“I shut my eyes in order to see” – Paul Gauguin

The Portrait Exchange is a perfomative game in blind portrait making en masse! No previous drawing experience necessary. Just a sense of adventure and curiosity.

The performance is a wonderful interactive experience that invites people to take a risk, draw, laugh and play. And be part of a growing collection!

www.antheamoys.com

Playful people have all the luck! According to the research, they’re better partners, smarter students, more successful business people, healthier, happier, and more creative overall. Playfulness is our birthright, yet some of us are clearly more playful than others. That goes for societies too! What is playfulness, exactly? Where did it come from? What makes it possible? What blocks it? And how can we unblock it – not just in ourselves but in our world?

In this interactive presentation we’ll look through the long lens of Attachment Theory and explore the roots of playfulness in the first year of life. We’ll discover how our Playgrounds became Proving Grounds, and Battlefields and what it takes to restore the playground again. Because the shortest distance between your most shut down, fearful self and your playful true nature may be no distance at all.

By Gwen Gordon

The Playful Revolution is a movement that strives to re-introduce playfulness into our day-to-day lives. Founded in 2013 the Revolution has been active doing interventions in public space and hosting Play workshops called Play Out’s.

In this Performance Lecture we will cover some theory on designing for Ludic Interventions, pop-up playful happenings. With these theories in mind we will embark on a quest to find ways to incorporate playfulness in our every-day mundane activities. In what way can we challenge ourselves to play with our surroundings? As an example I have challenged myself to slide down the hand-rail of the office building where my studio is in 101 different ways. And how can we challenge our social structures in a playful way? How can we introduce ourselves to someone new without using any words? Should we challenge the way we sit on chairs?

In a Playful Revolution Play Out we will explore different forms of communal Play. With a range of exercises catered to explore different aspects of play be it social, physical or cognitive. Taking inspiration from the New Games Movement and theatre warm-ups it’s a great session with laughter and expression.

Hosted by Sylvan Steenhuis (NL):

Sylvan Steenhuis is an Amsterdam based designer of physical play. After being exposed to Urban Games, during the Bachelor Interactive Performance Design and Games, he got hooked on public space and physical play. He went on to study these practices in his thesis ‘Evoking Playfulness in Public Space by Ludic Intervention’ at the Master of Arts in Performance Design, Utrecht School of the Arts, Netherlands. Currently he is active hosting physical play sessions and working as a freelance designer.

Playful Revolution

Play Talk w00t 2013

Half the power of spoken word and the poetry slam is in effective emceeing. MCs are like skilled leaders of social play- they create an exciting place to try something new, make inclusive play offers and entice skeptics - in short, they Move the Crowd (another term for MC). The focus of this workshop is on both the poem and the MC: democratizing the performance space via play and spoken word.
What does your play poem look like, sound like, feel like? In this non-competitive poetry slam we’ll support each other in remembering, co-constructing and performing our play histories/practices. Moving from heart to voice to stage, we’ll play with rhythm, choral echo and MC tools- this is democraplay at any age!

By Nicole Sumner

Breathing is the essence of living, a common action to all human beings. We can choose to be aware of it, but we rarely do.
The purpose of this playful activity is to raise awareness about our own breathing and other people’s breathing and use this mechanism as a tool for empathy, to explore our ability to understand and share feelings with people around us.
Participants will be guided with instructions and technical aids through a series of breathing exercises that will reconnect them with themselves and with those around them by exploring several conditions: proximity, social interaction, timing, awareness through a different predominant sense (visual, sound and kinesthetic) and synchronicity with other people’s breathing rhythms. This playful context will serve as a playground for intimate interactions and expanded (self) awareness.

By Enrique Perez and Klemen Lilija.

Have you lost your mojo or got bored with life? Are you stuck in a rut and can’t quite figure out how to get out of it? Does work keep getting in the way of your dreams? Have you reached a crossroads and don’t know which way to go?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, it’s time to act swiftly before the zombie virus gnaws away the last bit of your brain and stymies forever your chances of turning your hopes and wishes into reality.

