Stupid Play and the Brilliance of Maria Mison
The spirit of lyrical ritualism
Hi friends!
(If you’re new here, we are in the middle of a series on the Perfections—virtues for daily life. We’ll pick up the series next week, with a post on patience.)
Here in the United States, we're witnessing a systematic assault on human connection with ourselves, each other, our environments. Still, embodied play can become a vital practice to remember shared humanity.
Maria Mison offers a playful salve, challenging us to rethink the boundaries between art, ritual, and everyday life. Based in Manila, Maria and her work have traveled the world. The art house darling I EAT MANTRAS FOR BREAKFAST and A Hundred Thousand Places have appeared in European therapeutic settings and in NYC performance spaces. My own introduction to Maria’s work was To Sleep in the Treebanks of Ancestors, a heart-opening experience to re-imagine lineage.
"We all pray differently," Maria observes in relation to play. She describes her syncretic lyrical ritualistic games as an offering to the player/pray-er: "it’s almost like, 'Okay, this is how I fuck around with this.' And then, 'Do you want to fuck around with this?'"
Knowing the tool or practice to call upon is what the Buddha called skillful means.
In our conversation (a more complete version is here), Maria explores how play reframe connection in a fragmented world. "The way I reformat the world is the way I write to the world. It's like writing in and with the world," Maria explains.
"If I have a matchbox and I have a spell or invitation to burn the dross of life on it,” Maria said, harkening an image of a box with a cleansing spell written on it, “I'm writing on the world. Your matchbox is not telling you what fire really does. And I'm just making it obvious."
Maria’s background in theater and ritual practice has shaped a uniquely transformative approach. Let’s begin there.
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Experience Before Theory
Maria’s work screams, it hides, it invites, it soothes with words, imagery, and guidance. Above all, it provokes.
Maria’s designs leap off the page like visual jazz. Her ability to move via image, language, and ritual led me to suspect theater training. So I asked.
I was a junior artist in Philippine educational theater. And actually, that's a really interesting connection because in PETA [the Philippine Educational Theater Association], we gamify creating theater. They teach you how to do curriculum design, but you need to make game loops.
For example, when you teach tableau work [where actors freeze in place, to read things like embodiment, gesture, proximity] or you teach directorial work, you need to merge pedagogy needs to emerge the content [content creation through play], and then you synthesize, and reflect on the content. But you play first. You can’t jump into it like lecturing first. You need to play, and then you will experience it.
Maria credits her mentor Rae Nedjadi for expanding her understanding of play as a tool for exploring the self.
“One of the primary issues of artistic~psychotherapy is that there is somehow a denial of Spirit. It’s culled out of it, only nodded or alluded to for the historical reverence of the rational-industrial mind that defined the “Modern Era”. This is why post-modernism can feel nihilist, depressed or scattered because there’s a severance to a mythic-magick kind of experience that characterizes not only indigenous cultures but just our internal way of sense making. Our artistic, expanded selves.”
-Maria Mison, “An introduction to ritual, an investigation of the intersection of games, and therapeutic practice.”
Finding Language for the Unnamed
Experiential understanding precedes intellectual comprehension. Bodies often understand what the mind struggles to articulate. We feel, therefore we do.
When I asked about how she got into lyric games—games that emphasize the poetry of lived experience—the answer was interpersonal.
Maria credits her mentor Rae Nedjadi (Temporal Hiccup) with providing context for experiential frameworks that academics texts could not.
Temporal Hiccup has a game called My Shadowed Heart with a set of questions about the lover you don't want to see. What's the thing you don't want to speak? What's the thing that must not be said?
And I felt I understood what Jung was talking about [regarding shadow work…] The game was teaching me about bravery, teaching me about investigation, teaching me about regret, teaching me about projection. It was a master class.
Their Love Destroyed This Land is one of my favorites because it’s about colonization. They had three archetypes that felt like parts of me that I've never had the words for. And then when I drew images for it and then played it out even played out the dialogue, it was like a turning point. I was like, this is the feeling I want to do for my games. It's almost like I had a really wise shaman talk to me, but the game spoke to me.
If audiobooks are listening to texts, books are there for reading, games might be understood as doing texts. Rituals are for divination and transformation. Maria, who also produces the podcast Integrated Awakenings, does all.
Making Ritual a Little Bit Gay
In my work facilitating the Creative Coalition and teaching professional writing, I'm constantly seeking ways to create brave spaces where people can explore without feeling judged.
I asked about how Maria facilitates brave exploration in her ritualistic play workshops.
