A huge thanks to my friend Tony Perone for alerting me to a recent TED Talk by Stephen Volan, “Approaching Autism Theatrically.” Diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult, Stephen shares how he experiences himself in the world, at one point likening it to just about constant stage fright. His talk is lovely—funny, poignant, smart. He brings in the DSM-5, Second City, Virginia Spolin, his height (6’8″), play, improv, Shakespeare, as he tells of his journey to become a social player “on the stage that is all the world.”

Support the dialogue on human development/possibility/becoming by passing this video along!

Zdravo da Ste Weekend

December 29, 2011

I returned from Serbia a few weeks ago, energized from six very performatory days with friends old and new. Nearly every year since 1997 as winter begins I’ve made the journey to work and play with the extraordinary people of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”). They’re a group of psychologists, educators, social and youth workers who’ve created a Vygotskian-influenced approach to performance and group creativity, and take it into collective centers, schools and cultural institutions in villages, towns and cities across the country. Above all, they are developmentalists. They’ve devised elegantly simple ways to engage children, youth and adults in creating common joint activity—whether that takes a musical, artistic, poetic, dance, performance or conversational form, there is no goal external to the activity. Such a non-instrumental, tool-and-result method is dear to my heart.

So are the hundred or so people of Zdravo da Ste that I have come to know through the common joint activity we create one weekend a year. We have great love for each other as both comrades and family members can—love grown from mutual passion for a better world, fierce commitment to each other, and ever-growing understanding of and respect for each other’s uniqueness born of historical and cultural difference.

This year, we spent the weekend Vrnjacka Banja—a small town in the south known for its healing mineral waters—in workshops creating performances around the topic of identity as an individual and collective process. On Monday, workshop leaders (myself, Lina Kostarova-Unkovska, Paul Murray and Tim Prentki) brought the topic and conversation to Belgrade, as panelists hosted by psychologist Bojana Skorc at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade.

In 2009 Zdravo da Ste and publisher Dragan Stojkovic of MOSTART released the Serbian edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth (translated by Bojana and Zdravo da Ste founder psychologist Vesna Ogjenovic). Social workers, psychologists, youth workers and educators in Serbia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia have a way to be introduced to Newman, social therapeutics, the performatory approach developed and practiced at the Institute, and to Zdravo da Ste’s unique way of generating development.

While in Serbia, I also led two workshops, one in Belgrade and the other in Novi Sad, organized by 2010 graduates of the Institute’s International Class Tamara Borovica, Bojan Drmonjic, Tamara Maksic and Milovan Savic. It was fun and challenging and especially rewarding to spend several hours creating with nearly 60 new performance playmates. I hope to see many of them, along with my old Zdravo da Ste friends, in New York City in October at Performing the World 2012: Can Performance Save the World?

Regarding the topic of identity, I invited those in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Vrnjacka Banja to challenge the hold our societal identities have on us by embracing (or, at a minimum, considering) our historical “identity” as creators and transformers of how things happen to be at any given societal place and time. It’s a common joint activity the world needs very much right now.

Part of a Performance in Nov Sad

New Performers in Belgrade

Please check out the latest issue of the East Side Institute’s newsletter, Reports from the Field, for news on what our friends, colleagues and alumni are up to. You’ll hear from Annalie Pistorius and her new social therapy practice in Pretoria South Africa, the synergy between Elina Lampert-Shepel and Brazilian educators at a Vygotsky research conference, and much more.

In my work as a developmentalist, I am an advocate of, doer of, and studier of play. I grapple with both implementing and understanding what Lev Vygotsky said: “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself” —and its practical applications and implications for people of all ages.

Having begun a three-session East Side Institute Revolutionary Conversation last night (where we touched on play quite a bit) and preparing today for a keynote address on play, performance and pretense that I’ll give in a few weeks at the Association for Experiential Education international conference, I’ve been playing with play today. Here’s some thoughts to ponder and comment on—and aid me in my thinking/speaking!

Vygotsky tells us that it’s the interplay of imagination—which frees us, and rules—which constrain us, that makes play potentially developmental. The action created in the “imaginative sphere” frees the players from situational constraints and, at the same time, imposes constraints of its own. In this way, “play creates a zone of proximal development of the child… Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play and make it the highest level of preschool development.”

This freedom from environmental constraints (“reality”) in free play has similarities with theatrical play, or performance, especially the unscripted, improvisational kind. In both free and theatrical play, the players are more directly the producers of their activity, in charge of generating and coordinating the perceptual, cognitive and emotional elements of the play. When I look at children’s free play with this performance lens, I see the value of play in a new light.

