Monday Oct 10, 2022

TGPC - 4 - Dr. Olu Taiwo - Failure in Play Creates Story

The big themes of today’s podcast are “play”, “failure”, “improvisation”, “story” and “Eudaimonia”. How failure through play is not only creative, it creates story. Where dice meet improvisation in role-playing games we are both in first and third person at the same time.

“How do we unlock the vast universe of landscape in the imagination of each individual?”

Dr Olu Taiwo: Senior lecturer at the University of Winchester. Olu teaches in Street Arts, Visual Development and Contemporary Performance in a combination of real and virtual formats. He has a background in Fine Art, Street Dance, African percussion, physical theatre and the martial arts.

We talk about cycles, adapting through intuition, surviving through physical technology, differentiating the levels of University teachers, exploring the concept of “Kung Fu” as “flowing skill”, playing a chaotic good paladin, deciding between pro basketball and forming a theatre company. As we go deeper into what is play, we start nerding out over the randomization of dice rolling, variables, control, accidents and playing roles and how that leads to understanding our place in the world - either through the control of “editing change” or being open to how uncertainty facilitates play as a way to grow. We get into how putting masks in museums is insulting and are imprisoning them as they lie dormant. And we get philosophical about how the historical shift to writing sat the human being down to favor cognitive activities reducing our engagement with the environment with our bodies, the rhythms of the body and listening to the rhythms of nature. Fascinating stuff! Come along as we playfully explore teaching skills, applied learning approaches and share many cultural perspectives – modern, Western, African, ancient - such as “Players play with playwrights’ plays to make plays” and “I am because we are, since we are therefore I am.” And other coded fractals from the past.

His book:

Taiwo, Olugbenja Olusola Elijah (2021). The Return Beat - Interfacing with Our Interface: A Spiritual Approach to the Golden Triangle. Peter Lang, New York.

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