no-michi', concept of God is fairly animist:

"Kami are defined in English as "spirit", "essence" or "deities", that are associated with many understood formats; in some cases being human like, some animistic, others associated with more abstract "natural" forces in the world (mountains, rivers, lightning, wind, waves, trees, rocks). It may be best thought of as "sacred" elements and energies. Kami and people are not separate, they exist within the same world and share its interrelated complexity.^[2]"

Hummmm.

Candomble

2010-02-18T06:49:00.000-08:00

Farewell Recife. Thank you for all you have taught me.

I’m on a bus to a small town called Cachoeira. I’ll arrive in about 20 hours I think.

Cachoeira is reputed to be the soul of the Brazilian Candomble religion, the place where the practice is at its purest and most intense.

(thanks emilio for the pic)

I’m going in the hope that Candomble can teach me something about peaks.

I have found no peaks in Carnaval.

Graham, my boss, wants peaks.

I like peaks.

European festivities lost their peaks, says Barabara my historical oracle, when they lost their original ‘ritual’ form, were kicked out of the new Christian churches, and turned into more secular 'festivities' in the streets and taverns.

Candomble remains a ritual form, with music and dancing that goes on late into the night until dancers reach ecstatic trances which are felt and reported to be divine.

thanks Jucafil for the pic

“Sure, it’s a practice of collective joy,” Jon Hardeman told me when I called, “but no-one would ever call it that, no-one would ever say it’s about the joy." Jon's a British musician and a Candomble initiate. "It’s about a social get-together, it’s about cultural preservation, it’s about feeling a pure connection, to nature, to yourself, to the community, to spirit. Historically it was about African slaves brought to Brazil preserving their animist religious practices by cloaking them in Catholic regalia, allowing them to come together and support each other without the slave masters breaking it up."

(thanks judester for the pic)

Julianne, My German friend, is scared of Candomble she says, for it seems too foreign, too intense.

I think Graham, my boss, is looking for something intense.

His thinking is always, if he wants it, probably other people do too.

He wants to run around and be silly and free and let it all go.

But when that’s all it is, he’s not satisfied.

He wants a feeling of spiritual upliftment as well, and a peak.

I'm hoping Candomble, and the small Bahian town of Cachoeira, can teach us something about that.

Maybe Capitalism and fun don't mix

2010-02-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

The issue is the ratio of fun producers to fun consumers.

Capitalist fun likes a ratio of like 1:1000, or 1:1,000,000. Madonna is the capitalist funster’s dream: One singer, a creative team of a few hundred or so all things considered, and a paying audience of millions upon millions. Sweet.

In the kind of fun I’m looking for, consumers are their own producers. I’ve come to summarize it to people with hand movements. Mainstream entertainment takes the broadcast model: (I span my hands outwards like they’re pretending to be headlights): the entertainment is on a stage and broadcasts the fun to the passive audience.

The Fun Fed specializes in ‘generative entertainment’, I say, thinking that I need a better word than that and making a circular bowl shape with my hands. The people in the room create the fun with and for themselves.

I tried to get into Carnaval spirit last night, I really tried. I drunk a bunch of neat white rum on ice with my friends, danced and wooped around the room, put on make up and a dress I made that was meant to be a halterneck and ended up backless, and we hit the town as a capital-city-troupe (Buenes Aires, Brasilia, London, Berlin, Paris) ready to Party.

And found disappointment yet again.

The issue, I concluded, was one of ratio. A few stages dotted throughout the city hosted bad local pop, to which some people danced. The rest of the city simply held bars, booze stands and thousands upon thousands of people traipsing around looking for fun.

Nowhere was the idea of making fun, any way other than drinking some booze and hoping that did it for you.

I, I thought quietly as we traipsed around, I can, er, sing. And I’m pretty good with rhythm. I can’t start or lead anything because I don’t have the knowledge or the relationships here… but I could, er, I could join in…

I looked at the people going past. What can you do? I bet we had loads of fun capacity between us, loads and loads and loads.

Finally we found a circle of people playing samba rhythms in the street, no electricity. Fun! We stopped to dance by them, in the middle of the dense pedestrian highway the street had become. That encouraged the drummers, who packed a bit more funk into it. That put more funk into our dancing. We fed each other, the way drummers and dancers do. We grinned at each other. Grins all round. A few more people joined in. Then more, and more. Then we had a crowd, a real crowd, playing and boogying away. Wonderful!

A friend dragged us away to look for a ‘real’ samba band, which we found round the corner, four guys in a row, with mics and too-loud speakers, a black man with painted face paid to dance, sweating a lot and looking tired, a manager managing everything, and a tame crowd lolling around. It was ok. But the musicians looked unhappy. Their playing was mechanical.

Then the electricity went off. Sudden aliveness! The crowd took over the rhythm with their clapping hands; helped out with the chorus at top voice. The musicians grinned! The energy raised! Ah-ha! I thought. My hypothesis about electricity being a fun killer is supported! Here at least. Then it came back on. The energy dropped again. I went to sit down.

From the back of the crowd I could see loads of girls doing the samba de peu, and they were rocking. Cute, sexy, grinning, rocking. Moves! They knew the moves. Moves are good.

The boozed up rampaging around is understandable. If people have been making their own fun with carnaval all day, they have to stop at some point, but the party wants to continue. Supply decreases while demand doesn’t.. Also, people don’t want to spend their whole time singing and dancing; they also want to talk, flirt, kiss, rampage around freely.

But the booze and the electrification and the professional bands and the merchanidise all up that little thing called GDP. People who spend their down time practicing musical instruments or dance moves rather tahn watching tv, and get together to make their own joy needing nothing but space and time, don’t really.

Is that why, in Western cultures (I'd include Brazil in that) we've come so far from self-sufficiency in joy?

“You have to be a child or a fool to do this”

2010-02-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

… said the schoolteacher in the square of the old town as the tribal parades lined up to perform at the Recife Carnival.

“Me, I never could. I’m a square. I can never relax. When I was a kid… My mother… I work for the government. I can’t dance in the street.”

It looks like he’s in the minority. I’m sitting in the café at the bus station, where the TV shows the highlights of todays carnval: thousands upon thousands of people singing, dancing and shaking it in the streets.

Perhaps we need to do this in order to relax. Perhaps we all need, sometimes, to be fools, no longer attached to our reputations or bound by the local social rules.

We talk about ‘letting off steam” at a party; people talk of Carnaval as a “valve” of social release.

Gender roles are very tight in Brazil; the Olinda Carnaval opens with 400 men parading in drag. The gender valve is released. When Bruce Parry, Man, went to Carnaval with his TV show Tribe, he played football in drag and absolutely loved it.

