Let’s Be Weird Together and Change the World!

I’ve recently taken to saying that during the COVID pandemic I’ve made 1,314 new close friends. That’s because of the Global Play Brigade (GPB). And I’m only halfway joking. 

In my blog today I want you to meet just a few of those close friends, Rita Ezenwa-Okoro of Nigeria, Fernanda Liberali of Brazil, and Jeff Gordon of Israel. A few months ago we came together to talk about the GPB on the new podcast series, All Power to the Developing, hosted by the East Side Institute; the international center for performance activism and social therapeutics. 

What a conversation!

Rita, Fernanda and Jeff are brilliant, passionate and amazing. Rita is a performance activist, cultural communications expert and entrepreneur, and CEO of the awesome Nigerian youth NGO, Street Project Foundation. Fernanda is a teacher educator, researcher, author and professor in Brazil, with more academic degrees than you can count on three hands (really), and the founder of the Brincadas, an activist and play based multidisciplinary network of youth, educators, poor and middle class people, therapists, performers and students. Jeff is trained in community/social theater, Clown, therapeutic clowning and drama therapy, and as a lifelong activist he is passionate about co-creating grassroots theater and social and personal transformation across diverse communities.

To hopefully entice you to listen to the podcast, (entitled Let’s Be Weird Together and Change the World – here’s the link again), you can read just a few snippets from this awesome trio… 

Rita Ezenwa-Okoro:

…play helps develop our minds in ways that we can create solutions to problems that exist, but not in a way where we’re just grappling or struggling with a problem. Play gives us the opportunity to imagine new things; we can play with even the most difficult problems and find new and different solutions for them. And so an exciting thing about play is that one can do that, develop our minds together —  and you begin to create things that weren’t there before. 

Fernanda Liberali:

Play is a collective collaboration…and with play and our imaginations, we transcend our immediate ways of acting, responding… we find freedom together. We create what one of the Brazilian writers I like very much says, it’s a very revolutionary way. Because we create the common, the thing that goes beyond who I am, who you are, to create something that is the we, the we together — overcoming the limitations and becoming a very powerful instrument for us to live in the world. So because of that, I think play is not only developmental but revolutionary.

Jeff Gordon:

…and love is definitely a resource that guides the GPB, along with a number of other positive emotions, like hope and optimism. Just hearing somebody and being heard is just so essential at this time. I think, also, interestingly enough, fear and anxiety is being addressed in a very authentic way. People are not saying, “haha, I laugh, laugh, laugh, because I’m at a laughter session.” The GPB laughter session has also been a way of addressing the pain. There’s a famous clown, Charlie Chaplin who said, “In order to truly laugh, you need to be able to play with your pain.” And people are bringing this authenticity into this space. 

See what I mean? Join me and them in this terrific podcast. And join us at the Global Play Brigade as well! We just turned ONE year old, and we are just getting started…

Something cool…

At the end of each of my blogs I share a neat thing I found (or a friend sent me). Today’s site is for exploring sound and music in every corner of the world. Check out the amazing Radio Garden to take in the sounds from Aleppo to the Galapago Islands to Montreal.