Materials for Our Creative Playground

Collection of four women with expressive facial expressions: two women smiling casually in professional or casual settings, one woman dressed as a clown with a fake mustache and hat, and another woman with an exaggerated angry or surprised expression wearing a red lace top and red clown nose.

Welcome to our cultural/therapeutic exploration for creative development

Please read and watch before you joined the group.

Our reflection started during the pandemic.

Like many, we wanted to respond to the unprecedent human crisis we were collectively going through around the world, pulled between the wish to go back to normal and the desire to build something new. And we got inspired by Arundhati Roy’s article.

Two cartoon women lying on the ground, holding smokes and wearing sunglasses, with colorful smoke clouds in the background.
“Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
— Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal. ft.com, April 3 2020

So, if we don’t go back to normal, where do we go?

We created Nippy Bottom and decided to use the tools of the performing arts and social therapeutics to co-create with people a stage for creative and emotional development upon which we can play with what it means to not go “back to normal.”

A person holding a clown mask on a stick facing another person with red curly hair and glasses, wearing a leopard print jacket.

Meet Nippy Bottoms: She is not going back to normal.

Nippy Bottoms is a clown with beautiful, tender, and righteous anger. And a twinkle of hope.

If she and we are not going “back to normal”.

Written and performed by Marian Rich, directed and edited by Aurelie Harp, the 17-minute video will be the starting point for our exploration. (Registrants will receive the full video to view before the first session.)

INTRIGUED TO KNOW MORE? JOIN THE GROUP TO WATCH THE FULL VIDEO