We meet up and we make art around themes. So for example, we'd make a zine of the past year. I'm trained in expressive arts therapy, so we process the art symbols.
Like last April we did an inner child birthday party…
Logan: [squealing, probably]
It was everybody's birthday. So we had 26 cupcakes, the baby streamers and we had so many beads, so everybody just made random bead stuff.
We had certificates for what you weren't awarded for when you were younger. And my friend and I pretended to be principals of the teenager age.
We had party hats. So it's like a little bit of theater, but it's also like, we need to be gaga or gremlins. So the whole party's theme was like that: celebrating your inner gremlin.
[It’s important] to make [ritual, play] playful, to make it stupid even. We even say that it needs to be stupid because people take the ritual and healing stuff a little bit too seriously sometimes. So it needs to be a little bit gay.
Logan: Joyous. Yeah, like why are we doing [this format] otherwise?
Exactly. The word “gay” here in the Philippines is “bakla.” But bakla also means theatrical and a little bit over the top so bakla is like, you're so glam. So when we're doing it, we say it needs to be more bakla. That's how we make sure that people play.
At the heart of Maria’s philosophy is an embrace of one’s own immediacy.
By repurposing everyday objects (like her matchbox spell) and familiar social forms (like birthday parties), Maria demonstrates how transformation happens not through escape from reality but through reimagining both what it is and what it means to us.
“DEAR READER,
Why did you go to school? Socialization and to figure out the way the world works? Who’s world? What kind of ‘work’?
Do you have time for wisdom? Have you ever read, or come to know something and you become exhausted? In an age of drinking from a fire hydrant when thirsty for (internet) information, how much of a privilege it is TO BE ABLE TO SITUATE ONESELF. TO HAVE TIME TO THINK FOR ONESELF. TO HEAR ONESELF.”
-Maria Mison, “My Educational Philosophy is Better than Yours”
The Joy of "Not Being Good"
Training and experience can, somewhat ironically, alienate us from our bodies and keep us in our heads.
The students in my writing for audio class are playing Possum Creek Games’ Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Ben Robbins’ Kingdom. Thereafter, they will reframe their stories into a narrative podcast arc.
In their letters of intent, more students expressed terror at the idea of coming up with their own stories than excitement. Two students wrote the same self-indictment, “I have never been creative.”
Maria articulates why experiential play thrives in “not being good”:
What's interesting about games is you don't need to be a performer. I mean, I am a performer, but I feel like because of the training, we do things a certain way. This makes the reaction to the game less organic.
Because with theater, I'm thinking about the audience. This sucks sometimes because it's like, “oh, they need to understand it” or “I need to polish it” or “I need to whatever” versus if it's a game, I'm just there for the experience of it.
Whereas if it's a person playing a game it's more…I wouldn't say “raw.” It's just more raw that's really the response to the game. They're not trying to entertain you.
It's so welcoming too, because you don't want them to train for it. It would remove them from the play.
And I think that's what I like about LARPs more than theater; it feels almost so selfish towards the player.
[Live Action Role-Play (LARP) emphasizes self and fellow performers as audience, rather than a seated, paying audience.]
The willingness to play with imperfection, to value process over product, requires a patience that runs counter to our culture's demand for immediate results and perfect execution. (We’ll pick up that thread next time.)
And in this climate where expression is increasingly monitored, space to practice voice—however imperfect—becomes a small act of reclamation.
For more on these themes:
Takeaway Practice
Do you ever want to compliment someone but feel weird about it, or there is no precedent for it, so you don’t? And then they never know how much you appreciated the thing?
Tell them. It doesn’t matter if the thing happened years ago or just now. Spread appreciation.
If you can’t tell by my endless citations, I’m floored by the quality, range, and heartfulness of Maria’s work.
And I’m happier for telling her so.
Events
Adoptee Alchemy: April 13th, 4-5:30 PT
Adoptee Alchemy is a monthly adoptee-only “sit and share” space.
There will be a half-hour guided meditation, followed by community guidelines and general sharing of what’s arising.
Suggested donation: $10 (no one is turned away for lack of funds).
Creative Coalition: May 4th, 3-6 PT
Join Creative Coalition for a guided experience blending mindful play and collaborative storytelling.
Using Carrion Comfort/ Wes Frank's This Old House, we'll tell the story of a house as its inhabitants change over time.
Base Rate: $20
Light Hive Readers may use code: Hive50 (50% off)
Paid subscribers get this one for free! I’ll give you a code in the chat.
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please email for the link.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee and co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, a newsletter dedicated to processing and expressing climate-related emotions. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and have just opened Robert Oster’s Avocado (a fountain pen ink).