Trying something new every day
I’ve been working in the arts & culture and education sector for many years. Since I moved to Mexico City 5 years ago I started working as a consultant and facilitator for youth and adult populations. Two years ago I co-founded PIA (www.piacdmx.com), an alternative language school and theatre company hosts language workshops. Our students create their own play (PIA produces it) based on applied and educational theater approaches.
As a result, I have been focusing more and more on adult education and arts education. I also had to acquire new methods and approaches and learn to overcome my fear to perform and act. I spent some time studying verbal and nonverbal communication through theater and improvisation techniques and gained new competencies and skillsets.
I believe in the power of art as a connector and I use the arts to connect people with civic and educational topics. My focus is citizenship and human rights education and political activism in urban settings and spaces. I started to design informal and nonformal education projects and learning environments around these topics and to develop materials for educational workshops and facilitate myself.
Last month Isabella Gady invited me to host an interactive and body-centered workshop as part of her course Creative Team Dynamics and Identity at the Parsons School of Art and Design, The New School in New York City. The course aims to help students understand their point of view, perspective and context as part of their responsibility as innovators, designers, and facilitators. I wanted to assist them in improving their work in local communities and strengthen their leadership by experiencing a change of perception through corporal learning.
I entered a classroom with 18 college students and was excited to get to know their take on things. Just a few years ago, I was a newbie to NYC myself, and I can only imagine what it means to move to this city in such a young age. The beautiful thing about working with young people is their willingness to engage and their interest in learning and doing new things. Although some of the activities were experimental and asked them to share intimate feelings with the group, they surely overcame their first hesitation and participated freely.
I started the session with some exercises to get to know each other better without using verbal communication. 1) by drawing each other, 2) by being guided through the classroom with our eyes closed, and 3) by staring into each other’s eyes for an extended period. Afterward, we played a game where within a few minutes, they had to question each other about themselves. The non-verbal activity formed a bond between the members of the group; one girl mentioned that she believes she got to know her classmates better. On the contrary, the second game somewhat created anxiety and discomfort.
During the second part of the class, I asked them to dive into their school community and to come up with people, actions, and spaces that relate to life on campus. We then mixed and matched the activities and silently played them out and improvised different situations. Lastly, we did a similar exercise with words, intending to compare the flow of ideas based on visual or verbal clues. I was also allowed to assign them homework and chose an alignment activity that I learned at an ROI workshop with The Energy Project.
The general idea was to focus the class on non-verbal communication and intuition when it comes to communicating and interacting with others in unexpected settings. I wanted them to build confidence in their ability to read, receive, and interpret information.
