Bonobos, play and surviving the future

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

“”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

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 :)

The Return of Swing from emily jeal on Vimeo.

Street Training

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

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?"

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"?