Play, Breathe, Grace, Art
Allen Turner
Saturday 28th May, 09:15
We live in a world that doesn’t really give much respect to the need for play. It, play, is often treated as a disposable thing that we become more and more disconnected from as we age and attempt to perform maturity in our world. We engage the world with pragmatic seriousness and goal oriented interactions in an attempt to claim our safe space within our various social strata. In those safe spaces, what little play we hold onto also becomes very goal oriented. It’s locked into containers of distraction that celebrate our participation with achievements and awards; urges us to buy the next and newest version; appetizers us to place on leaderboards; and encourages us to embrace false scarcities scrambling to get special trinkets that we can tie to our identities and continue to confirm and replicate the traumas of colonization and capitalism. This kind of play becomes habit forming and exhausting, but rarely leads us to joy.
Game designer, youth worker, teacher, performer, and relative to the world, Allen Turner, will talk about how play might be one of the great medicines that is hiding in plain sight. Through an exploration of games, roleplay, metaphor, parable and anecdotal experiences of using play to find ways to push against and redefine our traumas and narratives, Turner will invite us to find a place for play in our healing modalities, use it to catch our breath and see our own beauty, and to recognize where play already resides in our personal ecologies and how to bolster it up.
TW: Discussions of child abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, sex and sexual play.