Join Portia Tung, Playmaker 001 and founder of The School of Play, on a whirlwind interactive mini adventure through the science and history of play and how play is essential for adult development and well-being. Play your cards right and you'll leave with plenty of ideas to nurture your inner chimp and make more of your inner human's dreams come true.

About Portia Tung:

Portia is an Executive and Business Agile coach, storyteller and wishmaker. Her pursuit to help people realise more of their potential has led to the pleasant yet all together unexpected discovery that play is essential for the lifelong development of adults and not only children. Portia's research on play has led her to live a more playful life, so much so that she has managed to dream The School of Play.

Twitter: @portiatung

Businesses have been devoting increasing attention and resources to promoting diversity since the early 2000s, but there has been little progress. Recent research suggests that this is because most diversity programs seek to control managers’ thoughts and actions – primarily through “diversity training”.

Laboratory studies show that this approach activates rather than reduces or eliminates bias against women and minorities because people often rebel against such controls: “Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”

Companies get better results when they let go of the control tactics. Well-designed Serious Games, i.e. games that have an educational purpose and are not intended primarily for amusement, can help companies do that. The things that make games “games” – rules of play, chance, narrative – cultivate players’ imaginations, encourage face-to-face dialogue, and welcome emotional engagement. These game elements can be used to engage participants in the process of finding their own solutions to the challenges of inclusive leadership.

In this workshop participants will play Mosaic®, a facilitated Serious Game, developed on the basis of the book, Bridging the Gender Gap: 7 Principles for Achieving Gender Balance (Oxford University Press 2014; 2016), by Dr. Lynn Roseberry and Dr. Johan Roos. Mosaic® uses gender as a starting point to encourage participants to discuss and reflect on common diversity-related dilemmas drawn from the real-life experiences of leaders in all kinds of organizations.

Facilitator: Lynn Roseberry, Ph.D., Executive Director of On the Agenda®, a diversity and inclusion consultancy. Dr. Roseberry has more than 20 years of experience working with gender and diversity issues as a lawyer, scholar and in university management. Her research has focused on legal and political issues relating to discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnicity, and religion.

As a coach, are you looking for simple ways to connect your clients back to their childlike wonder, curiosity, and fun in support of their transformations to being the best versions of themselves?

Are you curious about ways to help your clients tap into their innate creativity and curiosity to reveal important values that will in turn lead them to richer lives?

This experiential workshop, led by coaches trained in the Co-Active coaching methodology, will add to your coaching range by introducing you to: tools and techniques to bring play authentically into your coaching ways to connect you and your clients’ values through the power of play approaches to enable your clients to gain fresh perspectives and break through resistance

You will discover the magic of possibility when the intention to succeed, progress, and advance is served by a playful approach to coaching. You will help your clients unlock their playful spirit as part of their transformation and growth.

Through slides and imagery to stimulate thinking, and an emphasis on practice and exercises to embody and embed playful coaching, you will take away practical tools and approaches you can apply to enhance your and your clients’ coaching experience.

This session is for coaches and anyone interested in exploring how to inject the power of a playful approach in coaching interactions, but everyone is welcome!

By Amanda Page and Meg Lyons

We might be playful individuals, but we work in often distinctly unplayful organisations. To consider this problem, join me for a board meeting. We'll sit around a table. We'll have an agenda. We'll have slides. None of us will have read the papers in advance. There may or may not be coffee. Let's see how far down the agenda we get, before someone says "what if we did it like this..."

By Alex Moseley.

In this practical session, we will uncover some of the common obstacles that get in the way of us playing, and how we might use playfulness itself to fully acknowledge them, lighten up around them, and start to gently dissolve them.

