In the 1990s, my husband and I spent a week each summer in California at a retreat center or a church social hall. We'd gather with a dozen or two people from across the country, returning each year for, what we came to call ourselves, "The Reunion Group." It wasn't what my husband calls a "vacation vacation," where you lie on a beach and swim in the surf. These were workshops with titles like "The Wisdom of the Body", or "What the Body Wants", Two dancing ministers, Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry,

InterPlay: Unlock the Wisdom of Your Body

who had developed a creative arts-based system of improvisation centered in the body, taught the workshops.

We'd begin moving to "get in our bodies", which seems a strange expression, since from the outside, it would appear that we should already be there. But like most people in the western world, participants in these workshops had inherited the habits and mindsets that separated mind, body, emotion, and spirit centuries ago. The only difference in us from the people spending their summer vacations at the beach was that we were looking for ways to heal these splits, and willing to invest time and energy in exploring this important frontier.

As we moved through each workshop, we'd allow words, and eventually stories to grow out of our movements. We'd create sounds that became songs and we'd practice collaborating with

InterPlay Introduction

other bodies, finding and following, what we called the "group body." When this happened we experienced a deep satisfaction not readily available in our regular lives, which is probably what kept us coming back. And having had these experiences together, we forged life-long connections with people we only saw once a year, who went back home to places like Minnesota, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago, North Carolina, Texas. And because we missed InterPlay we began teaching the InterPlay tools we'd been learning and piloting.

The InterPlay system was evolving at that time, and being based in the body, our experiences were often difficult to describe or define in

InterPlay Warm Up

words. We would often say during the process of the workshop day, as people were using the tools to explore and express their stories, "Is this art or is this therapy?" Since I was a dancer and a therapist, I didn't feel I had to choose which word best described InterPlay. I knew that it could be, and often was, art and therapy. But one morning, after a particularly moving day of presentations by workshop participants, I awoke with an expanded question - "Is it art, or is it therapy, or is it church?"

This heralded for me a realization that InterPlay was a complete integrated system, connecting all the parts of us while bringing us together as a group, as our ancestors were brought together in communal circles to dance and sing, tell our stories, grieve our losses and celebrate life.

Those first participants who returned so faithfully each year to ecstatically follow co-founders Cynthia and Phil, were members of three professional groups - groups that are still most likely to get what InterPlay is and recognize their own need for it. They were people who work with people in challenging life situations; therapists, social workers, and coaches; people who tend to the spiritual needs of others: ministers and spiritual directors; and artists of varying types; dancers, musicians, singers, poets, whose creativity comes from an embodied place, often sparked by collaboration with others.

These pioneers became co-founding mothers and fathers in the further development of the InterPlay system, now a social movement having spread to 60 cities in the US and to five continents. InterPlay will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in the fall of 2014. I am proud to be a part of it. 

2013.04.20 Sankofa Dance Theater