jestering towards the promiscuous possible
NOVEMBER 9 - DECEMBER 4 | 2026
What if we approached playfulness as a blossoming of microcosmic revolutions, and laughter as a defiant, political act?
You may be wondering where to begin. If you are reading this, you are exactly where you need to be. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Hold for a few moments. Slowly release.
Do you remember when you were free? With your face toward the sun’s aura spilling through your eyelids? Do you remember the last time you laughed so hard you cried? That moment of hilarity that took your breath but gave you delight? Do you remember the last time you danced with wild abandon? How those judgmental gazes got caught in your sweat’s descent, becoming vapor? How the furious rhythmic pounding of your feet, hands, head, and heart drowned out your inner critic? Do you remember the last time you wore exactly what you wanted, how you wanted? You didn’t dress to please others or to adhere to some societal code. Remember how those fabrics and colors that seemed to clash with conformity created harmony deep inside of you? Do you remember the last time you created for the sake of creation? It wasn’t content. It was ritual the way you snip, weave, rip, strum, layer, scribble, blend, solder, bleed, and mend for no one but yourself. Do you remember the last time you spent the day doing nothing at all? How you discovered that “nothing” is a myth? How boredom became a nap that led to a daydream that inspired a sentence, your hands in soil, a soul-nourishing meal, a body that remembered play is medicine? Can you remember your playfulness?
That’s your medicine.
Welcome to the Playgrounds.
The Playgrounds is a monthlong event hosted by ten (The Emergence Network) happening mostly online from November 9th - December 4th, 2026. Together, we will convene a diverse menagerie of playmates – human and more-than – to plumb the depths of the ludic. ten will host approximately 8 - 9 online offerings per week, hosted by an incredibly diverse group of contributors over the four weeks of the event.
Play sessions will happen on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays throughout the month. The exact times of our sessions will be announced in mid-October; we aim to schedule sessions that will work for multiple time-zones across the globe. The virtual encounters will last between 30 and 120 minutes each. We will also hold metabolization sessions around the five PLAY THREADS on some Tuesdays and Thursdays. As the purpose of this event is to actually play together, all sessions will be interactive, experimental and participatory, so if you sign up… please come ready to engage. This is not an event for bystanders. Your ticket to the Playgrounds offers you access to all online sessions, a community platform for asynchronous weaving and weekly spaces for integration. Local hosts will also offer a few in-person self-organized gatherings; access to these will depend on the organizing teams on the ground.
We will explore the textiles and textures of play by practicing with five threads:
Each time we allow ourselves to lean into our playfulness, we shed the selves we manufactured to survive. Play is a strategic undoing, an invitation to be our most ridiculous, slippery, uncapturable selves. Playfulness is how we’ve survived and how we will survive. It is a provocation, a gesture (jester?) that disrupts by virtue of existence. Playfulness destabilizes captivity and queers power dynamics because it is an unexpected response to oppression. It restores the senses, helping us to locate ourselves after years of self- and cultural-disconnection. Play makes awkward safe again. And if we allow ourselves to linger in it long enough, the awkwardness will soften our defenses – but only where it is necessary we soften.
For many of us, play has become a wound and a risk. We know that play can crack open possibilities to meet the world and each other in strange, unexpected ways. Yet, many of us have forgotten how to play and rarely find ourselves in environments that encourage playfulness. These times call for spaces to transform wound into portal. Spaces where we feel safe to touch our fleshy edges. Spaces where open palms signal not lack, but a renewed capacity for more life.
The Playgrounds is a playful conjuring, an attempt to embody our playfulness as a way of being. This offering aims to disrupt that which restricts our capacity to hold each other intimately (or, at the very least our capacity to witness each other) in all our dimensions. Our intention is that playfulness – as ancestor, as force of nature, as deity, as medicine, as strategy – spills out of The Playgrounds and into your daily living, loving, and being.
Purchase your ticket to participate in the Playgrounds here. Once you have registered, you will receive a confirmation email and a welcome note with more details on the scheduled sessions and an invitation to join the community platform about five days before the event begins on November 9th.
This Playgrounds is being offered in the spirit of the gift culture. We do have a range of suggested contribution amounts (between $25USD and $500USD). No one will be turned away due to lack of funds or access to a debit/credit card. If you are unable to make a financial contribution, feel free to reach out to us about your situation: playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org.
The team is selecting and scheduling new sessions daily! Keep checking back for updates!
