Portunholish: How All the Borders Disappeared
Playing with Portuguese, Spanish & English
In the month of June, GPB Latino América offered PORTUNHOLISH, a virtual playshop that invited participants to play with at least three languages – Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Eighteen people from Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Miami joined. To break the ice, we asked people to look around and notice everyone in the room, then smile at one another. We did this while listening to the Brazilian song “Sorri Sorridi Smile Sonríe”, a title which repeats the word "smile" in Portuguese, Italian, English, and Spanish.
After that, we played a game called “Look at Me and Tell Me.” In this game, one person tells a story using a single facial expression. It can be anything – eyebrows held high, mouth turned down, teeth barred – anything. They do not share the story behind the facial expression. Rather, other participants interpret the facial expression by telling a story in their own language. If you can imagine, this inspired a symphony of voices in three languages to fill the Zoom room.
Later, we shared childhood memories in small breakout groups. Each person told their memory in their own language, using large gestures. The instructions were to move their bodies as much as they could, trying to tell their story both verbally and physically. The other members of the group would repeat the storyteller's gestures as if they were a mirror of that person. Once everyone had shared memory, the whole group created choreography combining all the gestural stories and performed the choreography in the main room.
At the end, participants shared that they had enjoyed themselves. One participant said that she had not imagined before that she could play both with people that she did not know and with people she knew on Zoom. She was surprised that she could play with people close in her own geographic region and with people from afar. One participant shared that he felt as if he had gone back to school and was having a good time with classmates. Another said that what she had liked the most was that all the borders had disappeared, that she felt as if there were no physical and no language borders.
