“Weedelly Frop” – First Day on Governor’s Island

Yesterday we opened the site – and the season – at Governor’s Island.

For those non-Americans out there, this is a long holiday weekend and the social start of the summer.  It felt like the meteorological start too, with that baking, bleaching heat that makes New York City summers so distinctive, and so sweaty.

It was a quiet day compared to those to come, and it felt good to be able to set up the site as we wanted, to spend real time with the children and adults who came out.  There was one family group, a boy, a girl and their mother.  He was still in their mother’s arms, peering over her shoulder with an air of deep suspicion.

“He’s just woken up from a nap,” she said, as he responded to my wave by solemnly shaking his pudgy fist.

“La la,” the little girl said, as she threw a large orange beach ball up and then jumped into the air afer it.

She’d understood the idea of the Pop-Up Adventure Playground immediately, clarifying only “everything in these boxes?”  I nodded.  She went to one and pulled out a length of rope, red with yellow threads.  It was as heavy as a mountain climber’s coil and clearly brand new.  She looked to me for the nod and then opened it.  As it began to uncurl she dropped it onto the ground and took out another, this one blue and white.

“I don’t think she has a plan what to make,” her mother said, sounding apologetic.

“It’s okay,” I told her, as the girl set off for something else to unravel or turn over.  ”Even if she just wants to make a mess, that’s okay.  How often does anyone get to hear that, right?”  I grinned at her, and she smiled back.

Later, the mother began tying fabric around cardboard tubes, fixing it with bungee cords.

“I’m trying to make a person,” she said, looking at the construction.  ”But the head isn’t good.  Too…  lumpy.”

I went over, trying to see whether it was encouragement she needed or just time, when she picked up the headless cardboard person and turned it over onto her lap.  She’d been talking more to herself than me, so I moved along.

Her daughter meanwhile had been skipping around the site, touching the silk pieces flapping in the wind, taking a be-ribboned stick off my hands and reaching around a tree to wave it at herself.  Now she was sitting by a pile of little objects, and Sharon and the girl’s brother were there too.  I wandered over to see what was going on.

The girl picked up a bamboo cup that was filled with plastic poker chips, large beads and glass marbles.  She shook it, then sat it down and moved onto something else.

The cup felt good in my hand.  Nicely weighted, smooth but full of clatter.  On impulse, I turned it upside down and struck it on a piece of wood, as if it were a dice cup and I was gambling.  The girl looked up, startled and excited.  She picked up the beads, the poker chips and put them back inside.  Her brother found a plastic tub with a screw-top lid and he shook it, then handed it to me to open.  It was full of marbles.  The girl squealed, and began picking through them for the largest, the prettiest.

She began speaking to them in a made-up language, chattering:

“Meedle broop doop dee, zip doop.”

I tried to reply.

“Fnarf, fna.”  She shook her head, and gently scolded.

“Feedley blap pleep dop.”

I tried again.

“Needley dop deep koop?”  She nodded, and began counting out marbles into my cupped palms.

“Deet doop, penneley treep.”

We continued talking, giving one another questions and answers.  I shook my hands like an earthquake so all the glass marbles clicked and rolled together.  She swayed on her heels.  One marble jumped out, landing on the grass, and she plucked it out with thumb and forefinger, then dropped it back into the rattling pile.

“Weedelly frop!”

—————————————————

We also have 10 days left to raise $7,000!  This money will help us ensure a summer-long Pop-Up Adventure Playground on Governor’s Island, New York.  

This is a rare and remarkable opportunity for many of the 2 million children growing up in New York City to enjoy child-led and open-ended play provision.  It’s stocked with lots of great scrap materials, staffed by gifted playworkers and is completely free for everyone to attend.  We’re partnering with theFIGMENT NYC art festival and have been told to expect hundreds of thousands of visitors over the next 4 month period.

Your pennies, pounds and zloty can help – go to our IndieGoGo page now: http://www.indiegogo.com/Pop-Up-Adventure-Play 

There are free gifts for donators!

“Play as Freedom”

I realized I’d been going to a lot of Conferences recently when a speaker began and I knew I’d heard the presentation already, 800 miles away and 3 months earlier.

Lucky for me, Audrey Skrupskelis‘s Play as Freedom had enough great content to keep me going twice.  The title alone warmed my anarchistic playworker heart, and I was pretty pleased to get another at taking notes (I can type like the wind but have always wished I’d learned shorthand).

She spoke movingly about the joy of play as being in the making of choices, the exercise of free will.  She talked of the thrill of self-determination, and threw out quotes at the audience like it was glitter at a nightclub.