In the Roman Saturnalia celebrations, slaves and masters would switch roles, releasing the power valve. In the medieval European Feast of Fools, cities would have "a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position." Party and chaos descends under the eye of the Lord of Misrule, the Abbot of Unreason or the Pope of Fools: again, the power valve is released.

Perhaps we need this.

Perhaps this is what my boss, Graham, needed when he had the yearnings that led him to create the Fun Fed. He’s a powerful businessman. Maybe he needed to open the power valve, to dress as a fool and run through the streets wooping like a beggar for a weekend.

“You have to be a child or a food to do this,” said the school teacher. I’d add a few other routes:

masked; costumed; drunk; prepared with a team, a skit, a song, a practice; warmed up with specific fool/clown activities.

“British people are the wildest people I know,” said Chloe Goodchild, a hippy singing specialist who travels the world ‘unlocking’ people through song.

“Ah yes,” said Rolf the German, owner of the hotel I stayed in on my first night. "Everyone has it inside of them,” he said, “this wildness and this thirst for wildness. It’s opening people up that’s the issue! If you can get people to open up,” he tapped his chest, “this is good work, very good work.”

Ego, Soul and Joy

2010-02-18T05:44:00.000-08:00

I get home, full of white rum, about 2.30am and scribble this in my notebook:

Without soul there is only ego

Without soul there can be no true joy

A spiritual practice is, by my definition, that which amplifies the soul and quietens the ego.

Joy needs spiritual practice. Not necessarily next door, but in the same building, the same town, the same week, the same life

Amazing Carnival Photos

2010-02-17T08:14:00.000-08:00

From around the world, from the Boston Globe

Madrugada: the dawn parade

2010-02-13T13:20:00.000-08:00

Today, my last day of Carnaval, was a mixture between the wonderful first night and the terrible second night.

(thanks to interstar for the picture)

It started brilliantly when I arrived at noon. The streets of pretty old Olinda were full of young people all dressed up and out for a day of Mucking Around. Almost everyone was in costume. The costumes, and the people in them, were so creative and playful with each other. Blocos wandered around making everyone dance and sing and laugh and the vibe was fantastic.

pic 1 from irishpolyglot
pic 2 from f. a. photography
pic 3 from alex

It ended on a bit of a downer. By 3pm, the party had mainly concentrated in just a few streets, too crowded to move in. Throughout the town, the streets had become messy, the crowds smelly, the faces ugly, the remaining rhythms blurry. The event had not peaked; it had gradually got drunk and melted.

It makes me think about Barbara Ehrenreich's writing on the removal of the ecstatic peak from European festivities. (Brazilian culture is heavily influenced by the Portuguese colonisers [Brazil has roughly three cultural roots; the Portuguese colonisers, the African slaves they brought over, and the indigenous Indians who were here to start with]).

She writes:

"Inevitably, something was lost in the transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized festivities - something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of workshop the moment of maximum "madness" and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity... Medieval Christianity, in contrast, offered "communion" in the form of a morsel of bread and sip of wine soberly consumed at the altar - and usually saw only devilry in the festivities that followed.

"...this relative secularisation may help account for the uglier side of European carnival tradition. Without a built-in religious climax to the celebrations - the achievement, for example, of a trance-like state of union with the divinity - they readily spilled over into brawling and insensate drunkenness." p93

I get stuck, though, when trying to imagine what a peak would look like. What if we were to have a London Carnival; how would we usher it towards a collective peak, and away from "brawling and insensate drunkenness"?

So many people, so little fun

2010-02-13T03:16:00.000-08:00

Last night was the bit I was dreading.

We left late. The night before had been an early one. This was a late one. Everyone talks about downtown at night. That's the place to be, they say.

Three busses went past, too full of partygoers to stop, before we found one we could squeeze onto, more intimate than the Northern Line in rush hour.

Downtown was mainly crowds. And beer. Thousands upon thousands of people were packed into the old city. A concert was going on, Glastonbury-like with a big stage and big speakers and big screens dotted around, and voluminous, endless crowds.

Trying to move, we found ourselves in one of those crushes where you start thinking, this has the potential to turn into one of those headlines, '17 killed in Recife Carnival crush.' You start playing the scenarios in your head; what would you do, try and scramble out? I looked around. That would probably involve standing on that short woman's head. Then she might die. What else would you do? I tried to imagine a co-operative, non violent approach to surviving a crush and figured it was probably not to be there in the first place.

Observing the crowd, two things:

1) Everybody loves a chrous

Hands in the air, everyone singing, doing the dance, on the chorus. Everyone, everyone loves a chorus.

2) Apart from the chorus, and apart from the people actively involved in being in the concert audience,

there was no joy on the faces.

I'd seen it as we walked over the bridge towards the old city. Throngs were walking away with heavyset, joyless faces. Entering the city we saw these faces everywhere, along with the smell of sweat and beer. "So many people!" someone said. And so little fun, I thought.

So why on earth does everybody do it?

I could think of three underlying reasons: mating, bonding, and liminality, the pull of each all greater, apparently, than the cost of handling horrible fun-less crowds, and tomorrow's hang over.

Mating: single people are here on the pull.

Bonding: Couples, friendship groups, the entire city, the local culture, is bonding, having unusual experiences together. It's like the annual running of the boundaries in the Andes, or Mayday in Padstow .

Liminality: "Liminal" spaces are the spaces in between, where normal rules don't apply. We can shed the restricting bonds of social norms and be free.

We need these spaces. And it feels like booze has kind of taken over from other forms and practices as the active ingredient that creates the liminal experience.

I think that's a shame.

Carnaval 4: and then...

2010-02-12T13:26:00.000-08:00

I followed the tribal processions to the performances, and watched the dance in which about 200 dancers divided into men and women, boys and girls, and I thought, what an experience, to be a boy dancing in the line of boys between the lines of men doing their electric men dances, seeing all that power and strength and rhythm, picking your favourite guy, thinking, I’m going to be like him when I grow up. Ditto the girls, and how the women might feel, we are Women, and the men, we are Men, and imagining the kind of unity they might all feel doing that.
(pic from christiano)

Hunger dragged me away, via a few conversations, till the sky had grown dark and the crowds had grown big and all I seemed to be able to find was drunken noise.

I decided to go, turned the corner and stumbled across some incredibly beautiful singing. I went closer and found a singing bloco doing their warm up party in their backstreet, complete with kick-ass rhythm section.

Still singing, they began to walk and I was swept along with them. Their token English speaker befriended me and told me they were a group of tax administrators and other professionals who shared an office and had a sing together every day after lunch. The woman playing the accordion was their composer and conductor, he said. Others later told me that my my translator had been King of Carnaval 4 years in a row in his day.

