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. We recommend committing to all four sessions in the series. Play deepens when we keep showing up together, as co-conspirators. Drop-ins also welcome. We make no promises about continuity behaving itself.

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 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.

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.

What happens when when the jesters in us practice marronage & leave the "safety" of the sanctioned, received yarn? In this writing workshop, we may practice poetic leaping, pick chaotic characters to toss into the middle of one another's stories, or draw world-building maps of collaborative futures that tap dance on the ruins of all that burns. Those seeking to find a childish spirit of play, boundary testing, & experimentation will hopefully come away from this session with their trickster gene all alight!

Maria Pinto is a Boston area naturalist, essayist, and fictioneer. She leads regular fungal forays at Arnold Arboretum & her writing has appeared in Science, Arnoldia, and Orion, where she’s a contributing editor. Her book of lyric essays inspired by fungi, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival was the recipient of the Don Kissel Prize for Nonfiction and other awards.

Dreamplay is a generative, play-based experience that has gatherers innerstand themselves by working with the messages, resources and insights embedded in their dreams. Uniquely, this methodology, helps dreamers harness insight from collective wisdom while centering their own intuitive knowing. This people’s healing modality is safe, powerful, effective and a little bit whimsical.

Asia Dorsey embraces the earth. She follows her dreams of nurturing collective libration through revelation and radical self discovery. As an Advanced Dream Teacher and student of Jungian, Tantric and Toltec lineages she facilitates Dreamplay nationally and internationally using performance art and authentic relating to cultivate the strategic imagination needed to dream forward new realities. When she is not dreaming, she is seeding embodied liberation through Food and Herbal Medicine education through Bones Bugs and Botany.

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. Bring some objects to the session and a phone to snap some photos!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This session is rooted in the belief that clowning is a beautiful tool for coming to know and love our deepest selves. Through clown games, reflective practice, and the quiet act of saying yes to what you feel, participants begin to unlearn the conditioning that keeps them at arm's length from themselves.

Mery Miguez is a coach, guide, & red nose clown. She believes that the most revolutionary thing you can do is choose to be exactly who you are. For most of her life, Mery felt she was too intense, too much, somehow not quite right. She spent years trying to "fix" herslef. Then, in 2007, a friend invited her to a clown workshop & everything changed: she discovered that the very things she had been trying to fix about herself were her greatest gifts.

Join this improvisational play space where we vocally play together! Mind Meld is a group improv & speaking exercise where we play with what's emerging in the moment, bringing a collective voice through many individual brains. Stretch your sense of possibility, practice camaraderie, think on your feet, make sound gestures, & embody the mycelial network. You'll be invited to leave your desk & sit somewhere else in the session. 

NOTE: This session will be capped at 18 participants in the interest of not overwhelming the minds melding in the Zoom. Please come early if your neurons want in on the action. 

Sarah Durlacher is an organisational designer, facilitator, & social practice artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). She blends technical rigour with creative, embodied practices, using acro yoga, contact improvisation, & absurdist play to invite people into deeper connection with themselves & each other. Her creations include Aliens: Earthparty, an immersive performance & Sloth Partee, a series of gatherings built around play, slowness, & rest.

What does your body know that you have never managed to say? Together we’ll play with whatever your body is yearning to express, and make something out of what we find, with whatever is in reach. Then it goes into the post to one person in your life who has never quite known what it’s like in here.

mari rossi is an artist, researcher and kin of ten. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Toronto and her autotheoretical dissertation explored disability, leaking, and learning to play with the more-than-human. She is now training as an art therapist at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. mari works with watercolour, collage, and mail, and lives between Toronto, Canada and Bahia in Brasil, her home country. She is stewarding Exú’s Post: Making Art Together-Apart, ten's translocal mail-art experiment beginning in January 2027, and comes to the Playgrounds curious about what the post can carry.

A playspace for sharing and exploring fairy stories. We'll begin with a story circle on various "hidden beings" from our own cultures or lives, and then venture together through several portals into less and more enchanted worlds. With the fairy tale as a technology for holding our worlds amongst others, we'll experience why our crises call for re-enchantment and how an elf might help.

Sadie Rittman is a writer and anthropologist focused on ecological re-enchantment, hidden worlds, and meaning-making in metacrisis. Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Edge Effects, The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Perspectiva, and elsewhere. She was born in New York, raised in Singapore, and has lived across many worlds.