Skrupskelis mentioned G. Stanley Hall (on whom I could find very little online), and gave a shout-out to Heraclitus by quoting: “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play”.  She said that play is experienced as a state of rapture in which all that is not-the-play moves to a position of non-reality.

She said that play gave children a sense of power because they “understand what they are doing” – an interesting nod to play as a following of intuition, but I had always felt that an important aspect of play was that of the leap, the extension into the unknown.  The question then arises, how do we do the things that we don’t know how to do?  How does the intuitiveness of play help us light a path through the undiscovered country ahead – or in other words, wing it?  So that went onto the list of things to think about.

She also provided the phrase “autonomous play” to use in place of the often sadly abused term “free play” – and it’s always good to have another nice phrase in the arsenal.  I like that its suggestion of dignity and self-direction – something that I’ve found many adults do not expect from children.

Towards the end of her talk, Skrupskelis gave a beautiful description of a game interrupted by adults, and how that broken mood is like a world which cannot be re-entered.  There is a rudeness in being interrupted, a shattering of the mental state, that prevents it.

It reminded me powerfully of a scene in The Magician’s Nephew (my childhood favorite of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series) where Digory and Polly stand in a strange wood.  All around them are pools, each one a separate world.  They are all unique, and there is an infinite number to choose from.  Some can be found again and some, once exited, are lost forever.

I think that something similar happens in play, the way that each moment is distinct but some are linked together, like a string of beads.  Sometimes we are able to visit a play-world again and again, so that something magical and reciprocal happens.  We both create a place for ourselves in that world, and we make that world part of us, forever.

I had some seashells as a child that I could contemplate for endless passing moments, and can recall how their cream blushed to pink before disappearing inside the cave.  I remember their weight in my palm like something between ceramic and chalk, and the exact sensations of the meditative state I found there every time, and how my mind would fill with thoughts of oceans and mermaids and small slippery creatures moving through dark water.

If you want to see Skrupskelis present this paper, she’ll be doing it again at the IPA Conference in Cardiff this July!  You can go there directly after mine (on Ethnographic Playwork, Wednesday July 6th).

————————————

We also have 11 days left to raise $7,000!  This money will help us ensure a summer-long Pop-Up Adventure Playground on Governor’s Island, New York.  

This is a rare and remarkable opportunity for many of the 2 million children growing up in New York City to enjoy child-led and open-ended play provision.  It’s stocked with lots of great scrap materials, staffed by gifted playworkers and is completely free for everyone to attend.  We’re partnering with the FIGMENT NYC art festival and have been told to expect hundreds of thousands of visitors over the next 4 month period.

Your pennies, pounds and zloty can help – go to our IndieGoGo page now: http://www.indiegogo.com/Pop-Up-Adventure-Play 

There are free gifts for donators!

Axline

One of my favorite aspects of going to Conferences is leaving with a dozen scraps of paper telling me what else to start reading about next.  The names may be obvious or obscure – they may even include documents that I’ve pretended to read and quoted extensively in college papers (shh, don’t tell.  Admitting my ignorance is a new thing I’m trying).

Sometimes though, you don’t even have to read the thing to have your mind blown open.

Virginia Axline is a new addition to my list, and I scribbled down her 8 Principles of Play Therapy as the PowerPoint slides flew past.  Take a look at them, and see if they sound familiar.

1. Develop friendly relationship with child

2. Accept the child without question

3. Establish a permissive relationship

4. Recognize and reflect the feelings of the child

5. Maintain respect for the child’s problem-solving skills

6. Let the child lead

7. No agenda

8. Make only necessary limitation

Not very different from the Playwork Principles are they?  They just came out 54 years earlier!

I read Sturrock and Else’s Colorado Paper (available free through Ludemos) a few years ago, and got very interested in the therapeutic potential of play – in ways we might help the children create an environment in which they could experience all the curiosity, experimentation, exploration, imagination and recovery that make play so extraordinary.  There’s so much to read, always more papers that cite more books – how will we ever catch up?

I also found a short film of the ever-brilliant Fraser Brown in three parts, in which he discusses a definition of Playwork broad enough to encompass Play Therapy as a branch of it.

Gosh – is it 100 posts already?

I started this blog as a way to think about play and playwork, children and childhoods in a public forum – and to see who got in touch because of it.  I can honestly say that doing so has changed my life, and enriched it beyond measure.

In honor of that, and because I’m a big ole soppy hippie at heart, I’m posting a poem.  I found it online a year or so ago, but can’t seem to find it there now.  I’m happy to do my part to re-release it into the wild – in part (of course) because I think it has something eloquent to say about play, about ourselves, and about what it means to be alive.