Their music was Just Beautiful. I started to hum along and a tax administrator in heavy makeup and a bright red wig put her face in my face and sung the words very loud and clear at me. I hadn’t a clue what they meant but tried my hardest to copy her, I think that was what she wanted. Then the guitarist was taking my hand and looking into my eyes and singing something about the stars and it was all getting a bit much so time to turn the corner and find that bus.

A couple of streets later I was lured off course by the sounds of rhythms wriggling out of clapping hands, and it was such an alive clapping, not a mandatory clapping but an animated clapping, the sounds of a characterful group of clappers who really want to be clapping right now. I turned the corner to see hundreds of clapping hands raised above a procession of clowns, all rednosed and dressed up each in their own funny way, wiggling and tiggling down the street.

(thanks to Doutores de Alegria for the pic)

Behind the clowns were the sounds of a brass-and-drums marching band, some distance behind.

The clowns carried me away with them and they played with me and I played back and we turned the corner and under a street light the marching band - all straight and dressed in black and playing the local Frevo music really well and really loud - caught up with the clowns, who stopped and danced.

A pretty clown woman found a little clown girl dressed in an almost identical pretty maroon strapless satin dress with flouncy skirt, and they danced together. Each had such a sway to her, such an understated, captivating elegance, that a circle formed around them and suddenly there it was, a party under a streetlamp by a pavement café, the marching band and the dancing clowns, delighting everyone and themselves inside their spontaneous eruption of form out of chaos.
(this pic from christiano too)

I stayed with them awhile before my tired feet dragged me home. I don’t know how long they stayed under that street light, or when they left, who else bumped into whom and what happened then, but I do know this: what a fantastic form for a city-scale party. Get some music styles that everyone likes and knows. Invite everyone to make a group, however they want. Make sure there are enough musicians, drums and brass instruments to go around, and somehow have a historical precedent such that everyone has high hopes for Carnaval. Set an entire city free from normal life for five days: give each group their starting positions and times, and simply, simply, press go.

(pic from cristiano. )

Carnaval 3: The Fun Killers

2010-02-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

As far as I can see, there are three (or maybe four) things that kill the fun.

1. Big Cameras

There haven’t been many of them. But they make people self-conscious. Self-consciousness kills fun. Good fun seem to involve the loss of self-consciousness.

It’s not so much the little point-and-shoot cameras that revelers fling around. They’re fun, and used in the spirit of fun.

It’s the people with big cameras who don’t participate but just take pictures. They’re taking from the proceedings without giving anything. To take more than you give traverses a fundamental principle of life.

Good fun needs contribution, not documenation. Let it be and let it go.

I haven’t taken any pictures yet. I feel I should. I don’t know what to do about that. I’ll see what I can find on flickr.

2. Stages

So, I went last night to see the Tribal processions. I’m really interested in tribes, because if research suggests that play is a human need at all ages, that there’s some kind of singer and dancer in all of us, but we’ve been smothered by a Protestant Capitalist thing that says work is more important than play – if that is true, then I’m really curious to see what people do when they haven’t been smothered by a protestant capitalist culture.

And given the dominance of a North American economic and cultural model, the main people who potentially haven’t been thus smothered are tribes.

So, I went to see the tribal processions and they were just fantastic, powerful dancing and drumming and costumes. They weren’t contemporary tribes, an old schoolteacher told me; rather, contemporary Indians reviving practices now dead. Their feathered headdresses and skirts were made of gowdy coloured synthetic feathers, but my do these people have rhythm.

Their parade was FUN, but then it culminated at a stage where each group gave a performance of the dance they had been parading. The joy ended there. It drained from me. It drained from their faces. It drained from the whole palpable experience. They did the dances, sure, but the fun was lost.

(pic from cristiano)

3. Electricity

As the night went on more and more blocos joined the party, and some had electricity. Microphones and speakers. That killed the fun. It made some people’s fun drown out that of others. It hurt the ears of anyone too close. And when the speakers played unlive music, it broadcast a kind of deadness, an un-liveness, across the whole feel. It killed the fun.

There were no carnaval vans. They weren’t needed; everyone danced down the street.

Lights were useful though…

4. There was kind of a fourth. Groups of men just trying to make as much noise as possible. Crappy vibe. No fun.

Carnaval 2: Form

2010-02-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

As far as I can tell, the form of Carnaval here works like this.

Anyone who wants to forms a ‘bloco’, a parading group. They come up with whatever they want to do, but a bloco usually includes a marching band playing funky local rhythms, some great costumes, a big sign telling everyone what they’re about, and some kind of story that they all share.

In their allotted space and time, organized by the government, the bloco gets together and warms up. This seems to take a couple of hours and involves having a great big party together, with whichever onlookers come and go. The onlookers don’t matter here: it’s all about the team and their energy.

When they’re hot, they start parading around. Yesterday the parading started organized and ended up totally chaotic, with blocos crashing into other blocos, battles for power with the strongest veering through while the weaker disintegrated, joined in with the stronger as it passed, then regrouped their parade afterwards.

In this stage onlookers are important and there’s no barrier and only the very occasional policeman so you get swept along and away with the bloco.

In some cases there’s some kind of culmination, like a short stage performance of each group. In other cases people just wander around with their bring-your-own-party blocos and the city descends into wild, chaotic revelleries that go on until the small hours, under the peeling old colourful buildings and the tall trees and the bright stars and the warm indigo sky that takes everything into itself with something of an endless, calm, all-night smile.

Carnaval 1: Frevo

2010-02-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

First taste of Brazilan Carnaval last night. It rocks.

Or should I say, Recife Carnaval. The Carnavals are very different in each region. More on that later. Let’s talk Frevo.

The bus dropped me off in the old town, by hundreds of people milling around, chatting, singing, dancing, playing in a couple of scratch bands, in a big open space by the sea.

Carnaval starts today. Yesterday was…. Was everyone not being prepared to wait for Carnaval in order to have a Carnaval.

So they did.

Let’s start where I started, with Frevo.

It was 5pm, and people were gathering before processions started. I wound my way through the leaping children and huddling teenagers and big men with big brass instruments wrapped around their bodies, towards the funkiest sounds I could hear.

It turned out to be coming from a group of purple t-shirted women, with a bandstand area at the top end, lots and lots of them, dancing to an all

girl band. Girls on drums, girls on brass, girls singing.

And the women were getting down! I stood at the edges and started bobbing away. I couldn’t help it. Some of the women were my mother’s age; most were something in between us, some older than her. And they were funky! They all knew the same moves, which they played with amid their general getting down.

(pic from cristiano)

The young girls were at it too, and running around whilst singing and dancing. The band struck a popular tune and the women started singing along at the tops of their voices, as a lively conga of twelve year olds came skipping past in a line singing the same song as their mothers like it was the latest from the Spice Girls. God I’m old. Beyonce?