Play’s Mutiny
with Annabelle Berrios
Wednesdays, November 11 - December 2 · 19:00 UTC (your time here)
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Play’s Mutiny is about noticing and engaging life’s invitations to play on our own terms. In this 4-week series, we will limber our permission and curiosity to engage the unexpected using whatever is at hand, and even create objects to assist our insubordinate ways. The goal is to notice what happens when we loosen our grip on how we play.
See bio
Based in Spain, Annabelle Berrios works at the intersections of collaboration, creativity, and transformation. She cares deeply about dignity, freedom, wellbeing and joy for everyone, everywhere, and… she considers the path the destination. Play helps her align with dynamism & loosen rigidity. Her practices as a creative inform how she approachs relational goals as a leadership consultant and coach.
Playing W/ what we cannot yet name
with Agatha Liz
Wednesday, November 18 · 15:00 UTC (your time here)
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Playing with What We Cannot Yet Name is a participatory artistic practice inviting participants to transform a fear, anger, or unanswered question into a visual creature. This becomes a playful way to explore what we may not yet know how to name or understand. This session will be in Portuguese with English inerepreation.
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Agatha Liz is a Black Brazilian artist, educator, psychologist and researcher from the peripheries of São Paulo. Her practice explores how creativity can open new ways of relating to ourselves, one another & the world. She is the creator of MAEH, a space that brings together art, self-research & embodied ways of learning. Her work is rooted in peripheral territories & in play, art and imagination as spaces of possibility, connection and transformation.
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Writing poetry cannot be taught nor learned, but conditions can be created where both can be disregarded and a poem still appears to dent a blank page. The Poetry Pharmacy creatus just such conditions. The workshop encompasses self-probing, curated recitations, creative writing exercises, facilitated reflection... and the co-creation of poetry themed around restoration, revival, and healing.
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Rachit Sharma is a poet and the founder of Dillipoetry, a literary platform known for its thematic and experimental poetry walks, workshops, and training programmes. He previously designed and facilitated leadership journeys for young social leaders across India with Youth Alliance. His work engages a range of social concerns, and his poetry has appeared in over 25 literary platforms and anthologies.
Creating in the Now
with Meghana AT
Time and date TBD
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What happens when I create something that has meaning only in the present context, which makes sense only to my partners in the space? In this game, we play with random objects around us, create meaning out of nothing, build on each others' fragments to create stories that last only as long as the session. It's a practise in stretching our imagination, strengthening presence, & rehearsing detachment.
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Meghana AT is a theatre artist/addict, who has been exploring multiple roles in the field since 2012: actor, writer, director, producer, production manager, teacher, & dramaturg – with more experiments to come. She has a Master's in Authorial Creativity & Pedagogy from The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She's the founder of tafreehwale, a theatre company engaged in original, political, playful theatre making & training.
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Playing with Purpose: Obstacles as Superpowers asks the question: what if the very things we see as obstacles or shortcomings could become our greatest strengths? In this interactive workshop, we’ll play and reflect to see how we can use our everyday stories and our Clown to express absurdity. And, on the flip-side how we can integrate playfulness more and more into our everyday rhythms.
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Dan is a certified Laughter Yoga instructor and founder of Unified Playfulness, creating spaces for adults to disrupt habitual patterns, & bring more resilience, originality & joy into the systems they inhabit. He is especially interested in the connections between play, clowning & mindfulness and how these can be integrated to connect to the mystery and beauty/absurdity of being human.
Poetry of Relations
An invitation into more-than-tomato storytelling
with Foresta Collective
Time and date TBD
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This experience will invite participants to explore playful togetherness and how we hold each other innerly through multispecies storytelling, that is a collective rather than individual practice of cross-pollination and mutual reinterpretation. Rooted in embodied perception, imaginative leaps, improvisation-in-writing and joy of being together beyond the prison of identities.
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Foresta Collective tends to the living cultural ecology a platform for regenerative practice & inquiry into the living & liveable worlds (now growing as a real forest). Rather than seeking recognition or inclusion within oppressive existing systems, the work unfurls through listening (to this moment), refusal (of inherited forms of violence, whether disciplinary, institutional, personal, or relational), and desire (for more caring relational fields, inner and outer).
Playlab:
Embodied Research for Rehearsing Liberation
with Kate Morales
Date and time TBD
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Playlab: Embodied Research for Rehearsing Liberation will combine ritual, improv, & theater games around a specific line of research. Our embodied knowledge-making through games translates into specific, applicable skills we need in community-building. The session is intentionally intergenerational, nurturing the connection between the different wisdoms of youth & adults.
