Table Top Dancefloors, Kermit the Frog and Easy Read for Palestine
Play Radical Newsletter #1 February 2024
Hello and welcome to the first Play Radical Newsletter. If you are receiving this then you signed up- so thankyou! I’m delighted to have been welcomed into your inbox. In these newsletters I’m going to be sharing bits about what I've been up to, what I’m excited by and anything else I feel is worth sharing!
Sculpture dancing
I’m currently working with Glasgow Sculpture studios on their ‘Kin’ programme delivering a series of play and making sessions for children in collaboration with a local housing association. So far the sessions have been about finding ways to flow with and make space for a lively range of energies and interests. The overarching theme for the sessions is ‘Sculpture Dancing’ and centres around an evolving play space of objects made by myself to interact with through our bodies. Over the weeks the children’s creations will become part of the play space. One element is the ‘table top dance floor’ (which in the video below, is confusingly, on the floor). Here hands and smaller objects can be manipulated and moved whilst being infinitely reflected! I wanted to think about ‘dancing’ as being something small and quiet we can do with our bodies as well as something big and loud.
Kermit on my mind
The Muppets and Sesame Street are a big life-giving-heart-squeezing-brain-zapping inspiration to me. I’ve recently been watching videos of Kermit a lot. He’s of course a special frog. But the thing that I’ve been really taken with recently is just noticing just how expressive Kermit is. Kermit functions quite differently to the rest of the muppets with his face and head showing the minutest of movements from the hand inside. Kermit is the muppet who is the closest to just being a human hand with eyes stuck on but somehow feels the most like his own person (frogson) to me. Hey look! Heres the perfect demonstrative video
Shut Your Face
I recently published my first blog post in about three and a half years. I actually started writing it around three years ago, got stuck, got frustrated and then came back to it recently and was finally able to wrangle the ideas into something that makes sense. Its all about supporting autonomy in autistic children from an autistic perspective including why it matters to talk about autonomy specifically related to autistic children. You can read the piece and/or listen to the audio transcription here:
Easy Read for Palestine/CEASEFIRE NOW
Finally and most importantly the humanitarian crisis and ongoing genocide happening in Palestine is a daily struggle to process and understand. I don’t think it’s fully possible to do either but I do believe we should be doing everything we can to not look away, keep shouting, pushing, boycotting, creating, feeling and learning.
It looks different for all of us. I have had to accept after a long time of making myself ill that most protests and demo’s aren’t accessible for me. What I can do is talk to people in my life, use with the power I have to raise the voices of Palestinian people and work to not let myself be numbed by this but mobilised to the cause of freedom for all.
I’ve also been using some of my skills to create Easy Read Documents to provide accessible information on what is happening. You can find, download and share these here. For a detailed resource on ways you can take action to support Palestine click here. And finally, if you can, donate to Medical Aid for Palestine here.
Ceasefire now! Free Palestine! No one is free until we are all free!