There’s so much to say about this one thing.

Let’s start with Tradition.

The music was Frevo. Everyone knew the words and the moves. Everyone felt they owned it; it’s the music of this region, the music of this ‘people’ whatever that means now. No-one seems to reject it, the way my parents and I rejected one another's music for so many years.

I don’t think we’ve got music like this in our culture, in the UK, have we? Songs that everyone knows the words and the dance moves for and can get down to together, regardless of age, class or race?

A tall skinny kid wanting to practice English sidled up to me. “Frevo

started 103 years ago”, he declared.

A-ha! I thought. So, like planting a big tree, it might be possible to seed an encompassing music now and in 103 years time, everyone will get down to it together, feeling that these sounds are our shared home.

A little later, I shared a beer with a professor of social Geography in a big square. “Frevo was dead until ten years ago.” It was a forgotten music, he said, until Chico Science, a young musician from Recife, picked it up and mixed it with contemporary beats and sounds. That created Mangua Beat, and it spread bigtime. “It’s post-modern hybridity. It’s the same as Manu Chao in Europe, Massive Attack in England, The Gotan Project with Argentinean Tango, The Tinariwen Movement in Africa. Mangue beat put Frevo back onto the radio and into people’s lives.”

“That’s rubbish,” said an old school teacher who cornered me for some English practice a bit later. “I love Frevo. We have always listened to Frevo. It’s just that the media, ruled by the southern power centres of Rio and Sau Paulo, only started playing our music ten years ago. Until then it was not on the national radar.”

“Frevo wasn’t dead ten years ago,” 27 year old Giovanni told me today, “but it was dying. Mungabit helped to bring it to life. But it wasn’t just that. The Refice authorities banned the playing of Axe, the music of Bahia (the neighbouring state), during carnaval, to preserve Frevo and the local culture. If you want to play it in the street, that’s fine, but there can be no Axe concerts over Carnaval.”

So in sum it sounds like, as a result of some combination of the above, these people of Pernambuco, Recife’s state, share a music called Frevo that is 103 years old. It’s a happy music that makes you smile and dance, and it’s cool, to me, to the 12 year olds, to the grandmothers, to the teenage boys, to everyone. I like that.

…

So, back to the women in the purple t-shirts. I’m the only tourist. Some of them look at me, and I grin, and they grin back, and we seem to agree together that everything’s cool, and we get down some more.

It’s only when I stop for a breather that I look more closely at their t-shirts.

They read: “Nem com Uma Flora: Pelo Fim Da Violencia Contra as Mulheres.”

It means: "(You don't hit a woman), not even with a flower: For an end to violence against women.”

I shiver.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of women here in these purple t-shirts, dancing and singing away, grinning from ear to ear. I wonder what they, or their sisters or their friends or their mothers, may have experienced.

Lonely Planet says that "Instances of domestic abuse are frighteningly common (one report stated that every 15 seconds a woman is beaten in Brazil)." (p59)

I don't know how that compares with other countries, and I know we’re getting away from talk of fun here but here’s the thing:

Each of the groups in this Carnaval carries a story.

A reason why they sing and dance.

It is variously the story of their own culture, their club, their cause, or a mixture of all.

Every one of them has it.

So the fun is not fun on it’s own; it is fun that carries and weaves stories that help define a person, a group, a people. The fun is a cultural heartbeat, cultural blood flow, cultural aliveness in action.

Arrival

2010-02-12T05:53:00.000-08:00

As the plane touched down, everyone erupted into woops, cheers and applause.

Apart from me. I looked around, astonished.

The man behind me shrugged. "Every time," he said, grinning. "We are in Brazil now."

("Brazil, a country of almost everything." Thanks to Ju! for the pic)

Play and ritual

2010-01-21T07:34:00.000-08:00

Malidoma Some, p142:

“Every time a gathering of people, under the protection of Spirit, triggers a body of emotional energy aimed at bringing them very tightly together, a ritual of one type or another is in effect.”

Using that definition, one could describe some Fun Fed sessions as implicit rituals.

“Ritual is a place of safe ecstasy, but with no undesirable side effects. This is one of the reasons why indigenous people love ritual.”

“There are two parts to ritual. One part is planned: people prepare the space for the ritual and think through the general choreography of the process. The other part of ritual cannot be planned because it is the part that Spirit is in charge of. The unplanned part of ritual is a spontaneous, almost unpredictable interaction with an energy source.”

“It is gathering with others in order to feel Spirit's call, to express spontaneously and publicy whatever emotion needs to be expressed, to create, in concert with others, an unrehearsed and deeply moving response to Spirit, and to feel the presence of the community, including the ancestors, throughout the experience.”

Some describes his first experience of a Western wedding.

“To me, the crowd's attitude was most strange. That passivity of those present made me wonder if anyone cared about the bride and groom. People seemed more responsive to appearances, drinks and partying than to the sacred commitment of the two getting married.” p144

“The problem with these cermonies is that over time they begin to lose their attraction, since they happen in the same way year after year. They do not have the essential ingredient, spontaneity, which to indigenous people speaks of the presence of Spirit.” p145

Learning and play

2010-01-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

“Play isn't the enemy of learning, it's learning's partner. Play is like fertilizer for brain growth. Sometimes the best way to get the feel of a complicated subject is to just play with it. That's why kids often learn computer systems faster than adults – they aren't afraid to just try stuff out and see what works, whether adults worry they will do something wrong.” p101-2

“Learning and memory also seem to be fixed more strongly and last longer when learned in play.” Details on p 102

head body heart

2010-01-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

Jaak Panksepp is a neuroscientist who has a play research centre at Washington State University.

He describes play-related "processes that link brain stem (movement) to limbic (emotional) to cortex (thought)” – ie, what the non neuroscientists among us might call processes that link body, heart and head. P62

We spend a lot of time in our heads. Well, I do.

My friend Anthea loves rock climbing as the only thing she can do with her clothes on that gets her "out of her head."

I always think of play as something that balances the heart, body and head. I like it for that.

Moves or No Moves?

2010-01-11T05:32:00.000-08:00

Had a tops time on Saturday night dancing to the Mad French Wolf in Waterloo.

Rock 'n Roll! Literally.

I went with my friend Luke who didn't know anything about Rock 'n Roll dancing, and neither did I, so we made it up, and we had a total blast.

Everybody else Knew Moves so we found it rather difficult to dance with them.

So I'm thinking about Dance Moves.

They're both enabling and restricting.

Enabling: you get a shared language that enables you to dance music through your body in co-ordination with another person who can speak that language. It's great. I know the lindyhop language pretty well, and it's brilliant fun.

Restricting: once people get into knowing dance moves, we can go through a long period in which we seem to forget that we can do anything other than the moves!