Imagination is a River of Powers

We need the voices of all the people

We have ever been

To vibrate in our cells

So that we may choose from this abundance

The names for our highest aspirations.

From In a Ribbon of Rhythm, by Lebogang Mashile.

Popping-Up on Governor’s Island

This week Sharon Unis, Erin Davis and I moved our stuff onto Governor’s Island – the site of our summer-long Pop-Up Adventure Playground.

Governor’s Island is a small, non-residential island only two minutes by ferry from Manhattan.  Free from cars and open only in the summer, it becomes a Narnia-like park for the city’s residents and visitors – here briefly, brilliantly, and then gone again.  We are there as part of the FIGMENT NYC festival’s sculpture garden, and so had the joy of driving our little van on early to get set up.

We pulled flat-pack plastic boxes, like giant Tupperware, out of the U-haul and assembled them beside our grassy spot.  Some of the other FIGMENT NYC contributors were also there setting up and the shape of the festival, and indeed the summer, was beginning to become clear.

Into one box went the fabric, the huge lengths of brightly colored jersey and the little scraps donated by the owner of a cutting room in the Garment District.

Into another box went the cardboard tubes donated by an architecture firm, the grass stakes and a heap of thin whippy bamboo poles.

The third box was full of the things that defied categorization – the tupperware containers of various sizes, the crayons and the chalks and the blue-painted clothes pegs.  Sample squares of tiles, small and hard and perfect.  Poker chips, and multicolored drinking straws.

As promised on the weather report, the heavens opened and fat raindrops came falling down.  I split my (only) jeans clambering in and out of the van.  We were deciding what to leave on the island and what to bring with us, throwing informational postcards and sign-up sheets into a tote bag to take home again.

It was the start of a new location, with that holiday feeling of novelty and anticipation. It made me think of other locations, other set-ups.  There was a play garden where I had been Senior for awhile and I recalled the pleasure and responsibility of getting there first.  Doing the Health and Safety checks and then sitting with a last hot coffee in china mug, surveying the place that was now perfectly quiet but soon to be the site of epic battles, great feats of generosity.

The actual staging will come later, the distributing of materials in half-formed suggestions in the landscape that happens before a session.  We looked around now to start thinking of the possibilities.  This hill would be good for rolling.  The boxes could face this view and serve as benches or jumping platforms.  Stakes and ribbons could populate the lawn like daisies.

It is a carnivalesque feeling to open a site like this one.  Perhaps places have memories, and personalities already, and this place is prepared for an art festival.  To our right is an astro-turf covered Stealth Fighter which camouflages against the grass.  Behind us, a woman is knitting sweaters for tree trunks out of plastic bag strips.  I’ve been thinking of them in a Northern British accent as ‘tree cosies’.  The whole landscape is playful already – large crowds will be coming here in little groups, expecting a day out doing something unusual.

In other places, those small neighborhood spaces selected precisely because they are so poor for play, the atmosphere is different.  Play-deprived neighborhoods sometimes feel cold, and you are uncertain of the welcome you might receive the first few times out.  You need to ‘warm them up’ a little, with your materials and your enthusiasm.  You are a guest in someone else’s front yard, and you need to prove yourself reliable and interesting.  Then you begin to build trust and relationships with the people who come, start to know the play-selves of the children who attend.

All these different places to play, all these different contexts for playwork.  Each offers a particular set of possibilities and suggestions – the only guarantee in any of them is that by the end of the day you’ll have been surprised.

(Only 17 days left to raise $7000!  We’re using crowd-source fundraising to match our initial grant for this 4-month long Pop-Up Adventure Playground.  Help out by donating or helping us to spread the word:  http://www.indiegogo.com/pop-up-adventure-play)

Good morning

I just got this one, inside of my breakfast cookie.

Say hello to others.  You will have a happier day.

Well, hello there!

Paper slips

I’ve been feeling receptive lately, vaguely but surely open to new ideas and suggestions.  These whispers from the world might come from anywhere – dark windows seen through the trees, a sentence in an otherwise mediocre novel.  Fortune cookies.

First of all, I love them.  I used to eat them with my dog when I was a kid, carefully prying them into halves with my thumbs and giving one piece to him.  His big pink tongue would reach out and scoop it up and he’d sigh, then settle against my leg.  The fortune was all mine, but I’d read it out to him and try to make it relevant to his life.

Even accounting for my pro-fortune cookie bias, I’ve been having a run on coincidences lately when it comes to their typed paper slips.

I received this one a few days ago – the first thing to come into my hand after a surprising and promising connection hands me a business card.