A playful & mystical gathering to explore slowness in our bodies, thoughts and spirit. Modernity forces us to move at an unnatural pace that fosters disconnection, illness & obsessive thinking. What happens when we reconnect ourselves with the rhythms of the earth, cosmos & the interconnected web of life? This space will offer experiments in movement, meditation & with our creative intuition to find attunement with the sacred art of slowness.

Noelle Ghoussaini (she/her) creates performance, ritual and sacred gathering with and for community. Rooted in the mysticism, histories and land of her ancestral lineages in Lebanon and beyond, she weaves spaces of homecoming. Most recently, Noelle founded SacredSpace which curates intimate and large-scale collective, creative, healing journeys. Come visit :) createsacredspace.art | noelleghoussaini.com

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?"

Manish Ruparel is. His 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, alone.

This session is a rendition of the famous Mafia game in which players are immersed in an eco-philosophical trial on the occurring thefts of our futures. The Mafia are the secret architects of destruction and the rest of the playmates are fugitives, attempting to surface alternative truths and protect their village. In nocturnal assemblages, the architects selectively exile people, & in the mornings, arguments are presented by the villagers regarding their suspects.

NOTE: This session will be capped at 25 participants so that all will have a chance to play. Please come early if you want a seat on the court.

Ishān Aggarwal is an activist-ecologist, movement organiser, and climate educator based in Goa. His lifework is to resource collective spaces of inquiry and social imaginations for ecosocialist futures. He serves as a co-finder at the centre for spiritual ecology and graduated from Schumacher College.

Oddkin are the unlikely relations we make along the way, human and otherwise. In this two-part series, we’ll make something from wherever we each are, then release it into the hands of the postal system, addressed to one other person in this call — someone far away, probably a stranger. Three weeks later we’ll meet again to open together what found us, and listen to what it might want next. And if something doesn’t arrive in time — or at all — we learn to play together with loss. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU MUST COMMIT TO COMING TO BOTH SESSIONS!

mari rossi is an artist, researcher and kin of ten. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Toronto and her autotheoretical dissertation explored disability, leaking, and learning to play with the more-than-human. She is now training as an art therapist at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. mari works with watercolour, collage, and mail, and lives between Toronto, Canada and Bahia in Brasil, her home country. She is stewarding Exú’s Post: Making Art Together-Apart, ten's translocal mail-art experiment beginning in January 2027, and comes to the Playgrounds curious about what the post can carry.

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.

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.

The forbidden: those things and places we should not play with or go to. We've all heard: "Yes, you can play, but stay where I can see you." Don't go 'round the corner. Don't go into the woods. Don't go into the basement, the cellar, the cave. Don't play those sorts of games — play these instead. So we're asking, how and what does the forbidden play? In what ways are we already playing, even under conditions that don't or can't fit our definitions of play? In what ways are we being played-with, exorbitantly, by excessive fields and tricksters beyond the abilities of our perception and ideas about bodies? Water flows. It also boils, floods, rusts and shifts shape. Don't go into the water. It's dangerous. You are forbidden to come to this session!

Craig Slee is a disabled writer, consultant, & theorist dealing with mythology, folklore, dis/ability, magic & culture. A recovering philosopher, he writes and feels and talks from the multitude of wheelchair-bodies and ancestral crip-fields that sustain him, and have done so for from birth. As a gleeful co-conspirator, he attempts to crip ideas of agency and activity, self-hood, embodiment, and technology, and the stories people tell themselves about the project known as ‘being human’.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his children, Alethea Aanya & Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. He is the founder of ten and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains. Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos & inspired by Yoruba cosmologies. 

This is a session to play with the parts of self that don’t want to play, using Psychodrama, authentic-movement, and drawing exercises. Participants will be invited to move between different positions: inhabiting rageful, grieving, and other unplayful parts-of-self within their storms. Like ducks bobbing on the water, we’ll witness ourselves and one another in the storms. The longing for this workshop is to co-create a  shadowy playground that embraces voicing our resistances, imagining with our grief, and de-thawing our frozen responses. Each aspect of the session will be invitational, with many ways to participate, including moving, watching, writing, drawing, speaking, or choosing not to be seen.

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, therapist, and educator whose work aims to expand transformative inquiry through relational games, role play, performance art, and conversation scores. He co-founded The School of Making Thinking & is the founder and director of The Deep Play Institute. Trained in Circling, Psychodrama, Buddhist Meditation, and Processwork, Aaron teaches philosophy at the City College of New York. Learn more at www.finblooming.com.