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Kate Morales’ work as a Somatic Scribe amplifies our social ecosystem’s capacity to know ourselves intimately. They are a teacher of cultural somatics, visual writing systems, and applied theater whose work surfaces latent wisdom and power in a collective towards decolonial healing. They are also a resident farmer in their co-housing community and a joyful parent in a queer, radical unschooling family living on Maskoke territory in Atlanta, GA.
the red nose state: being awefull
with Manish Ruparel
Date and time TBD
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The red nose state points to the spirit behind clowning that brings play, curiosity, wonder and a deep courage to go into the unknown. This session will bring people closer to their inner clown states and into a state of connection, absurdity and play. The question at the heart is: "How can a state of play help people view the circus around us not as a threat, but as something we can dance with?"
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Manish Ruparel's work starts with what's happening around him and how it resonates in his body. He often lives a nomadic life searching for something he doesn't yet know yet, but knows what it feels like. Every now and then he creates performances, hosts workshops and courses and finds different ways to bring people together. He recently started a company called Flying Fish Arts Collective.
Drawing on Accompaniment
with Krista Dragomer
Date and time TBD
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Accompaniments are a thing added, happening alongside. In music, in food, accompaniments, often simple on their own, bring liveliness to an experience. How might we accompany ideas? How might curiosities, intentions, or challenges shift, open, or reshape in surprising ways? Through this experimental drawing session, we'll explore accompaniment as a modality of playing at the edges.
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Krista Dragomer is New York based artist working in drawing, sculpture, and collaborative multimedia projects that move between the ecological present and & speculative timelines. Her artworks depict bodies that resist easy categories, bodies that don't sort neatly into human and environment, human and nonhuman, living and dying. Her process additive & sedimentary: as she fleshes out drawn, cast, layered, and hand-sculpted forms.
Aerin Dunford
Aerin Dunford is a network-weaver and connector of people, ideas and organizations. She’s a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. Over the years, Aerin has been claiming her weirdness (a rare mix of prudishness with explosive experimental impulses) more and more. She believes that the work of unlearning and unpacking Western value-systems and indoctrination, and decolonizing the mind are vitally important in these strange end-times.
Austen Smith
Austen Smith (they/them) is a masculine-of-center, non-binary wordsmith, social researcher, community worker, and artist. They have over two decades in community advocacy and organizing, program stewardship, and community participatory research design. They are also the founder of ImaginationDoulas, a spirit-led creative education platform that supports Black and other culturally marginalized creatives to approach their creative practice as a spiritual discipline.
Ishu Subramanian
Ishwarya is a student of grief, nature, theatre, and the elements – especially water. She is currently exploring playfulness as a way of expressing, relating, and being. She works at Synergos, bringing Bridging Leadership to the world as a practice that weaves together inner work, systems thinking, and trust based collaboration. She is always on a side quest, seeking curiously, revolting joyfully.
Pooja Kishinani
Pooja Kishinani is a wanderer, dreamer, runner, and researcher from Bengaluru, India. Her lifework is anchored in nurturing transformations towards postcapitalist futures. Pooja is currently pursuing a Masters in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She lives and breathes stories, and can almost always be found at her local library immersed in the wor(l)ds of Ursula K Le Guin or scribbling away in her notebook. She loves cats and coffee.
Who is this for?
The Playgrounds welcomes everyone who is curious about play and is willing to experiment with other ways of living, being, and relating. It may be of particular interest to folks who are exploring play as a practice of nourishment, defiance, disruption, provocation, resistance, joy, and possibility especially within structures and systems that demand control and seriousness.
The Playgrounds is co-created with playmates (human and more-than) from different geographies and cultures. If you have been exploring, or are curious to explore, different modalities of play — such as art-making, embodiment, altar-building, games, co-inquiry, and more — the Playgrounds is for you.
What is the structure for this event? Where will this gathering be hosted?
The event will begin on Monday, November 9th with an opening celebration. Over the next four weeks, there will be approximately 8 - 9 online offerings per week hosted by an incredibly diverse group of contributors. Play sessions will happen on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays throughout the Playgrounds. The exact times of the sessions will be announced in mid-October; we aim to schedule sessions that will work for multiple time-zones across the globe. We will host metabolization sessions oriented around the PLAY THREADS on some Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s not expected, nor will it be possible for participants to show up for all the offerings live. Online sessions will be recorded unless the contributor requests otherwise.