How sad.

I've had some totally great times dancing with men who know The Moves. But I've also had a totally great time dancing with men who don't know the moves, and also with old men with few teeth who know the moves inside out and they're bored of them, so they put them as one tool in their toolbox, close the box, forget everything, remember their bodies, feel the music, and play.

And it's wonderful.

So, I think if the Fun Fed is going to get into partner dancing, I think we would sit in that space between moves and no moves, the space between form and free play.

And lifs...

Yes, lifts.

One thing I've noticed is that men quite like to pick women up. And women, well, this woman at least, quite like/s being picked up.

It's no joke picking me up. I weigh at least 11 stone and I'm 5'10. But people seem to like trying it. Having a go. All sorts of directions. Totally up side down. Flying me round in a circle. Kicking other dancers on the bum accidentally (sorry!). They usually manage it too. It's impressive. And fun!

So, I think we do moves, no moves, and Lifts... Somehow or other :)

Samba

2010-01-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning Samba Beginners class with Romero. Wicked. Wiggly. La-di-da. "Attitude!" He yells over the music. "Elegance!" Ok then. Tra la laaaa! I exaggerate. What fun! The movements make me joyful. "Samba is the way to share your happiness," cries Romero. It feels true! I was anxious and tired on the way in, now I'm grinning ear to ear.

We're learning the Sambo to Peu, a shuffly wiggly little step. I'm failing miserably to co-ordinate my feet, hips and flailing arms. The woman in front of me is a leggy Brazilian with tumbing orange curls, in heels and a tiny ra ra skirt. As I watch her wiggle away, she takes her fingers to her hips and traces two lines up the sides of her body, past her wiggly chest, picks up her hair, lifts it high, and lets it tumble in strands back down her wiggly back, all the while looking seductively into her own eyes in the mirror without a glimmer of self-consciousness. Blimey! I think. That's not allowed where I come from!

I'm still dancing while I watch her, and gradually co-ordination starts kicking in. As my body starts to do the proper movements, I can feel it really conditioning my lower abdomen and pelvic floor. This is sex practice! I realise. Wow! Brazilian dance is sex practice!

I'm reminded of an ex-boyfriend recounting a conversation with a friend who'd just started seeing a Brazilian woman. "Mate!" the friend had exclaimed, talking about the sex. "I had no idea!"

I've always wondered what that actually meant.

This dance isn't just sex practice, it's sex catching. It's a mating call. We are all like peacocks with our tails lifted. "Look at meeeee! I'm really hot! Take me now!"

I'm rather shocked by myself when I look in the mirror and see my reflection beaconing me to bed. "Come into my arms," my body is saying. "Don't you want to enjoy these wiggly hips? Mmmmmmm"

And everyone's at it in here, the young couples, the old couples, the skinny ladies in heels, the larger ladies on a fun January health kick, all grinning and wiggling away.

"Now cover yourself in Gold!" Romero exclaims in the cool down. "Yellow, yellow sun. See it in your mind, open your arms to it, pour it all over yourself! Cover yourself in sun!"

Right. This is just a beginners class. I want to go to a Samba party. I want to see these Brazilians in action.

Policeman sledges on riot shield

2010-01-10T02:36:00.000-08:00

thanks to the Daily Mail for the pic

Vanuatu is the happiest place on earth, research suggests

2009-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

You've probably seen this already. It's old news. I didn't. Nice BBC report.

High 5 a game for cyclists

2009-12-09T03:55:00.000-08:00

Submitted by Lottie on Sat, 2008-10-18 12:03.

a game for cyclists: ride around as usual and when you pass a pedestrian with their arm outstretched trying to get the attention of a cab, just reach up and hi 5 them, it helps a lot if you make eye contact and smile first. From: Street Training

Young people train 'authority figures' in how to have more fun

2009-12-09T03:46:00.000-08:00

"Young people from the Sceaux Gardens Estate Camberwell will be training local councilors, a baptist minister, a police officer, researchers and planners in how to have more fun in streets and in public spaces.
The techniques to be taught include
the swinging gate of fear
shouting out silly words
wind tunnel hair flying
railing squeeze
street magaphone
gravel moonwalk
'yes lets all" game
the session will conclude with a discussion about creative/antisocial uses of public space
o and BTW all techniques have been thoroughly risk assessed :)"

Street Training

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature

2009-12-08T07:50:00.000-08:00

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Frank Lloyd Wright

the world wide may pole

2009-12-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

I thought the maypole was just an English thing. Wrong!

Alabama, 1910

Sri Lanka

picture from turningwheel

Till there was only beer...

2009-12-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Having been banished from the churches between 400AD and the middle ages, 'rituals' became 'festivities' and went to the streets. From the 17th century onwards, then, festivities were banished from the streets.

"In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century ... there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life." (9)

"A Buckinghamshire resident described the emptying of the commons after the suppression of Sunday recreations as a depressing loss. While formerly the common 'presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on,' it was now 'left lonely and empty of loungers,' leaving the men and boys with nothing to do but hang out in the pubs and drink.(11)"

Quoted in Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich, p99-100

picture source

Good old fashioned fun

2009-12-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

"People once danced, drank, feasted, and performed dramas and burlesques within their churches; now [in the middle ages] they did so outside those churches in the festivities that still clung to, and surrounded, each holy day...

"[This] created a world of regularly scheduled festivity that is almost beyond our imagining today. The Church calendar featured dozens of holy days - including Epiphany, Ascension, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi, as well as the more familiar Easter and Christmas - on which all work was forbidden, and on most of which various celebration was tolerated. In fifteenth century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. ... Despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labour.

"... Great passion and energy went into the planning of festivities, with special organizations, like the French confraternities of young men, dedicated entirely to preparations year-round." Dancing in the Streets, p91-4

pic from turningwheel

Dionysus

2009-12-02T04:27:00.000-08:00

"Lillian Lawler, writing in the 1960s, leaves no doubt that ecstatic dancing was indigenous to the mainstream Greek tradition... Within the ancient Western world, many deities served as the objects of ecstatic worship... But there was one Greek god for whom ecstatic worship was not simply an option; it was a requirement. To ignore his call was to risk a fate worse than death or even physical torture; those who resisted him would be driven mad and forced to destroy their own children. This god, source of both ecstasy and terror, was Dionysus or, as he was known to the Romans, Bacchus.

"His mundane jurisdiction covered vinyards and wine, but his more spiritual responsibility was to preside over the orgeia (literally, rites performed in the forest at night, from which we derive the word orgy), where his devotees danced themselves into a state of trance.

"The fact that the Greeks felt the need for such a deity tells us something about the importance of ecstatic experience in their world; just as their pantheon included gods for love, for war, for agriculture, metalworking, and hunting, they needed a god to give the experience of ecstasy a human form and face."

- Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich p 32-33

The Maenads

2009-12-02T02:09:00.000-08:00

"The most notorious feminine form of Dionysian worship, the oreibaia, or winter dance, looks to modern eyes like a crude pantomime of feminist revolt. In mythical accounts, women "called by the god to participate drop their spinning and abandon their children to run outdoors and into the mountains, where they dress in fawn skins and engage in a 'frenzied dance.' These maenads, as Dionysus's female cult members were called, run through the woods calling out the name of the god, or uttering the characteristic bacchic cry 'euoi' they toss their hair and brandish their thyrsos - sticks to which pinecones have been attached. Finally, they achieve a state of mind the Greeks called enthousiasmos - literally, having the god within oneself - or what many cultures in our own time would call a "possession trance." These were not solely mythical events; in some times and places, the oreibasia was officially condoned and scheduled for every other year, in the dead of winter. Pausanias, who wrote in the second century CE, tells of a party of maenads who reached the eight-thousand foot summit of Mt Parnassus - an impressive athletic achievement, especially if performed in the winter - and Plutarch wrote of an occasion when a group of female worshippers were cut off by a snowstorm and had to be rescued."

- Dancing the streets, p34-5

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Dance Mania

2009-12-02T01:38:00.000-08:00

"The most flamboyant form of what might be called 'ecstatic dissent'," writes Barbara, "was the dance manias that rocked parts of northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and Italy a century later. The first outbreak sounds like another cautionary tale about the perils of dancing: in Utrecht in the summer of 1278, two hundred people started dancing on the bridge over the Mosel and would not stop until it collapsed, at which point all the dancers drowned. A hundred years later, in the wake of the Black Death, a much larger outbreak of dance mania again struck Germany and spilled out into Belgium: "Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, house-wives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels." Arriving in Aix-la-Chapelle (now the German town of Aachen), "they formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the by-standers, for hours together in wild delirium, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion."(13) . We have, unfortunately, no testimonies from the dancers themselves, but contemporary observers saw them in a condition ethnographers would now describe as a possession trance.

"While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions [with the exception, one might guess, of the music they danced to] .... but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out... Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary."(14)

"Hence the Church authorities' worry that the "manias" represented a new form or heresy: Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople finding their own way into the presence of the gods."

picture source

See also Wikipedia. I particularly like the descriptions of Strasbourg's Dancing Plague of 1518, where local authorities hired musicians to play alongside the dancers and keep them dancing until the dance was danced out of them. The less fun parts are the reports of dancers dancing themselves to exhaustion and death.

In a similar vein, there are some reports of epidemics of laughter.

Laughing babies

2009-11-29T14:01:00.001-08:00

Contemporary Social Ritual

2009-11-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

"THREE YEARS AGO my husband Lawrence and I - together with a lively, curious, and spirited community of people - launched into a project called 'A Search for Living Myths and Rituals Through Dance and the Environment.' The intention was to use dance and art and an environmental perspective to reflect back to the community its own central themes and issues. ...

"Most rituals take their meaning from a myth, a story that tells something important to and about the community performing the ritual."

Anna Halprin

picture source

"As James Hurd Nixon explains inPhilosophy of City Dance:

In ancient times and in traditional cultures, dance has functioned as the means by which people gathered and unified themselves in order to confront the challenges of their existence. When the members of some hunting cultures need food, they dance a hunting dance, preparing themselves for the rigors of the hunt and supplicating the divinities and the animal spirits to bless their undertaking. Often the dancers enact the whole ritual of the hunt, bringing it to a successful conclusion."

This makes sense to me.

I once saw a TV show with that famous TV doctor who's name escapes me right now... About the power of visualisation. He took a gymnast who couldn't master a complex move on the bars. He made her sit there and imagine herself doing it. How it would feel. From inside.

Then she stood up and did it.

There were loads of examples. I've experienced it. You probably have. If you imagine it, see it, draw it, maybe even dance it, sing it, you create or somehow strengthen the possibility.

Humm.

I'm fascinated by the hooking up of dance, song and play with a bigger story. It could be a bigger social story, or personal or spiritual story.

I have a strong instinct to explore dance, song and play as applied to social ritual.

A neuroscientist's 'stroke of insight'

2009-11-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most popular TED talks ever.

A stroke shut down half of Jill Bolte's brain, and she experienced something she describes as Nirvana.

Clowns, Fools and Social Shamans

2009-11-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

Han’s off to Canada for six weeks in January to study Native American clowning.

In Native American culture, she tells me, clowning is not about performance, it is about community. Example: a clown takes a late night walk in the moonlight. She passes the home of Jo and Janice and hears Janice crying and Jo shouting cruel things.

The next day in the community, the clowns spontaneously do a little skit about the way that husbands treat wives. No-one but Jo and Janice knows that it’s about them, but the message that Jo and perhaps Janice receives is clear: you are being seen. Please bring your behaviour back into line with the norms of our community.

pic source

As far as I understand it, Han continues, in Native American tradition laughter is a route to God. Clowns are used at the beginning of ceremonies to get everyone laughing and opening up to what is to come. For ceremonies to really work, people need to be open, and play and laugher is the thing that softens you and gets your ego out the way enough for that to happen.

The clown intervenes spontaneously in the Native American community whenever she sees fit. Clowns don’t answer to anyone in the community, they answer to up there, Han says pointing. If a clown starts to get all egotistic about that, other clowns will clown on them to bring them back down to size, keeping the community in balance. They do it all with a really light playful touch, concealing private learning kindly within a lot of laughter.

...

I'm talking about this with AJ, a Californian clown / businessman who happens to be couch surfing in the same place I am. "You've missed something important," he says. "The role of the fool is not so much about bringing people back to the community norms, it's about holding up absurd norms, questioning them, and liberating people from them, bringing them back to a more visceral spontaneity."

The clown, the fool and the social shaman. Brothers. Sisters. (But not identical ones. Jonathan Kay, arch Fool, wouldn't have his name mentioned in the same sentence as shamanism, says Loose, a protege. Sorry Jonathan...)

I’m fascinated by this role. We talked about something very similar at CLEAR Village, the role of the contemporary social shaman. Forget drums and rattles, we said. The thing is this: that for community to really work well, it's really useful to have at least one person who's role is to keep an eye on the wellbeing of the community and intervene playfully to keep things healthy. We used the word shaman because when we talked about community wellbeing, we meant an idea that involves spiritual wellbeing, whatever that might mean. That’s what the shaman does. She takes care of the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing of a community and the individuals within it, intervening as appropriate with all manner of songs, dances, play and other techniques to keep things good.

The shaman has implicit permission from the community to do his thing because people recognize and respect the role. They know they need it.