For most psychologists and educators the value of play is that it facilitates the learning of social-cultural roles. Through acting out roles (play-acting), children “try out” the roles they will soon take on in “real life.”

I get this, but I think it skips over the paradox of pretend play—when children are pretending, they are least like what they are pretending to be! When they play school they are least like teachers and students because teachers and students in school are not playing at being teachers and students, but rather acting out their societally determined roles. Children playing school, or Mommy and Daddy, or Harry Potter and Dumbledore, are not acting out predetermined roles. They are creating new performances of themselves—at once the playwrights, directors and performers. They are creating culture. This is how I make sense of Vygotsky’s understanding that in play the child acts as though a head taller —that the developmental potential of play is as performed activity and not as behavioral acting. Not only for chidren but for us all.

October 3, 2012

Here’s a more graphic rendition of the Performing the World invitation and call for proposals.

October 2, 2011

I’m thrilled to announce the next Performing the World (PTW) conference/festival, “Can Performance Change Save the World?” to take place in New York City October 4-7, 2012. Proposals are due March 1, 2012.

The theme of the last PTW, held in 2010 and attended by over 500 people from dozens of countries, was, “Can Performance Change the World?” The depth of the challenges facing humanity two short years later have led the conveners of Performing the World to recast the question for the 2012 conference as, “Can Performance Save the World?”

Performing the World (PTW) was born in a conversation between East Side Institute co-founder, the late Fred Newman, and me at the end of the summer of 2000. We had already “discovered” performance, and its essential role in human development and learning was key to the therapeutic, educational and community-organizing work of the East Side Institute and its broader community. At the same time, Newman and I were also having conversations with Ken and Mary Gergen, leading social-constructionist psychologists who themselves were turning toward performance, particularly by experimenting with new performatory modes of presenting research and scholarship. During the 1990s at annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, we and the Gergens did some joint performatory symposia and Newman’s original “psychology plays” were performed—all to great enthusiasm. We were encouraged, and wanted to do something bigger and of our own structure.

My international travels had introduced me to many different performatory practices initiated at both the grassroots and from within the universities. I met dozens of people and heard of hundreds more who were using performance to help people and communities grow and create positive social change. We decided to reach out to those doing this work/play—from community organizers to business people, from artists to social workers, from therapists to teachers.

The first Performing the World conference was held in October 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. Hundreds from all over the world showed up at the beautiful ocean side village of Montauk, 120 miles from New York City, as if this kind of gathering was what they and their communities needed at such a moment.

There have been five PTWs since then. The last two—in 2008 and 2010—were held in New York City, bringing the conference to one of the most vibrant and diverse cultural centers of the world and partnering with the All Stars Project as co-sponsor. PTW has been greatly enriched by having the All Stars’ performing arts and development center on 42 Street near Times Square as the conference’s home base and by the inclusion of hundreds of young people and adults who participate in its programs. Additionally, both the Institute and the All Stars reach out to friends across New York City’s many communities to provide housing for PTW participants and broaden the “performance space.” I am inspired by the growth of the global performance movement and the role that PTW is playing in it, as not only a conference/performance festival but also a unique community event bringing people together to perform a new world.

May 31, 2011

May is one of my favorite months of the year, with light lasting into the evening hours, baby green tree buds turning into adult green leaves, and bursts of color (both flowers and people’s clothing) dotting the city streets. But this year I spent the middle of the month far far away from New York City’s spring awakening. I was in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh conducting workshops on effective education for the 21st century, which introduced university faculty and students to performatory and playful learning and development approaches. And while there was no feel of spring in the very hot and very humid city air, the human awakening to the joy and intimacy of creating together was palpable.

I was invited to Dhaka by Daffodil International University, instigated by Syed Mizanur Rahman (“Raju”), an economist and drama educator who heads up the university’s Career Development Center. As a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class and participant in our Performing the World conferences, Raju has embraced performance as how to live one’s life developmentally and, being in a position to breathe life into the rigid and static British-based educational system of his country, he asked to partner with the Institute to help advance his work and socialize performance broadly within the school’s community. I was happy to agree and added my workshop facilitation partner Carrie Lobman, who is the Institute’s director of pedagogy and on the faculty of Rutgers University School of Education, as co-leader of the training week.

