Grammar of the Imagination is an evening-length dance performance conceived and directed by claire barrera. It features an intergenerational cast of performers: youth Jordyn Kubernick, Nila Kwa and Paloma Barrera Rodriguez and adults Linda Austin, Allie Hankins, and Hannah Krafcik. The work uses traditional children’s games as a platform to explore how play can be a site of imagining radically new social relations, or of disciplining and re-enforcing social norms. This project will be a deep inquiry into the ways power, discipline, care, and transformation arise in interpersonal dynamics, which is a subject matter that has motivated barrera’s work for years.

As an activist and social worker who spends a lot of time with kids and parenting a child of my own, it has become clear to me how important play is to social movements, to healing, to creativity, and how play could serve us when we’re asking ourselves, how do we create something new in the world?

— claire barrera