Embodied Emergence Playshop: Explore dynamic approaches as new pathways for design development

UnitePlayPerform Playshop: Embodying Emergence (Deep Dive) is a 3-hour immersive session with Melissa Gilbert exploring embodied approaches as pathways for creative and personal transformation. Rooted in the UnitePlayPerform methodology, this longer-form experience invites participants into a full-body approach to birthing emergent ideas, where play becomes integration and ideas are lived, not just explored.

Through guided practice, material interaction, and inquiry, participants move through cycles of feeling and doing, using repetition as a pattern disruptor to shift internal systems, reframe belief structures, and expand creative capacity. This session moves beyond surface experimentation into the deeper patterns that shape how we think, make, and relate.

Working across body, material, and relational dynamics, participants are supported to slow down and notice what sits beneath habit, pattern and behaviour and explore instinct, and creative re-patterning. Through cycles of awareness, disruption, and integration, the Playshop creates space to interrupt learned behaviours, recognise unconscious repetition, and open new pathways for conscious creation.

This is where play becomes integration. Where ideas are not just explored, but lived.

Innovation is not only external; it is shaped by the internal systems we carry. This deep dive offers a space to recognise patterned behaviours, interrupt cycles that limit creative expression, and reframe value systems through embodied experience. It supports expanded ways of thinking, making, and relating, while unlocking creative potential through lived, sensory engagement.

This session is for those ready to go deeper, stay with process, engage through feeling and doing, and explore transformation through embodied practice.

Not to perfect. But to integrate.

A deeper personal development experience for those ready to shift internal systems and expand creative capacity.

Moving beyond surface experimentation, this deep dive invites participants into a full-body approach to innovation where play becomes integration and ideas are lived, not just explored. Rooted in the UnitePlayPerform methodology, the session supports new ways of thinking, making, and relating, unlocking creative potential through embodied experience.

A deeper personal development experience for those ready to shift internal systems and expand creative capacity.

This extended session moves beyond surface experimentation into the patterns that shape how we think, make, and relate. Through embodied practice, material interaction, and guided inquiry, participants work with repetition as a pattern disruptor—reframing worth, belief systems, and learned behaviours.

This is where play becomes integration.

Where ideas are not just explored—but lived.

ABOUT ARTIST/DESIGN STUDIO :

ABOUT ARTIST/DESIGN STUDIO :

Described by Australian Design Review as “an exemplar of socially engaging art,” and recognised for “excelling in producing socially engaging work,” Melissa Gilbert is known as a “cultural disruptor” (Broadsheet) and was selected for NGV’s Melbourne Design Fair – Discovery, spotlighting the next generation of design leaders.

She is the Founder of UnitePlayPerform, a living intelligence studio activating embodied systems change, and co-founder of The Nest Creative Space, Australia’s largest grassroots creative production studio community.

Her commissioned work has been exhibited at the Carriageworks, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Rockhampton Museum of Art, the Museum of Brisbane, and MONA, VIVID, Museum of Old and New Art, alongside international exhibitions.

Her work has been featured in Vogue and highlighted by ArtsHub as one of the top exhibitions at the Museum of Brisbane for Play Moves.

Gilbert is also a keynote speaker and has partnered with Purpose Conference and Adapt NSW as Creative & Wellbeing Partner, and serves as an advisor to the Symbiocene Institute. She is a scholarship recipient of the Masters of Business & Empathy (MBE) at Small Giants Academy, as well as the International Impact Safari supporting her global leadership in relational culture, systems change, and embodied practice.

Reclaim and Transform Initiative - Material Innovation Partners:

UnitePlayPerform

KNOVUS

DEFY Design

Contact the host of UnitePlayPerform Playshop: Embodying Emergence Playshop (Deep Dive).