Three days before the production opened, she could barely speak her letter to her Dad. She had to read it; she couldn’t remember it. She had no attitude. Her affect was flat. I thought this was hopeless, that the performance would be a debacle. But Jones kept working with her; she made her stand with her hand on her hip for the last line: “How do you like me now?” When she was forced to move a certain way, her reading became more intense. By the opening, Garret did thrust her hips and remember her lines. She made the audience listen, commanding their attention. Whether her family (the ones there, the father not) were changed by what they heard, whether she herself was, once the public performance was over, I don’t know.

Think of a point in time within your life thus far – any time at all.

What is the first thing that comes to mind?

A place – a place is inextricably glued to that time.

Within our minds, there exists a dependency between space and time. We mark our memories of time within the context of a particular space, a location. A significant place evokes a memory of a particular time, proving how we all mark time through space; as a place changes, we mark its change as movement in time. This is how we anchor ourselves in the universe, and give purpose to places. 

Life and Childhood

In their essay “Playing in industrial ruins: Interrogating teleological understandings of play in spaces of material alterity and low surveillance,” Tim Edensor et al. discuss the importance—and danger—of industrial ruins as places for children, adolescents, and sometimes adults to play. In urban areas, they say, children can explore a “wild space” with little to no adult supervision (Edensor et al. 74). The essay also highlights the importance of the materials in these ruins, which are used not only as “toys,” but also as means for rebelling against society’s expectations by breaking them, painting them, or turning them into sculptures (Edensor et al. 67, 69).

 /oneworld/changing-our-story-2015/playing-parking-lots

Micro-Impacts of Play

              A common theory today for the existence and importance of childhood play in human is that play is necessary to full and healthy development, a theory exemplified by Robin Marantz Henig in her essay “Taking Play Seriously.” How we play as children shapes how we behave in our adult lives. In her short posting “Playing Alone,” Hsymonds reflects on her own experiences of play, exploring how the manner in which she played parallels the way she sees herself acting now. At the intersection of these two pieces lies the question of how the ways in which we play, not just the act of playing, affects actions in non-play spaces.

Alison
ESem Paper #4
September 25, 2015
Giving Children a Real Childhood

Among the animal kingdom, play is almost universal in infants and adolescents, and humans are no exception. While play can sometimes be more dangerous than helpful in the wild, our children use it in another way: as escapism from real world problems and a method of processing their emotions and thoughts on these problems. Both Molly Knefel’s article Kid Stuff and Butterfly’s posting on two scenes of play from their childhood illustrate this idea, though from two different perspectives.

/oneworld/changing-our-story-2015/playing-parking-lots

Industrial ruins, are spaces on the urban fringe found in most cities. They are wastelands, unkempt parks, alleyways, culverts, and edge lands. They have a rusty aesthetic to them and are full of danger and risk but provide space for low surveillance, carefree play.

In Edensor’s essay, he analyzes play in industrial ruins to have multiple functions. As Edensor explores the routes and manifestations of play, which he categorizes into destructive, hedonistic, artistic and adventurous versions, he makes the claim that play is a way for children to toy with and manipulate adult roles, going beyond simple imitation. Edensor also emphasizes that the environment of an industrial ruin is optimal to experiment with unadulterated freedom. In a web posting on Serendip Studio, under the username isabell.the.polyglot, a contributor recalls a memory of play in which she is freed from the supervision of her mother, and takes the opportunity to try something new that she would not have attempted had her mother been watching.