To Play the Fool
The Fool is an ancient figure who invites us to consider our experience of incongruity and change. The Fool is always an outsider, asking us to look beyond convention. You’ll recognize him as the court jester who challenges the king and brings some much-needed levity to a society where everyone is jockeying for position and power. If we are willing, the fool will lead us to a renewed and widened view of the world.
We can find this figure in the Tarot deck, the medieval Carnival, and today’s Mardi Gras parade through the streets of New Orleans. The Fool also reigns on late-night tv, in the monologues of tv hosts Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah—and on Netflix, in the outrageous comedy of Mrs. Maisel (yes, women take their punches at the status quo as well).
SoulAtPlay offers a new course with Giuliana Rizzo—The Fool’s Laughter—that explores the role of this figure in art and as a breaker of norms.
A student of Jungian psychology, Giuliana says, “I’ve always been fascinated by humor. I’ve experienced tremendous awe at a good joke or the genius of a truly funny person, analogous to reading a great book or listening to one of my favorite songs. Humor seems to be a particular kind of intelligence—one that seeks to deconstruct a situation and then rebuild it, very quickly, into something new and coherent—and the effect on the audience is surprise and joy.”
“I never bought into the idea,” she adds, “of humor as a cheap trick, or a simple consolatory act. I view it as a deeper intuition, as a magic activity that sounds a lot like creativity.”
Sign up for her live presentation on March 31 ($25) or for the full course.
The World is Made of Music
What is the psychological effect of listening to our favorite songs and to the sounds of nature—and even of vibrations too subtle for the human ear? Join Joel Kroeker, a music therapist, Jungian analyst, and an award-winning recording artist—to find out how music shapes our feelings and responses to major life events.
“Music is everywhere,” he says, “but much of our musical ecosystem remains unheard. In this course, you will learn how you unconsciously make meaning from sound and how music illuminates a variety of human experiences including joy, creativity, grief, anxiety and depression.”
There’s a relationship between dreaming and fantasy and our experience of being inside the musical field, Kroeker adds. “We all live in a world that is quite literally made of music, in terms of the vibration of molecules, but in this class, we’ll focus on the symbolic meaning of music—our own psychology, our own interior experience. How music affects our relationships with family and co-workers. And even how music affects our sense of politics and our care of the earth.”
Learn how sound triggers a variety of psychological reactions and shapes your sense of the world in this live one-hour webinar, The World is Made of Music, on March 26, 2022 ($20). Or sign up for his three-module course, When Psyche Sings ($97).
Improvisation for Uncertain Times
Ever since Mike Nichols and Elaine May, improv has been a channel for the whacky, the wild, the wonderful—and the utterly surprising. Even in this public service announcement for Tax Day where their verbal sparring is the essence of inspired play.
In recent years, improv groups have sprouted up across the country offering us the chance to try our hand at interacting with others without a script, and with very few rules, except “Use what your partner gives you, be responsive, and see where the story goes.”
This month SoulAtPlay premieres a special Improv class with Clay Drinko, PhD, author of Play Your Way Sane, and a contributor to Psychology Today. In this new online course, “Improv: 12 Tools to Stay Sane in an Uncertain World,” Drinko provides an innovative roadmap for creativity, mindfulness and social interaction. “Improv theatre,” he notes, “is about facing uncertainty by connecting deeply with others.”
This self-paced class is for people who want to learn how to meet the world with a more playful and flexible stance and decrease their daily level of anxiety. Clay guides you through a dozen improv exercises that will help you “calm down, get out of your head, connect with others” and come up with new rules of engagement for everyday life.
In this course, says Drinko, you’ll learn that “you have the power to shift your focus. It can be in the simplest way. It can be pointing at something and saying what it is. It can be pretending you’re a detective, and being really curious about what someone’s saying. It can be repeating back what someone just said to you. Shifting your focus to the people and places and things around you is an incredible way to get out of your head. And we have brain scans now to show that shifting your focus will help you be more creative and in the moment.”
Sign up for “Improv: 12 Ways to Stay Sane in an Uncertain World” and explore all of Clay Drinko’s exercises with your friends.
