AN ADULT PLAYGROUND?

I WAS CURIOUS to know why people kept telling me that what I offered didn’t

exist any where else. So, I searched the World Wide Web. I typed the name THE

ADULT PLAYGROUND (which is what I called it at the time) into the search

engines and ... found a plethora of pornographic sites. I wasn’t surprised. My

choice of name was intentional – a provocative jab precisely at the fact that ‘the

adult playground’ is generally understood to refer to pornography; probably the

biggest and most profitable industry in the world, alongside chemistry and war

fare. These are not the games I play.

Other than that, I found one solitary company in America that provides Adult

Playgrounds for obese people; activity parks, they call them, with swings and

roundabouts and bouncy castles, designed to attract adults who don’t normally

take much physical exercise. It is not my intention to provide fun weight-loss

programmes either.

I changed the name. I now call it simply the Playground and that is how I refer

to it throughout the book. I continued my search.

In an artistic context, I found adult play groups all over Europe and America

that explore imagination, improvisation and self-expression in more or less exclusive

or overlapping cross-art-forms: experimental dance, contact improvisation,

clowning, fool work, comedy stand-up, forum theatre, playback theatre,

improvised street theatre, arts therapy and psychodrama. I include elements of

all of these forms of play in the Playground, so why were people telling me that

nothing like this exists elsewhere?

A very subtle, but major difference began to emerge. I found no other such

like Playground that explores professional acting techniques with the primary aim

of empowering individuals (both actors and non-actors) with essential LIFE and

COMMUNICATION SKILLS.

Top stage and film acting techniques are usually taught in the context of

making people ‘stage or film worthy’. Furthermore these techniques are usually

only taught to a relative small minority i.e. those who are considered talented

enough to gain entry into top drama schools. Funnily enough, the ones that are

selected are usually those who demonstrate in some way that they already know

how to do it. Knowledge of this enlightening kind is guarded by ‘the

professionals’, like magicians guard their tricks of illusion.

I began asking myself two things: ‘Why shouldn’t the common player be

empowered by these top secrets, when the results are so clearly transformational?’

and ‘Why is there such a strong divide between theatre and life itself?’

The most obvious answer to the latter question is that life is ‘real’ and theatre

isn’t. Theatre and film are simulations of life. We dream of doing things on stage

and in film that we wouldn’t dream of doing in real life. Of course! But in my rather

anarchic mind this observation inspires far deeper questions about the very real

connection between life and imaginative play. I mean, how on earth do we create

the world we live in? The whole of life could be seen as a form of theatre or film.

One question led to another and in my on-going research I came across like

minds ... a whole zeitgeist phenomenon, if you like, that must have begun at

least two centuries ago ... alternative thinkers, writers, spiritual teachers,

psychologists, philosophers, actors, and theatre directors and yes, quantum

physicists and scientists too, who express opinions similar to mine. We are

creative observers.

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum reality,

things are considered to exist only to the extent that

they are observed. Consciousness is the observer.

David Ash, Vortex of Energy, 2012:127

In short, we are in need of nothing short of a revolution in our common

consciousness; a new general awareness of the potential of the human psyche,

imagination, intuitive intelligence and the real nature of the human mind. We

need an awakened perception of a universe, in which the word

‘separate’ no longer exists.

Sadly, in ‘reality’ we witness the opposite. The ‘success’ of industrial and

capitalist (profit orientated) progress has turned us into full time blinkered, left brained,

for the most part robotic and sedentary workaholics, living in our

separate little microcosms. Stressed out of our minds, isolated from each other

(apart from on Facebook), with no time to truly sense or dream, we have to

accept that we have been dumbed down to become willing and unwilling

consumers, money addicted slaves, albeit with a longer life expectancy, but

exhausted, dis-eased beings, who in their play time sit hypnotically captivated

by billion dollar films starring our favourite actors ... whom we attempt to

emulate or copy.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the

nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This

delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes

which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This

delusion is the love of work …

Paul Lafargue, 1883 The Right to be Lazy,

written in Saint Saint Pélagie Prison

So, let's play!