THE
PLAYGRND
EXPERIENCE
INVITE EARTH INTO YOUR BODY
✦
JUDGEMENT-FREE IMAGINATION
✦
CO-CREATE THE PLAYGROUND
✦
BREAK FREE FROM THE GRIND CULTURE
✦
SOMATIC PRACTICES
✦
CASUAL SHADOW INTEGRATION
✦
INVITE EARTH INTO YOUR BODY ✦ JUDGEMENT-FREE IMAGINATION ✦ CO-CREATE THE PLAYGROUND ✦ BREAK FREE FROM THE GRIND CULTURE ✦ SOMATIC PRACTICES ✦ CASUAL SHADOW INTEGRATION ✦
WE’RE AN ONGOING THEATER EXPERIMENT
At PLAYGRND, we invite participants to take the stage in improvising new and ancient worlds where all is possible. Through games, song, and movement, we bring people together in play, drawing inspiration from our body’s wisdom and our collective imagination to build dreams of joyous futures.
WHO WE ARE
We are artists who recognize that IMAGINATION doesn’t end in childhood. We make-believe to EMPOWER Co-CREATORS AND craft narratives for A liberated FUTURE.
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Participatory music
Get in tune with your community with some musical play! We’ve got a buffet of games to help groups find their shared rhythm, uncover dormant melodies, and get some wiggles out. Translate your stories, learnings, and values into song with us!
One popular offering includes Council of All Creatures, where we facilitate communities to embody more-than-human relatives in a participatory musical theater experience as we work together to help the humans remember how to be part of the web of life. Give voice to the flora, fauna, or microbial teachers who you’ve been curious about in this life-changing encounter.
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Earth Connection play
Unplug from the demands of digital communication and open up to the conversations waiting to be had in the natural world. We facilitate playful nature connection experiences where every piece of trash is a puppet, every spider web is worthy of pause, every bird song is waiting for translation, every interspecies interaction is ready to be playfully narrated, and the natural world becomes a mirror through which we can make meaning together.
One popular offering is Transforming Invasives Welcoming Newcomers (TIWN), an infusion of play, music, improv, and land stewardship that invites us to get curious about the “weeds” that have overtaken the ecosystem.
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Parts puppet-making workshops
Give new life to upcycled materials in our puppet making play space. Are there voices in your head that you want to let out, in puppet form? Subliminal voices at large that you’re wanting you give physical form to? Wanna craft and just see who comes through?
Explore the diverse inner voices in the multiplicity of you. Building off concepts from Internal Family Systems, Rainbow of Desire, and Inside Out, we invite folks to investigate our inner parts through puppet creation and play. Develop your part’s character - giving them texture, voice, and humor while getting to know their origin stories and essential functions in the larger you. Clown into deeper self-knowing; navigate your parts with levity; introduce your loved ones to the complexity of you.
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LIB LAB
Does your collective have some friction, some funky gunk, or just some desire for more connection? Do you have liberatory ideals that you want to practice with your intimate circle? Are you longing for safe spaces to rehearse the collective response to unsafety, to prepare your communities to resiliently and joyfully respond to oncoming disaster?
Invite us to come facilitate your crew in a playshop designed to bring more cohesion, more capacity to transmute conflict, and a wider scope of collective imagination for what is possible.
MEET YOUR
PLAYTITIONERS
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Oona Valle is a monkey bar champion and a tree climbing fanatic. She cycles through intense seasons of varying avocations, including but not limited to bird imitation, crochet, breathwork, plant play, and whistling. Their fascination with plants led them to working on farms, and eventually to study agriculture, soil, and “weed” science. Since then, she’s been unlearning institutional ways and making room for curiosity to guide her interactions with the world; curating puppet shows between plants, crafting medicines from “weeds”, and singing to the bees.
They’ve toured with Agile Rascal Bicycle Theater, supported youth to devise plays with the SF Mime Troupe, and alchemized story into song with various communities. As a healing practitioner with Sacred Roots Collective, she incorporates medicinal play, theater of the oppressed and somatic awareness into her popular education facilitation. While they’ve trained with Dell’Arte, Double Edge, and the Church of Clown, their greatest teachers in imaginative dramatization have been children.
Oona lives in an intergenerational, interracial, interfaith intentional community where she dances between expansive play with kiddos, doulaing new life, and translating the wisdom of the young ones by embracing the unexpected.
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Selena Feliciano is, admittedly and proudly, a hopeful-eco-sad-girl. Amidst the grief of the world, she turns to play, music, and laughter as ingredients of our liberated futures.
Selena has cultivated a facilitation skill-set over the last 15+ years, holding space for groups to collaborate, identify edges, and develop solutions for cooperatives, artists collectives, climate justice groups, academia, public agencies, and more. In collaboration with energy justice organizers and advocates across the country, she actively builds the movement for a reimagined energy system that is democratized and decolonized with the Energy Democracy Project.
Selena has been an active theatre-maker for over two decades. Her recent work with Agile Rascal Theatre Company has led her on bicycle-powered journeys, sharing original plays with rural communities....on two wheels. She has co-created outdoor art festivals with friends, like SHIFTINGEARS 2024, and is releasing her debut EP From Every Direction in the summer of 2025.
She likes to share giggles on surfboards and among the redwoods. Find out more at www.selenafeliciano.com
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Robin Bean Crane is part beaver, part compost pile, part metaphorical funeral clown. They wear multiple hats, including: a cultural organizer with Art.Coop which supports artists and funders to participate in the solidarity economy, a facilitator with Somatics of Money supporting people to find a more liberatory relationship to wealth, and a co-steward of Creative Wildfire where artists and organizers collaborate towards ecological and economic justice. They have been a video, animation and podcast maker with Cooperative Journal Media and love bringing these themes off screen and into our bodies.
The community theater bug bit them at a young, shy, closeted-queer age and saved their life. They tried repressing the bug to be a useful, serious organizer, but now their heart is so broken they can’t think of anything more useful than to play about it. They are grateful to be in the mentorship program at the Mandala Center for applied theater. They’ve studied various modalities at the intersection of collective healing, embodied storytelling, and group facilitation: forum theater (Theater of the Oppressed style), Legislative Theater, Rainbow of Desire, physical theater (Double Edge Theater style), psychodrama, improvisation, clowning, the Trauma of Money practitioner training, and Somatics (in the lineages of generative somatics, Strozzi, and eco-somatics in Weaving Earth’s Attune program), and conflict reconciliation. They get to practice all these ways of being at home - a community farm-ish project of living intentionally across race, class, faith, age, etc in Oakland, CA.
INVITE EARTH INTO YOUR BODY
✦
JUDGEMENT-FREE IMAGINATION
✦
CO-CREATE THE PLAYGROUND
✦
BREAK FREE FROM THE GRIND CULTURE
✦
SOMATIC PRACTICES
✦
CASUAL SHADOW INTEGRATION
✦
INVITE EARTH INTO YOUR BODY ✦ JUDGEMENT-FREE IMAGINATION ✦ CO-CREATE THE PLAYGROUND ✦ BREAK FREE FROM THE GRIND CULTURE ✦ SOMATIC PRACTICES ✦ CASUAL SHADOW INTEGRATION ✦
