DEBORAH TREFTS
Staff writer
According to the National Institute for Play, people are “wired for play,” and neither play nor “the science behind it” stops when childhood ends.
At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday at the CWC House, Allison Hopper will conclude the Women’s Club’s 2026 Chautauqua Speaks program with an interactive presentation titled “Laughter & Play: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Healing Power of Comedy.”
Combining “science with comic interludes,” Hopper, a science communicator and board member of the Chautauqua Science Group, will discuss the importance of play. She will also provide examples from laughter yoga — an exercise program emphasizing playfulness and laughter, breathwork and mindfulness meditation — and from improvisation.
“Members of my improv comedy team will be joining me to demonstrate play,” she said. “I’ll talk about improv and the connection between improv and play and evolution.”
Hopper is a member of two improv teams affiliated with The Highwire Center in Baltimore: ImprovScape and Salty Tomatoes. “Highwire Improv produces shows, workshops, classes, community meetups and training programs,” according to its website.
At Chautauqua Institution during Weeks Two, Five and Nine, she collaborated with a colleague from Highwire Improv to co-guide a Special Studies course called “Discover the Magic of Improv.”
Although Hopper was born in Falls Church, Virginia, she said she lived most of her life in New York City until moving to Baltimore about 10 years ago. Through her involvement in improv, she found a welcoming community.
“As a young person, I was involved with theater and filmmaking,” Hopper wrote on her website, Spiral Zoom. “I came late to the world of science. … My interest in evolution stemmed from my lifelong love of seashells and the desire to understand how spiral shapes form in nature. In my work, the epic of evolution is told as a story that is full of inspiring characters, creativity and resilience in the face of hardship.”
Hopper also attributes her evolutionary science pathway to her parents’ church affiliation. “That pathway was from growing up as a Unitarian Universalist,” she said. “I’m not very active now, but I grew up with a very secular view.”
She continued: “Because I grew up without a spiritual origin story, I personally feel it’s very important to know what your origin story is. And for me, that is evolution. I study it as a way of knowing, ‘Who am I? Where did I come from?’”
According to her, “the demographic that promotes creationism is more of a unified voice that passionately believes kids need an origin story.”
At Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where Hopper earned her Bachelor of Arts, she concentrated on writing and European history.
“Early in my career I worked on PBS documentaries,” she wrote on Spiral Zoom. “More recently I’ve been a graphic designer and project manager for a variety of financial institutions and companies that specialize in medical imaging. Today I’m a science communicator with a Master’s degree in Educational Design from New York University.”
Approaches to teaching evolution are Hopper’s current focus.
“There’s basically been censorship around evolution for all ages in this country,” she said. “And one of the ways it’s been done, to the extent teachers are mandated to teach evolution, the materials are very scarce and boring.”
They are not fun and not colorful, she said.
“Everything in the schools is made technical and academically complex,” Hopper continued. “They’re not presented as something that might matter to you. It’s: ‘This is complex, and by law we must cover it in a day.’ For a long time — decades — one of the only books that Scholastic Books published (on evolution) was on the evolution of Pokémon characters.”
According to Hopper, there are hundreds of books and materials about creationism and only a few very academic offerings about evolution.
“My talk is about the evolution of play,” she said. “… I’ll be looking at how play creates the possibility of connection. … (Improv games) can connect us across language barriers, and … also species barriers when we play with our dogs and our cats.”
Hopper said that she will conclude her talk with a brief exploration of artificial intelligence and research studies regarding the possibility ”for AI to exhibit play behavior.” In other words, “Can AI play?”