And like the clown and the fool, it is the shaman’s only role. He’s not also a leader, and certainly not a politician. He’s got no agenda other than the wellbeing of the community and its members, and answers primarily to god.

I think you play that role, Alastair said to me at CLEAR. I was the energy lady there, getting the group singing and dancing and playing and laughing together, bringing wholeness to the group when they’d been working apart, energy when they were tired, laughter and relaxation when they were too tight.

I thought about that and it didn’t feel quite right to me. To really play that role, I said, I would need to change; I have too much of a political agenda. I work for wellbeing, yep, but I think about it in political and systemic terms. Politics and shamanism don’t mix.

In all the conversations I’ve had about this over the last few days, it seems to feel to all of us like we’re discovering something quite true, and we all start thinking of the people we know who would play this role should our culture recognize it. They are the people who drift a little, not quite sure what their true role is, because that role doesn’t really exist currently in our culture. Priests, therapists, facilitators, they’re all kind of it but not really.

It seems to me that in the same way that I have been given a natural gift for music, other people have a natural gift for being incredibly insightful into what’s going on with people, a strong spiritual instinct, a light and playful touch, and an easy lovability. These people are our contemporary social shamans. But right now, while most of them sense it they don’t really know it, and our economy by and large offers them neither training nor jobs.

Nature 2: wild swimming

2009-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

Dan made us wear the silly hats... Didn't capture Dom Jolly who came with us wearing a full body red and white stripey swim suit... Wild swimming is great fun.

Play by the sea

2009-11-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

How come nature hasn't made it into this blog yet? Just got this email from a friend:

Wanted to tell you about amazing playtime I had last week, in the sea, at St David's (Whitesands Beach) - we went there for a couple of days and I bodyboarded as much as I could on a rubbishy foam kids board but that didn't matter - it was amazing! I absolutely LOVE it - get such a rush from being in the elements, wind rain waves - tossed about by the waves, waiting waiting waiting to catch one trying failing trying small whoosh paddling back out trying and GETTING THE WAVE!!! and just LOVING the sense of riding it, the pleasure of catching it... it was FAB. I think the seaside is a GREAT place for play. We also played football loads, with a ball so light the wind blew it into one goal all the time; and flew kites, and dug sandcastles. Sandcastle building, right on the shore as the tide comes in, is one of the types of play my kids get most involved and lost in, totally absorbed and delighted by their battle with the elements

Mastery

2009-10-29T03:07:00.001-07:00

Train Conductor & Violinist
Originally uploaded by Fabio Trifoni

“There is a great deal of evidence that the road to mastery of any subject is guided by play. Learning a subject by rote can take one only so far.” p141

“People always say that you can reach the top by 'keeping your nose to the grindstone', but as sports performance specialist Chuck Hogan observes, this is not true. People reach the highest levels of a discipline because they are driven by love, by fun, by play. 'The great performers perform as they do, and do so with such grace, because they love what they are doing,' Hogan observes. 'It's not work. It's play.'"

Work

2009-10-29T03:00:00.001-07:00

Dus jij vindt dat....!?
Originally uploaded by Kennisland

“The quality that work and play have in common is creativity... Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform work... Play helps us deal with difficulties, provides a sense of expansiveness, promotes mastery of our craft, and is an essential part of the creative process. Most important, true play that comes from our own inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting joy and satisfaction in our work. In the long run, work does not work without play.” p127

“Play is nature's greatest tool for creating new neural networks and for reconciling cognitive difficulties. The abilities to make new patterns, find the unusual among the common, and spark curiosity and alert observation are all fostered by being in a state of play. When we play, dilemmas and challenges will naturally filter through the unconscious mind and work themselves out. It is not at all uncommon for people to come back not only re-energized, but also with fresh ideas for work.” p127-8

play helps us solve problems, take a step back, let new ideas bubble up.

“As with many things in life, often the problem is not the problem, the problem is how you react to the problem. If the reaction is that of a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car, the chances of ending up as roadkill are greatly increased. When all employees are focused on the possibility of personal or collective failure, a funeral air saps the energy and optimism necessary for success. At this point, play gives people the emotional distance to rally.”

“There's nothing like play to promote true social cohesion at work. When people play, they become attuned to each other.”

“The opposite of play is not work – the opposite of play is depression. Our inherent need for variety and challenge can be buried by an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Over the long haul, when these spice-of-life elements are missing, what is left is a dulled soul.” - Stuart Brown

Toys

2009-10-29T02:53:00.001-07:00

365 toy project - Day 210 ~ Pullip
Originally uploaded by Yukihana~

“Here's a scene that parents around the world have witnessed over and over. It's a second or third birthday, and the big present comes out. The excited birthday boy or girl tears into the wrapping to uncover the box, then opens the box to find the perfect gift that the parent has worked so hard to find. Maybe it's the hottest toy on the planet, the one you have to put yourself on a list to get. Perhaps it's a car or doll that has special significance to the parents, one that they had themselves when they were young... Imagine the family chagrin, then, when their little darling is more interested in playing with the box than the toy.

“Parents should be happy about such a turn of events. It shows that their child has developed a healthy play drive, one that comes from their own fantasies and desires. The box is a blank slate, something they can transform through imagination into anything they want.

“As they grow, kids are often taught out of this imaginative approach to play, at first by parents, who might impart pressure and guilt that they really should be playing with this great toy, or by pervasive media marketing. Later, kids get toys that come straight out of hit movies or TV shows, toys that come with a preset collection of ideas about who the characters are and how children should play with the toys. This kind of preformed script can rob the child of the ability to create his own story. Instead, his is mimicking the expressions and lines that he is expected to say. A chance for imaginative flights of fancy is lost.

“Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It's not formed or motivated solely by others. Real play interacts with and involves the outside world, but it fundamentally expresses the needs and desires of the player. It emerges from the imaginative force within. That's part of the adaptive power of play: with a pinch of pleasure, it integrates our deep physiological, emotional and cognitive [body, heart and head] capacities. And quite without knowing it, we grow. We harmonize the influences within us. Where we may have felt pulled in one direction by the heart and another direction by the head, play can allow us to find a balanced course or a third way. All evidence indicates that the greatest rewards of play come when it arises naturally from within.” Stuart Brown p100-105

rough and tumble play

2009-10-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

“Research on rough-and-tumble play in animals and humans has shown that it is necessary for the development and maintenance of social awareness, cooperation, fairness, and altruism. Its nature and importance are generally unappreciated, particularly by preschool teachers or anxious parents, who often see normal rough-and-tumble play behaviour such as hitting, diving and wrestling (all done with a smile, between friends who stay friends) not as a state of play, but a state of anarchy that must be controlled.