All told, Carrie and I worked and played with about 200 students, faculty and administrative personnel in six different workshops. Our broad thematic was that the shift underway from past centuries to the 21^st century is from questions about things (What is “X”?) to questions about process (How does “X” work?). We had prepared an overall plan of discussion topics and improv exercises but needed to hear what the specific issues were that people wanted to work on so we could work off them. Students and faculty alike were unhappy with the formality and rote nature of the learning environment they felt compelled to recreate and said they wanted to change. We worked with each group offering ways they could do so as well as, perhaps more important, ways they could create together outside the formal classrooms (which would, we believed, have a big impact on what happened in the classrooms). Working with the students was pure joy! They threw themselves into doing so many things they never dreamed they could do together. The faculty was a more conflicted grouping. While many willingly went along with our invitations to create and imagine, some could not move beyond “tell us exactly what to do”—rejecting the very stance we were trying to get them to consider giving up, holding on to their own authority as experts and the institutional authority of knowing.

We also met with the high-level dignitaries of the university, had a lovely dinner with the chair of the board of the Daffodil Group (founders of the University), and watched a moving performance by the Daffodil All Stars of a play written by Raju.

Raju and his assistant, Md. Ziaul Haque Sumon (Sumon), were exceptional hosts and great organizers—gracious, relaxed, reassuring and proud of what they’re doing and our relationship. In addition to our work at Daffodil, they took us to Raju’s alma mater, Jahangimagar University, where we were treated to a great performance by the current members of the theatrical group he founded there many years ago; to the new campus site of Daffodil outside of the city, where this August Raju and Sumon will orient the 500 incoming students (performatorily) to university life; to villages and monuments and a heartbreakingly poor section of the city to meet a remarkable woman who cares for children of sex workers.

Back in New York, May’s spring is transitioning to June’s summer and I to the luxuries of American life and to the work at hand. I feel humbled and privileged that this work now includes this new relationship with Daffodil University, dozens of new friends, and the opportunity to contribute in unknowable ways to the development of the people of Bangladesh.

“Here is an idea for solving the education crisis in America. What if all the kids currently failing in school pretended to be good learners? What if all the adults – teachers, principals, administrators, parents – played along and pretended that the kids were school achievers, heading for college? What if this national “ensemble” pretended this was the case day after day, classroom after classroom, school district after school district?”

So begins “Let’s Pretend,” a special report on “Solving the Education Crisis is America” written by Lenora Fulani and Fred Newman, co-founders of the All Stars Project (which released the report) and long-time friends, colleagues and mentors of mine. The three of us have written thousands of words (and spoken millions more) on play, performance, pretence, creative imitation and their critical role in learning and development for people of all ages, but especially for those whom schools have failed/who failed school. All of our words grow out of the complicated interplay of carrying out on-the-ground performance-based development work and dialoguing with scholars, practitioners and policy makers. In “Let’s Pretend,” Fulani and Newman  say it as they see it in a mere six pages. In the time it takes to make a cup of coffee you can read it and see if you see it their way or if they’ve helped you see in a new way.

As a practitioner of and theoretician on how play and performance are essential for development across the life span, I see people developing and transforming through their ensemble activities all the time—in the spaces and places where they’re invited and encouraged to actively create their performances of themselves. As much as I am able, I speak with people, young people in particular, to learn how they experience performance in their lives. I recently interviewed George Pedraza (stage name Lyric), a high school senior whom I met in 2009 at an All Stars Project youth performance he was in. Since then I’ve seen George many other times on stage and off. We’ve gotten to know each other some (which is delightful to me), as he’s become more involved in the All Stars’ youth programs overall. I share here an interview I did with him recently.

When did you begin performing on stage?

I began performing on stage when I was 14, although I’ve been singing since I was born. I’ve been performing shows for my mirror since I was like…three.

with Lyric at All Stars' UX Opening Day, Winter-Spring Semester 2011

What was it like for you?

My first performance on stage that I can remember was extremely nerve-racking. I sang the song “Hello” by Lionel Richie and I actually turned out to be a hit with the crowd. The audience was really supportive and I got through it! After that I wanted to do it over and over and over again.

Do you remember when you first made the connection between performing and learning? Performing and growing?

I don’t remember actually realizing that if I pretended like I knew what I was doing in a situation that I actually knew nothing about, nobody really knew that I didn’t know what I was doing besides me. That was always a fact in my mind. I’ve been pretending my whole life, and somehow it’s worked out. It was only when I joined the development community through the All Stars Project that I realized that this was actually a way of life for many people and that it actually has a name—“performance.” The All Stars taught me what I hadn’t realized I had been doing my entire life: learning through performing beyond myself.

It wasn’t very long ago that I realized that the reason many people stop growing is because they stop learning through playing, and that many people forget how to learn because they don’t know how to play. Dr. Fulani was once giving a talk where she explained that the reason so many young people like myself are stuck and are not growing is because they’ve never had the opportunity to perform in a different setting apart from their neighborhood, meaning nobody’s called them and told them that they need them somewhere else. In Manhattan, or wherever! If that were to occur, young people in the ghettos would have an opportunity to perform beyond themselves by being in settings and situations that are foreign to them. That’s growthful!