Using games, activities and exercises drawn from theatre, mindfulness and self-development traditions, we will look at both the internal and external blocks that can jolt us out of our play-state, or stop us from getting into a play-state in the first place!

We will get curious about where they come from, before discovering the powerful potential of befriending and playing with these blocks, rather than resisting and ignoring them. Finally, we will discuss and explore some tools that might support us in our playing, in order to help give ourselves and others more permission to play.

About:

Robbie Foulston is a theatre facilitator and explorer of playfulness! He is currently curious about what supports, enables and gives us permission to play, and what the potential power of playfulness is, both individually and in society. He studied Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick, and has trained in general silliness with Holly Stoppit(clown teacher), John Wright (theatre director), Jonathan Kay (international fool), and Jamie Catto (1 Giant Leap, Faithless).

Twitter: @RobbieFoulston

Based on the early stages of a new research project, Helle will present perspectives on and methods to enable participation in playful activities for all children. You can only become a member of a play community if you have sufficient competences for playing and if you have friends to play with. In order to give all children possibilities for being a part of play communities, we need to create inclusive spaces and paths to participation. This is important, since taking part in play is what builds the capacity to play with mates and become great players.

The present workshop will explore play within our urban and institutional contexts as a powerful path to promote Cultural citizenship, Media citizenship and Do-It- Yourself citizenship (as discussed by Miller, 2006, and Hartley, 2013), ways of being and appropriating the contexts we live that resist the fragmentation and commodification of our all-too- serious environments, the walls that we often inadvertently contribute to build and that separate us and reduce us to individuals lost in an increasingly machinised systems

To do this, the workshop will showcase and explore a variety of convivial, community oriented tools, design techniques and insights drawing on a broad set of disciplines and practices, among which Pervasive games, Critical Pedagogy, DIY Media production, Participatory Research, Human Ecology and Psychogeography, to collaboratively compose a hybrid playful urban hacking kit grounded in the Rights of Identity, Media Space, Activism, Attention, Production, Affiliation, Gift, and, most centrally, Play.

The workshop will rely both on my transdisciplinary minded facilitation and on the active participation and the specific competencies of its participants to build, examine, remix and then make publicly available (through a variety of documentation techniques) a playful hacking kit, inclusive of tools of technological, conceptual or aesthetic nature, and ultimately provide both participants and the general publics with the means to develop and adapt their own community based playful interventions in urban and institutional environments, ways of collectively tearing down the walls of seriousness, be them physical and metaphorical.

About:

Luca Morini is a nomadic researcher (currently based in the Disruptive Media Learning Lab of Coventry University), who in his (still early) career traversed the fields of Systems Psychology, Media Education, Critical Pedagogy, Ethnography and Game Studies. In short, he plays a lot, tries to make people play against the system, and writes it down so that it looks like science.

Twitter: @LucaMorini11

If you live in a city - and you don't just want to accept what's there but want to participate in creating and shaping your city and especially your neighborhood? From creative interventions to urban games and civic participation - you can shape the city you live in.

During this workshop, we develop concepts and prototypes that invite citizens to engage in playful activities, shaping and negotiating the rules of public spaces.

Hosted by Gabi Linde.

If you live in a city - and you don't just want to accept what's there but want to participate in creating and shaping your city and especially your neighborhood? From creative interventions to urban games and civic participation - you can shape the city you live in.

During this workshop, we develop concepts and prototypes that invite citizens to engage in playful activities, shaping and negotiating the rules of public spaces.

Hosted by Gabi Linde.

Politikere, forskere og praktikere diskuterer børns leg og fremtidens krav til kompetencer

Børn har slet ikke samme frihed til at lege som tidligere generationer, og det er et vigtigt politisk spørgsmål, hvordan vi får mere leg ind i børns liv, for vi ved fra forskningen, at fri leg i barndommen er en forudsætning for at udvikle de kreative og innovative kompetencer, der bliver hårdt brug for i fremtidens samfund.