"Lack of experience with rough-and-tumble play hampers the normal give and take necessary for social mastery, and has been linked to poor control of violent impulses in later life. While studying the young murderers in Texas many years ago, we found an absence of rough-and-tumble play in their early backgrounds when compared to similar nonmurderers we interviewed as controls in our study [among a number of other studies cited].” p89

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp proposes a connection between lack of rough-and-tumble play and ADHD. (p100)

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babies

2009-10-29T02:26:00.000-07:00

“At three or four months of age, if a child is well fed and safe, and a mother's emotional state is one of opennes and calm, when parent and child make eye contact they initiate a harmonic meeting of the minds. As they gaze into each other's eyes, the baby will radiate a compelling smile and the mother will automatically respond with a surge of emotion and verbal and bodily joyfulness – and smile back. … What's going on in the brain is even more amazing. As they lock eyes, both mother and child are synchronizing the neural activity in the right cortex of each brain. If we wired Mom and baby up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), you would see their brain currents are actually in sync. This is called “attunement”. Their brain rhythms are getting in tune, performing a kind of mind-meld that is a very pure form of intimacy. Fathers, too, experience this as they engage with babies, but traditionally this occurs most between mother and child.” Stuart Brown, p81-2

A large body of literature points to the critical role of play in the development of brain and person in childhood. Brown, Play, 36-41

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pregnancy

2009-10-29T02:19:00.000-07:00

“During gestation, the embryo and developing fetus are subject to strong prenatal influences from the nutrition to the stress levels of the mother. … An expectant mother's play can lower her stress levels and help lessen the discomforts of pregnancy, but that playfulness can also help preform the mind-set of the baby insider her.” p80-81

“Studies of the Dutch 'hunger winter' during World War II demonstrate that your IQ, your risk of heart disease and other health problems are influenced by how well your grandmother ate during the third trimester of her pregnancy with your mother.” Dr Stuart Brown p81

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Play, creativity and innovation

2009-10-29T01:22:00.000-07:00

“Those who study creativity find that the process is by nature contradictory and paradoxical... Many of the paradoxes of creativity are embodied in play.” Brown p136

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“I recently spoke with the executive of a worldwide engineering company with labs in the United States, the Czech Republic, and China. He was troubled that the highly trained engineering personnel in China were not coming up with many new ideas, techniques or technology. The U.S. and Czech teams were doing well, with the United States in the lead.

“As a result of being convinced that play and innovation were inseparable, he established a 'play week' on an island off the China coast and a similar 'camp' in the Czech republic. The Chinese engineers showed a bump in morale and productivity, and thereafter games and free time for imaginative invention were integrated into the workweek. The engineers not only worked better together, but also came up with more effective ways to work and more original solutions for design problems.” p200

pic source

Play helps to loosen up the mind, says Brown. A mind at play can imagine endless possible solutions, not get stuck, let things go, adapt and work easily with others.

“One particularly famous scientist I know told me that the secret of his brilliant ideas is that he has a really big wastebasket. He lets himself enjoy thinking up and throwing out one hundred bad ideas before finding the single good one.” p141

Play and love

2009-10-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

“Gail and Geoff, both forty-six.. once described themselves as 'best buddies who really like sex.' … They now describe themselves as burned out and... they are not sure they even like each other any more.

“One friday night, however, they find themselves duct taped to each other hand and foot, squirming like Siamese-twin snakes across the floor with three other faculty couples. They 'race' toward a line drawn across the floor at the far end of the large community center commons room, where a play therapist conducts the couples' play shop. The laughter is contagious, raucous, and virtually uncontrolled. Sweaty and exhilarated, still laughing to the point of collapse, they reach the finish line. That night, Gail and Geoff make love for the first time in five months, and awaken in the morning as new friends.”

(pic source )

“In the course of taking play histories, I have interviewed a lot of couples, some troubled and some not. Among the troubled couples, some were able to relight the fires of love and some couldn't. The defining factor among couples who were able to find romance again, and even to find new fields of emotional intimacy previously unexplored, was that they were able to find ways to play together. Those who played together stayed together. Those who didn't either split up or, worse, simply endured an unhappy and dysfunctional relationship.” Brown p158

“Play is the most important element in love," says Brown. "Take play out of the mix and, like a climb in the oxygen-poor 'death zone' of Mount Everest, the relationship becomes a survival endurance contest.” p165-6

Brown thinks that play is sexually attractive: “A strong play drive is unspoken evidence of fitness to reproduce.” p168-9

Michelle Lauziere

2009-10-26T02:07:00.001-07:00

16 mouse traps, 16 golf balls, 16 baking pans, springs and wooden dowels... and coathangers.

Play and Ageing

2009-10-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

“...the brain really begins to change in the sixties and seventies, and some people start to lose the intellectual sharpness they had before. The people who stay sharp and interesting are those who continue to play and work.”

“Studies of early dementia suggest that physical play forestalls mental decline by stimulating neurogenesis [the creation of new brain cells].” (p58)

“When we stop playing, we stop developing, and when that happens, the laws of entropy take over – things fall apart. Ultimately we share the fate of the sea squirt and become vegetative, staying in one spot, not fully interacting with the world, more plant than animal. When we stop playing, we start dying.” (Brown p73)

Definition of play

2009-10-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

“Play is a state of mind, rather than an activity. Remember the definition of play: an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again.” - Stuart Brown

top: half of my team
middle: radical improv man Liam Kirsher
bottom: my mate nick :)

Play and the Brain

2009-10-16T03:56:00.000-07:00

According to Psychiatrist, medical doctor and clinical researcher Stuart Brown , the brain continues to create new braincells and neural connections all through our lives, and does this particularly when we play. (p41 and p57-58)

“There is a strong positive link between brain size and playfulness for mammals in general,” reported Neuroscientist Sergio Pellis, neuroscientist Andrew Iwaniuk and biologist John Nelson. (p33)

“Another renowned senior play researcher, Jaak Panksepp, has shown that active play selectively stimulates brain-deprived neurotrophic factor (which stimulates nerve growth) in the amygdala (where emotions get processed) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (where executive decisions are processed).” (p33)

"Play seems to be a driving force helping to sculpt how the brain continues to grow and develop... Like sleep, play seems to dynamically stabilize body and social development in kids as well as sustain these qualities in adults.” (p42)

“As children, our reward for play is strong because we need it to help generate a rapidly developing brain. As adults, the brain is not developing so rapidly and the play drive may not be as strong, so we can do well enough without play in the short term. Our work or other responsibilities often demand that we set play aside. But when play is denied over the long term, our mood darkens. We lose our sense of optimism and we become anhedonic, or incapable of feeling sustained pleasure.

“There is laboratory evidence that there is a play deficit much like the well-documented sleep deficit.” (p43)