Double 40th Birthday Creationship: Movement, Reciprocity, and Play

​We, Michelle Bernabe and Ben Von Wong, are both turning 40 this year, and we'd love to celebrate with you!

​Birthdays usually default to consumption: gathering for dinners, drinks, and standard conversation. This year, we want to invite you into something different. For our birthdays, we want to keep strengthening the Dear Crisis community, and to nurture something we've been craving more of in our own lives: creationships.

​Too many of our connections are built solely on consuming things together. We believe co-creation is one of the most powerful forces we can play with, and this year we want to actively introduce it into our friend circles and nurture it in all of our lives. To do this, we'll move through a three-part afternoon exploring our bodies, our minds, and our collective resources.

​We will start with a somatic movement exercise introducing our love of contact improvisation. It requires absolutely zero experience. This is a physical exploration of what it means to be in community. We will explore the social dynamics inside ourselves, the energy of the room, and how we relate to each other. By playing with feelings of unfamiliarity, trust, and presence, we'll practice having wordless conversations that help us listen better to our bodies and the unspoken dynamics between us.

​From there, we'll move into a more heady, intellectual space to explore the idea of creationships: how we can shift our friendships from just talking to actually building and creating together.

​We will close the structured portion of the day with a two-hour Offers and Needs Market. This collective exercise helps us recognize the immense wealth of opportunity, skills, and connection already within our grasp. It directly practices decoupling from a capitalist, extractive system and entering one of genuine reciprocity, so we all leave feeling deeply resourced and joyful.

​Afterward, we drop the structure and head out for a drink for those who still want to stay connected!

​You'll notice a bunch of registration questions; we'll use them to facilitate the creationship exploration, so don't be lazy! LinkedIn helps us with our long-term community mapping efforts, but if you don't have one, just enter a placeholder!

​The Afternoon Flow

• ​2:00 PM: Arrival & settling in

• ​2:30 PM: Contact Improvisation & Somatic Play

• ​3:30 PM: The Creationship Exploration

• ​4:30 PM: Needs & Offers Market

• ​7:00 PM: Break out and migrate to Amituofo (19 Bogart St) for food and drinks at our local vegan neighborhood joint!