el splash zone

​El Splash Zone  is a bilingual participatory musical experience, bringing together Spanish and English speaking communities in the spirit of hope, connection, and healing. The experience will feature a dynamic blend of songs, activities, puppets, and story - uplifting insights from the natural world as we move through and are transformed by conflict, especially tension that stems from cross-cultural misunderstandings. Spinning off from the story of the Tower of Babel, we’ll journey together through the watery challenges and opportunities of multilingual diversity - all carried on the current of original music performed by the Babble Ons. 

​This is not a spectator experience - get ready to be splashed with emotion, get out of your seats in playful dance, and get tangled up in stories of metamorphosis through friction. There will be different levels of participation you can opt into. Walk away with new friendships, and a loaded conflict tool belt - equipped with songs and practices to bring levity and perspective into moments of tension.

Here are some reflections from our first time offering this experience on November 8-9, 2025:

Still feeling the ripples of the splash we made at our weekend of participatory performances, November 8-9, 2025 💦 We stretched across cultures and shook ourselves back into our shared first language; authentic movement. We dawned masks that visibilize the internal frames that so often limit our ability to truly see each other. We allowed ourselves to be guided by the collective wisdom of the bees, and to tune into the vibration of the swarm (which is the same frequency as a thunderstorm!) We sang, we laughed, we melted ourselves into a puddle that reflected back our collective brilliance. Infinitely grateful for the creative community who mobilized to join this dreamscape, and for the trust to be guided by Oona’s creative direction, and by the songs that have guided me through conflict and hardship and into the other side.

Thank you to our amazing cast, band, and production team for opening up the portal into a liberated world where bee stings transform kidnappers into protectors.

reflections and adaptations ~ art in dialogue

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reflections and adaptations ~ art in dialogue 〰️

On the spectrum of control to emergence, we at playgrnd like to dance with mystery, listening to and adapting to what’s present. The creation process for El Splash Zone was a buzzing dance - feeling into the invisible threads that connected the songs through story, submitting iterations of the storyline to the dreamworld for insights, incorporating bits of news and requests from community members, and co-creating choreography from the leaderful swarm practice of tuning into the group impulse.

After our first performance, we got to digest the story with our witnesses. The play had closed out with a deeply indulgent expression of our collective rage and power. We transformed the helplessness that so many of us feel into a powerful collective buzz - humans, bees, and intergalactic beeings joined forces against a threatening 🧊 agent, singing out our rights, melting them into fearfully wetting themself, stinging them, and ultimately scaring them away.

In our community debrief, we heard celebrations of the closing scene, as well as curiosity about what else could be possible. @kazu_haga brought up his longing to see the 🧊 agent transformed rather than just scared away. Auntie Anne brought up the grief that, in her interpretation, the 🧊 agent was excluded the circle of belonging, and that we had all fallen into the violent temptation of projecting an enemy image onto them. She requested that for our next performance the 🧊 agent be offered sweetness and honey rather than stings. We took in the feedback, mixed with salt from the oceanic tide that’d guided the whole process.

Community theater has always offered us a space to channel our collective power, transform situations, and reclaim our agency as creators of our own stories. It’s a container where we get to express the emotions and impulses we are otherwise told to repress - a way to honor and satiate the backseat drivers of our collective consciousness.

For some of us, the act of stinging and scaring away the oppressive authority felt like a crucial opportunity to embody our true power, our sacred right to fearlessly defend ourselves and our communities. Empowered confrontation, not cancellation. And as the song Body to Body clearly states, “that stinger lodged in your skin / is a free acupuncture session”; we joked about yelling out to the fleeing agent “you’re welcome!”, in acknowledgement of the sacrificial medicine that a sting can be.

When a bee stings you, she sacrifices her life to protect her community. It’s not a passive dismissal, not a hit and run, not the cowardly jab of an internet troll, not a cancellation…it’s a mutual transformation. As we remember the hive as a super organism rather than a collection of individual bees, we can see the sting of a bee as a valiant expression of “nonviolent resistance”. The nonviolence that bees teach us isn’t a sweet bypassing of wrongdoing; it is active resistance that implicates sacrifice, expended energy, death, and pain — pain that ultimately brings healing, but that hurts nevertheless. In that same vein, @kazu_haga reminded us how authentically “holding” people accountable for the impact they cause requires investment - to “hold” requires energy, presence, consistency, strength. And although it might feel like a tight squeeze at times, ultimately it is a sacrifice born out of love, a hug sprouted from the faith in our collective ability to transform.

…And so we integrated the feedback, followed the currents of curiosity, and — without removing the necessary and healing sting of collective resistance — we brought in some sweetness to support the transformation of the 🧊 agent. Check out this scene in our instagram post and footage from the full second showing here.

Gratitude to @abejasinfronteras for the ancestral brilliance of partnering with plant medicine to cleanse the delusion with a limpia, supporting the transformation with honey, and sealing it with a communal buzz. Deep bows to my favorite clown @shmee for (once again!) taking on our collective shadow projections and skillfully, comically, bravely transforming from a pawn of the empire into someone who “works for the bees”.