International Play Association Denmark (IPA), Counterplay, Den Gamle By, og BUPL inviterer til debatmøde den 30. marts kl. 13.30-15 i Dokk1 i Aarhus som et led festivalen ”Counterplay '17”.

Paneldeltagere:

-> Lotte Rod, medlem af Folketinget, de Radikale
-> Lisbeth Lauersen, medlem af Aarhus Byråd, Socialdemokratiet
-> Morten Skrubbeltrang, generalsekretær for FDF i Danmark
-> Claus Jensen, faglig sekretær, BUPL Aarhus
-> Helle Skovbjerg, lektor, Aalborg Universitet
-> Carsten Jessen, emeritus, Aarhus Universitet og International Play Association Danmark

Debatten bliver modereret af Henrik Tarp Vang, UCC og IPA
www.ipa-danmark.dk
This event is in Danish.

After CounterPlay '16, we started working on a book with members of the play community and now it's ready to present at this year's festival.

Come to learn about the book, meet some of the authors, try a few play challenges, play silly local multiplayer games and experience a playful improv musical performance.

We reject the idea of online multiplayers. The only sensible way to do social gaming, is being in the same physical space, and share the experience of being competitive and very silly at the same time. We present a collection of multiplayer games who are easy to learn and difficult to master. Like Duck Game, Overcooked, Genital Jousting, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Push Me Pull You and Gang Beasts.

By Jørund Skaug, Lars Gimse, Vibeke Guttormsgaard, Kristine Sevik, The Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education

In this dynamic workshop you will actively work with your body. You will explore your own playfulness through dance and movement. In the session, you will experience playful and easy-to-do creative assignments to help you instantly feel increased energy, greater ease of movement and more joyfulness & flow in your body. This engaging session allows you to reconnect with your body's wisdom, creativity & aliveness and to connect with others in a playful way.

The workshop offers you the opportunity to discover yourself in a creative way. The workshop is all about fun & movement, not about executing the perfect dance. In this workshop, it’s about your dance! It's about passion, energy, sensation and creative expression. Dive into the experience, meet other people and get to know each other through your own creativity. Play will be the main ingredient. Come and discover your playfulness: move a little, shake a little and laugh a lot.

By Stephan Marchant

We explore the power of play with focus on leadership, by providing a platform for experiential learning: An "orchestra" of 10-20 people, and one person designated as the conductor of the orchestra. He/she leads the team in the performing an improvised piece of music. There are only very few rules, the main task is to tap into the possibilities of the group. The experience and insights are explored in a subsequent dialogue. With this play, participants get to see important aspects of leadership, such as the fact that the director him/herself does not make the sound, that the beauty of the sound is created by people showing up their potential, that a leader needs a high sensory capacity for his co-workers. The play speaks to all aspects of being human (head, heart, hands), which potentially leads to an internalisation of the experienced learnings.

Facilitators
Nadia von Holzen​ is an independent advisor for knowledge sharing and institutional learning processes. Her business is supporting networked collaboration and peer-to-peer learning. Nadia has a Masters in Pedagogics and degrees in Evaluation and in Development Studies. Nadia is a passionate explorer and learner, and loves connecting people and ideas.

Babette Pfander ​studied anthropology, economics and political science. She spent several years in international cooperation, also working in Africa and Asia. As an independent consultant she is passionate about deep communication, institutional learning and change as well as process facilitation. She is a trained coach for individuals and teams.

Andrea Flueck von Planta​ is an independent mediator & coach, facilitator and trainer. Her professional dedication is in leading creative and interactive processes where mutual and new learning is empowered. Andrea studied Pedagogics and has a Master in Law and in International Development Cooperation.

Bertha Camacho ​is an experienced international development consultant working for Skat Consulting Ltd. Participatory management and organisational learning are two or her main competences. Bertha is passionate about embracing dialogue, learning and co-creation processes in her work. She studied Sociology and Development Studies.