A chance meeting opens new doors in success and friendship.

Then, inside a cookie taken as a sugary break from a round of emails with Eddie Nuttall (the first I’ve had in years that came with a bibliography):

No problem can sustain the assault of sustained thinking.

The email thread been a conversation about play and love, and I’d been thinking that starting a new enterprise is so exciting, such a leap of faith that feels sometimes like very risky play.

I made myself dinner and let myself feel proud of a piece of work I’d just accomplished.  “If this is being nearly 30,” I thought, “then I’ll take it”. A series of soul-sucking jobs before I got into play had given me a combination of low expectations and low tolerance for boredom when it came to employment, and I’d never thought of work as a place where so much could be learned about oneself.  I’d not expected to to find a field so full of debates about intuition and mystery, about what constitutes a life well lived, and I’d not expected to find work that taught me new ways to navigate the world (and to consider the worlds of the past, the future, and of dreaming).  Taking a last fortune cookie out of the bag left from a mammoth delivery last week, I unrolled and read the following message:

If I bring forth what is inside me, what I bring forth will save me.

And it felt true.

On love and play

Recently I was part of a long email chain with Eddie Nuttall, Penny Wilson and Kelda Lyons.  We had been talking collectively about how one works with adults who are anti-play – or who claim to be advocates of play but carry so much fear and suspicion that their conception of play is in itself oppressive to children.  We were reminding one another to view these adults with the same sympathy that we would if they were still children chronologically - to understand their position as one of play deprivation, even if they are busy passing this deprivation along to another generation.

Something in this has been niggling away in the back of my mind ever since.  Finally occurred to me that nearly everything we’d been saying about play – about the human need for it, its inevitable bubbling up in people as a life force, our need to perceive those needs and live within them – could just as easily have been said about love.  Much of it already has.

If we consider love to be verb (following on from  bell hooks) then it becomes also an expansion of possibilities, a celebratory connection with people and the world.  Love offers us a transformative potential, if we can accept it, and shows us our best selves, our most sympathetic and receptive selves.  Love is where we practice true responsibility, and when we are living in love we might experience it as a calm alertness to chances for joy.  Love is respectful and intuitive and brave, seeking connection while celebrating difference.  It feels like a blooming of the self in response to sunlight.

We might experience fear as its physical opposite, as a contracting sensation in the chest or stomach, a cooling of the limbs.  We might associate it with controlling behavior, a preference for standardization and predictability, a suspicion of novelty or change.   We might say how fear places limits upon your relationships and exploration of the world and shrinks those boundaries in all the time.  We might characterize people who live in fear as doom-seers and doom-sayers, suffering through their own closed response circuit in which everything is experienced as difficult, disheartening, a cause for further concern.  We might say that fear breeds fear, that we get good at the things we practice and when it comes to fear that is a damned shame.

It seems to me that fear and love can be seen as existing along a line together.  They are absolutely linked – because we fear losing what we love, and in some twisted way we love our terrors so dearly that we refuse to let them go.  In any relationship (including playwork), we are always trying to balance our good intuition and our learned anxieties to find our best judgement.  We know that moving from love feels like a response, while moving from fear feels like a reaction.  In between those two points are the acts of ordinary confusion, the intertwined impulses that lead to (among other things) our modern paranoid overprotection of children.

Love and play are different – but they are on the same side opposing fear, offering ways to experience, accept and transform the world as empowered individuals.  Both seem to me our inborn mechanisms for finding beautiful truths.  When we live in love or play, we are our richest selves, our truest freest bravest selves.  When we love and when we play, we are most alive.

I believe that love and play overlap – and that this overlap might be called Playwork.  As bell hooks says, “love is an action” – and I think that one way of understanding playwork is as a loving act in support of play.  When we do playwork we are helping someone else in their processes of being and becoming, their creation or incorporation of new or deep or experimental selves that are all part of the same human soul.

And when we do it right, when we do it wholeheartedly and reflectively and with attentive joy – then we birth a similar process in ourselves.

Below is a poem created by Eddie, restructuring words of mine from that email thread in a new and beautiful formation:

I think

The fear people feel is massive

I think

Fear opposes play

Is the opposite of love;

It is a shrinking emotion.

We know better

Play can expand the world.

But the instinct is twisted inside for many

Spilling out of control as fear.

They have turned towards a darker place

Where suspicion reigns in a collective amnesia

Whispering of all that has slipped away.

I want to shout

But that won’t work at all.

We need to make something beautiful possible

For adults also

To support them through this process

As they wake and creak to unfamiliar sensations - 

As they start to play.