On November 11, 2018 I was an invited panelist in the webinar  Play: A Luxury for the Privileged or a Necessity for All? Play, Development & Social Justice offered by the East Side Institute for Group and Short-Term Psychotherapy (NYC). This conversation invited us to ask incredible important questions such as: Given that play is what leads to creativity and innovation, why is play increasingly less accesible? Who has the "time" or "right" to play? In what spaces is play present? 

As a performance activist and play revolutionary, I believe play needs to be at the forefront of our social justice work and conversations. Want to know why? Check out the video below.

El 11 de noviembre de 2018 fui una panelista en el seminario web Juego: ¿Un Lujo Para los Privilegiados o una Necesidad Para Todos? Juego, Desarrollo y Justicia Social ofrecido por el East Side Institute (NYC). Esta conversación nos invitó a hacer preguntas importantes como: Dado que el juego es lo que conduce a la creatividad y la innovación, ¿por qué el juego es cada vez menos accesible? ¿Quién tiene el "tiempo" o el "derecho" para jugar? ¿En qué espacios está presente el juego?

Como activista de performance y revolucionaria del juego, creo que el juego debe estar a la vanguardia de nuestro trabajo y conversaciones sobre justicia social. ¿Quieres saber por qué? Mira el video de abajo.

on the imaginal & the sacred
The path I have been on during my MFA has opened my interpretation of what is sacred and has helped me see the imaginal also within this realm. Having such a deep interaction with imagination in my Action Theater training, I have become increasingly interested in exploring the relationship between the imaginal world and the present moment. In my Buddhist meditation studies over the past 14 years, this realm of experience has been completely left out of what inhabits the present moment as if to say that what we can’t perceive through our five senses is not part of this moment. But who are we to say that what is available outside of our fields of sensory perception doesn't manifest in our imagination? Most of us are limited in what we can perceive through our senses, but I do believe that there is more that we can have access to, even if those are things that we can’t name. ​

In Unlearning to See the Sacred, Jeremy Hayward characterizes this unseen world as the “intermediate realm” which gives voice to the “vast realm of real human experience” that we deny in our materialistic worldview (66).  This broad space, nested in-between the extreme opposite levels of the material/ physical and the “transcendent being or nonbeing,” is where our ancestors, animal spirits and the fairies reside. Hayward argues that our access to this realm is “closely related to awareness in direct experience” (67) and our ability to perceive it “depends to a surprisingly large extent on what we believe: on our vision of our world and what it is made of” (63). His invitation to open our hearts to something bigger, to “pay attention to stories...our own feelings [and] our own sense of wonder and magic” (70), to recognize that “our world is imbued with living vital energy” and to dive in to be fully part of it and appreciate its fullness, is an encouraging one as it is where my journey is leading me (72). I am diving head first into a path of gratitude, discovery, unlearning, and remembering. Into a sense of belonging in a broader world full of magic and possibility.