Youth PlayShops

What we do together

With Art-based PlayShops, our exploration is rooted in textures, color, and self-led use of materials. Through engagement with them we follow our instincts, curiosity, and delight. We explore materials as much as techniques, our focus held by individual vision and experience as much as by group agreement.

In Games-based PlayShops, our focus is on direct engagement with one another through improvisation, strategy, and humor. We open and close each gathering with circles (totaling about an hour combined), and spend the remaining two hours in improv games, physical games (not athletic, but meant to really drop us into our bodies), and educational board games.

At the heart of every gathering is play — creative, physical, imaginative, and shared. The art, the games, the laughter, and the mess are the road and the destination.

Within the play, something deeper naturally surfaces. When young people feel safe and engaged, they begin to show more of themselves — their instincts, their ideas, their longings, their edges. Tension arises. Disagreements — spoken and silent — find their way into the room. Boredom, misunderstanding, passion, and tenderness all take turns appearing.

None of this is treated as a problem. Each is met as an opportunity — to notice what we feel, to share our impact on one another, to sit with what's uncomfortable rather than push it away. Feelings are treated as wise allies that deserve respect and care, not suppression. Through modeling and gentle encouragement, young people strengthen their relationship with their own emotions and those of others — learning to treat the information feelings carry as something worth unpacking, and discovering constructive ways to act on it.

Within the warmth and structure of each gathering, participants find their own flow and co-direct their play in a space that creates natural opportunities to absorb and integrate what they've experienced.