There will also be a handful of place-based, in-person gatherings in different geographical locations which will be self-organised by local hosts. Access to these will depend on the organizing teams on the ground.
Participants are also invited to share and dialogue on the Playgrounds discord channel on their own time before, during and after the event. We will have an online altar room and a game room for people to contribute to, in addition to weekly prompts and questions for people to engage with.
The event will close with online absurdities, games, and mayhem on Friday, December 4th.
What’s required of me to participate?
Curiosity and a willingness to experiment, dream, confabulate, and soften familiar frameworks and modes of meaning-making to make room for the trickster and the unknown.
We invite you to take risks when you can and an ability to make choices around how to engage with this experiment, and a spirit of hospitality and humility especially when engaging with notions and practices of play that may not fit into your worldview and socio-cultural conditioning.
Since the event will mostly take place online, you will need a relatively strong internet connection to join the Zoom video conferencing sessions and participate in the online community forum. It is always enriching when folks can join with their cameras on, though we understand that there are many factors that can impact the feasibility of this option.
Any materials needed for specific sessions will be communicated with participants ahead of time. If you are participating in in-person events, the hosts of these sessions will be in touch in advance with anything that you need to bring or do in preparation for the gatherings.
Will this gathering be offered in languages besides English?
Yes! We will offer a few sessions in languages other than English. We will have simultaneous interpretation for some sessions from English into other languages. Unfortunately we do not have the capacity nor resources to provide language interpretation and translation throughout the entire program. Information about multi-lingual offerings will be posted on the webpage.
If you would like volunteer to help with translation for one or more sessions, please write to us at playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org
Will this be a safe space?
We deeply value participants’ emotional safety and well-being and, at the same time, we cannot promise safety. Because we are sending an open invitation for anyone in the world to join us, our space will contain many differences in worldviews and backgrounds. We hope these differences can create the conditions for new insights and possibilities while knowing that they may also lead to conflict and fragmentation. We are counting on participants to use their discernment around when to prioritize their own safety and when to take risks and leap.
We will offer support to any participant or contributor experiencing challenging emotions during the event via a care and concern form. The ten Core Team reserves the right to intervene, and possibly remove anyone who intentionally or unintentionally creates non-generative conflict, demonstrates behavior that is destructive to the community, is antagonistic to group harmony, or makes it challenging for other members to feel vulnerable or safe. If a participant / contributor engages with you privately in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, please notify us by writing to: playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org.
Can children participate in the Playgrounds?
Absolutely! Children are welcome to participate in the sessions free of cost. If there are any sessions that have an age restriction, (i.e., 16 years and above only), we will clearly indicate these sessions in the schedule that will be shared with all participants.
How much does it cost to register?
This festival is being offered in the spirit of the gift culture. We have a range of suggested contribution amounts (between $25USD and $500USD) based on your relative financial standing. This sliding scale is meant to reflect not only the incredible disparity in economic conditions between different parts of the world but also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms generally from the so-called Global South to the North. Ultimately, the payment system is designed for those with more access to wealth to cover the costs of those with less access to wealth; we trust your discernment of how you personally fit into this economic context.
However, no one will be turned away due to lack of funds or access to a debit/credit card.
If your current financial situation and season in life do not allow you to participate through our sliding scale options, please write to us at playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org.
Funds raised will first go towards meeting any financial requests of our contributors and artists. Any additional funds will go towards supporting The Emergence Network’s work in 2027.
Can I volunteer?
If you’re interested in volunteering at the Playgrounds, please fill out this form by October 15. The form contains a list of volunteer roles we’re seeking for the event. Volunteers will be able to access all sessions at the Playgrounds free of cost.
What if I can only participate in a few sessions?
That’s totally fine. Most of the online sessions will be recorded and shared with participants after the event. You are welcome to participate in what you can and watch the recordings later!
What if I have trouble registering or paying?
If you face any issues with registration or payment, please write to us at playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org
What is your refund policy?
If you purchase a ticket and are not able to join, you can request a full refund (minus administration fees) through November 1st. After this date, unfortunately, we cannot refund any payments. Please get in touch with us at playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org with your request. We reserve the responsibility of turning down requests for refunds.
More questions? Email us at playgrounds@emergencenetwork.org.
“Perhaps it is precisely in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories, and function, that serious worldliness and recuperation become possible.”
— Donna Haraway