The Approach
Creating conditions for play, while practicing playfulness as a condition.
The Playground Approach began in a composer’s question: how do people listen to what they are producing together, while they are producing it?
Origins
From the score to the encounter.
Keren Rosenbaum’s work as a composer and conductor led her to Reflexive Music and to the Reflex Invisible Score — a way of notating music as instructions for attention and participation rather than as fixed notes. The scores invite people to produce sound, movement, and images, and to listen to what their own activity returns to them.
Over decades of work in concert halls, classrooms, clinics, and communities, these scores became études: short composed invitations that could be practiced by musicians and non-musicians, by children and adults, by colleagues and strangers. The Playground Approach is the practice that grew around them.
In practice
What happens in an étude.
Imagine a group sitting with sheets of paper. Someone crumples theirs, opens it flat, and crumples it again with eyes closed. The sound changes. Each person begins to hear their own way of crumpling — and, sometimes, the paper seems to answer. Attention has turned toward the relationship between a hand, a material, and an ear.
Or two people: one paints while the other sings, and they start and stop together. That single shared rule gives the encounter a shape. Inside it, the painter can slow down and the singer follows; the singer can swell and the brush presses harder. Then positions change — the singer moves, the painter sings, a third person joins. Something recognizable continues while its form keeps changing.
The études give structure while allowing variation. Practitioners learn to notice what is unfolding between people, to join it through a contribution of their own, and to sense how that contribution is taken up. The practitioner is a participant in forming the relational field, and the materials — paper, paint, water, a button, the floor underfoot — contribute to what the encounter can become.
None of this guarantees calm, harmony, or agreement. Interruptions, tensions, and distractions are part of what can be listened to and composed with. As Keren puts it, “playfulness is not lost, it’s just hiding…”
Vocabulary
Terms, introduced gradually.
- Reflexive listening
- Listening through one’s participation in what is happening. A person attends to their own activity, what comes back through it, and how their contribution changes the unfolding encounter. This includes the relationship with materials as well as with other people.
- Cross-Sensory Attunement
- Attunement to relations that can remain recognizable across changing sensory and expressive forms — for example, when movement is answered through voice. Attention is directed to timing, direction, duration, intensity, contact, pressure, and the ordering of phases, rather than simply to the involvement of several senses. Verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal dimensions belong within this account. A recognizable correspondence does not, on its own, establish shared participation; how a contribution is taken up matters.
- Relational field
- What unfolds between participants as their actions, responses, materials, and surroundings shape what can happen next.
- Polyphonic Joining
- What emerges as people find ways to join and participate with Cross-Sensory Communication.
- Playfulness
- The capacity to remain in relation with what unfolds, exploring variations and allowing the encounter to develop.
- Playground
- A space brought into being through participation. An étude offers a structure within which people can explore, respond, change positions, and compose something together.
- Noise
- A resource available for listening, exploration, sharing, and co-composition: external sounds, interruptions, competing demands, and interpersonal tensions, as well as internal thoughts, emotions, memories, expectations, and bodily sensations.
Relation to other practices
Its own specific practices.
People sometimes ask how the work relates to empathy or mindfulness. Those traditions carry their own relational and embodied depth. The Playground Approach contributes a particular way in: composed structures in which listening happens through one’s own activity, and in which attention is trained on timing, intensity, contact, and the ordering of phases as they pass between people and materials.
Where it is practiced
Across settings.
Therapeutic
With therapists, psychotherapists, and clinical social workers, including work with autistic and other neurodivergent people and minimally speaking people.
Educational
With teachers and educators exploring participation in classrooms and groups.
Artistic
With composers, performers, and ensembles, where the practice began.
Organizational
With professional teams and networks attending to how they work together.
Family
With parents and children sharing activity at home.
Community
With groups gathering across differences of language, age, and background.