Stereotypes are a trap, but with a game you can learn not to fall for them. Play for Change – change perspective to change the world is a path promoted and financed by the Emilia Romagna Region for the achievement of equal opportunities and the fight against discrimination and gender-based violence.
Francesca Corradofounder of the School of Bankruptcy, e Mavi GianniArtistic director of Zoè theaters and professional trainer for SNIT, the National School of Theater Improvisation, tell about a project that has no age limits and is intergenerational: “This path has requests from middle schools to groups that helped women victims of violence, from adolescents to young entrepreneurs “.
Playful Change works on systematic errors and beliefs about the differences between the sexes, but also on the cognitive mechanisms of justification. There are games, but also theatrical improvisations which represent the cognitive distortions that are part of the human being, but which become traps and mental weights. Often discriminatory attitudes are so inherent in us that we do not recognize them. These are situations that are staged, but also put on the table with games: “From the questions at the job interview that are only for women to saying that women don’t know how to drive and to the mother who is always the one who irones or cooks: it is a categorization of the world between right and wrong. First the workshops with games to discover stereotypes and then improvisation to understand how not to fall for it ».
The same authors of the path found themselves recognizing cages in which they themselves were closed and changed their language. They also noticed that gender stereotypes grow with age: «The differences between boys and girls are not so strong in the feeling of children. The problem is cultural and we get used to what society presents to us. We live in a context that makes us think in a certain way “.
The project was born as a response to a call and working on mistakes as School of Failure always does. «We started from systematic errors that does our brains on gender issues and from there we tried to understand the tendency to categorize, al bias, gender distortion. Blonde is stupid, all blondes are stupid. The stereotype is born and it is rationally justified ».
How do you unhinge the cage? «Following the emotion, while the bias, the stereotype is always hearsay. The key word is awareness“. The shows and video pills of the route can be used by anyone wishing to participate, for the Playground registration is required for the entire route. Just the shows, starting from questions to the audience, bring out stereotypes and are not only for women, even men have cages: machismo, not being able to express their emotions.
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Source: Vanity Fair