Netta Sadovsky is a therapist and artist based in Philadelphia and Assistant Director at The Deep Play Institute, where they lead retreats and workshops playing between expressive, spiritual, and interpersonal practice. They love contact improv and circling, and plays with the aestheticization of interpersonal and transpersonal group process through performance, video, drawing, and sound.

The crises are serious. Our politicians & leaders are not. In a world that sometimes feels like a clown show, what would it be like to play a character? In this playground we embrace the mischievous & learn from movements around the world (such as the Cockroach Janta Party in India) to collectively practice absurdity, satire, & trickster behaviour as serious political tools. Authoritarians respond to civic upsurge by resorting to dehumanising language calling people rat or  aliens. We are going to put these labels to work in this session turning such perceived insults into statements of humour, defiance & solidarity. You are invited to arrive as more than yourself in a costume of your choosing. Think: Serious play meets serious times. DISCLAIMER: This is an attempt to redirect rage, not to suppress it.

Sabrina Meherally is a Sindhi Gujarati Canadian artist, facilitator, and decolonial researcher whose work explores memory, land, and embodied knowledge systems. Her practice bridges community arts, decolonial inquiry, and relational facilitation. Sabrina says she is presently best described not by title or achievement, but as living inquiry – a question in motion. A person with rotating, compounding ways of being in the world. A Writer. Dreamer. Knowledge sharer. Ceremonial tattooist. Archivist. Mastikhor. Researcher. Aunty. A five-year-old in a forty-year-old body. 

Ishān Aggarwal is in a restful trough of his life. He is based in Goa, India, and dwells in-between imaginations of low-intensity, local, caring ecosocialist futures. Previously, he has offered himself as an activist-researcher, climate educator, movement builder, sustainability advocate, and even as a capital markets trader where he met the monsters of our extractive systems.

Public spaces carry a rulebook about how a body should behave in public: walk with purpose, don't linger, don't draw attention. That rulebook is applied unevenly, and women, queer people and anyone read as out of place feel its edges more sharply than others. Our session is a slow, guided walk through Bangalore neighbourhoods, where small and deliberate acts of play loosen that rulebook for an afternoon or an evening. Doing this in company is how we practise permission, so that moving differently in public starts to feel like a right we had simply stopped using. More info coming soon about  how to sign up!

Dhaval Kothari & Alifiya Mutaher are the co-founders of Lagori Collective, an experimental research and design studio from South Asia, based in India. Lagori works to expand the conditions under which multiple futures remain possible. They partner with businesses, mission-driven organisations, cultural institutions, and philanthropic foundations on research, strategic foresight, systems strategy, and cultural programming. Their practice begins with participatory research into how change is lived and negotiated in everyday life, across people, culture

More info coming soon.

Please note this is a private event.

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.

Come join us at the Southern Maine Women's Reentry Center for the world premiere of an original play created and performed through PLAY by a group of currently incarcerated Maine Inside Out artists. As an audience member you will transform into a spec - actor and have chances to play a few games, witness and absorb an original piece of art and express what moves inside you because of it. Come pLay with Us! Email admin@maineinsideout.org by November 12 with your full legal name, date of birth, and which show(s) you’d like to attend.

Maine Inside Out is a nonprofit organization based in Lewiston, Maine. We create theater with people inside prisons and in the community. Our mission is to ignite collective creativity and inspire social action by engaging youth and adults impacted by systemic oppression to create and share original theater. Maine Inside Out envisions communities and systems that see each person’s humanity, our shared connection, and our place in the natural world. Our vision is to transform a culture of punishment and isolation to one that thrives in connection, dignity and accountability. 

Although Western canons have often positioned thinking in opposition to the body, aspiring to objectivity, thinking has always been a situated, contextual, and embodied process. Play often encourages or involves a change of position, posture, or role. How does our bodily position affect our position towards the worlds we inhabit? In the Position Lies the Position: Thinking as If Kneading Dough to Make Bread, we will notice what thoughts might emerge when we are lying down, squatting, off balance, holding weight, very close to one another, looking upwards, looking downwards, compressed, or supporting one another, we will playfully explore how play can become a world-making tool.

At her core, Daniela is deeply curious. It keeps her learning, unlearning, and moving between forms of knowledge. Daniela Medina Poch (b. Bogotá) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator based in Berlin, currently part of the curatorial team at Gropius Bau where she coordinates BAUBAU: A Play Space for Kids. Through expanded listening, play-abilities, and relational practices, her work explores ecological imaginaries, systems of value, and the politics of knowledge production.