How did you get involved with the All Stars? Tell us about what you’ve done.

I got involved in the All Stars by auditioning for the All Stars Talent Show Network in late January of 2009. I went on to win first place at the show and was selected to perform in the 2009 benefit gala. After that, I participated in the first ever All Stars Choir, the All Stars Hip Hop Cabaret, the Development School for Youth, and Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids. I am now on the production team for the Talent Show Network and I do a lot of other volunteering. I’ve also traveled with Pam Lewis to Washington D.C. to meet Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and in 2010 I recieved the All Stars Young Leader for Change Award.

You attend a performance high school. What’s that like? How does it support your development? How does it not?

I attend Frank Sinatra School of the Arts (FSSA). It’s quite different from any other high school in this city for a number of reasons. Picture the movie “Fame.” That’s actually what it’s like at my school! The artistic development that FSSA teaches you is really top-notch, incomparable to any other public school in the city, and maybe even the country. But as far as human development, FSSA is still stuck like any other public school in New York. Play is rarely ever used, except maybe in the Musical Theater department, and you’re expected to learn what’s on the test, and graduate high school on time regardless of whether you’ve grown as a person or not.

What do you see as your current developmental challenges?

I would say that through training our development coaches for the Opening Day of UX [the All Stars’ “unique development institution, free of cost, forward thinking and open to people of all ages and backgrounds who want to grow and develop”], I’ve learned that my biggest developmental challenge is to learn how to have people develop through having them learn about themselves, rather than me telling people their flaws and teaching them to be better. Facilitating growth is very hard when you have no control over the situation!

Anything else you want to share about how you’ve come to embrace performance as a way of life?

Well, recently I had a volunteer experience that taught me something else about performing off the stage in live theater. I was at an event the All Stars Project has for every play they produce called “Pizza and a Play.” Participants in the All Stars’ youth programs get pizza and an opportunity to see a show at the Castillo Theatre. It was at this event that I made a realization. At most of these “Pizza and a Play” events, it is the first time some of the young people ever get the chance to see live theater. When watching the play, they realize that it is a completely different experience than watching a television show from their couches. It’s a completely different performance. In a theater, you can’t shout at a character and tell him not to go into the room and see what’s inside, or laugh at him and call him an idiot for doing so. It was interesting to see my fellow young audience members gasp and laugh at the show while realizing this.

I think performing as an audience member is harder than people think. The onstage performers rely on your performance, and other audience members also depend on your performance in order for them to enjoy the onstage performance. In many ways it’s similar to performing on stage. It requires concentration, enthusiasm, and energy.

I’ve learned to perform offstage everyday, but in particular, I’ve learned to perform offstage as a producer of the stage. I am a producer of the All Stars Talent Show Network. I perform in weekly production meetings about our upcoming events as we discuss how to have a successful show. I try to give my take on everything we discuss, from changing performer rules to creating the schedule of the day. I’m the youngest producer at the meetings, and I perform in a way that I’m taken seriously and that my opinion is as valuable and considered as everyone else’s. I take pride in my experience as a performer and although there are other onstage performers that are producers at the meetings, I am usually the one to kind of make sure that whatever rules and decisions are made about the talent show, they give the performers enough freedom and fun to have a good time. It’s a not a hard thing to do as the other producers are always aware and do an incredible job at producing the show!

If you need a pick-me-up today, something to inspire you, maybe this will do the trick:

Ishita Sanyal is founder of the Calcutta-based grassroots mental health group, Turning Point, and an avid promoter and proselytizer on behalf of a social therapeutic approach to mental health. On a subcontinent where there are only 600 practicing clinical psychologists and a devastating shortage of mental health services, Ishita advocates for a group/community-based, performance therapeutic practice everywhere she goes. She recently registered “Social Therapy India” as the official organizational platform in India.

Ishita has introduced therapy games with mothers and children struggling with rigid social roles and rules. Mothers tend to watch others play, for example, but not play themselves. Performance helps them take the state, she reports. And in her group therapy work at Turning Point, Ishita reports how the improv work has helped her “discover new capacities of the clients, simultaneously as they discover new capacities in themselves.” She describes, for example, a young woman who rarely spoke with others.  “As she struggled to perform in the dramatic play,” says Ishita, “and as the group showed its appreciation by enthusiastically applauding, there was a change in her performance… After some time, she began for the first time to speak with other group members.”

Read about more people like Ishita, graduates of a unique program focusing on the performance of community, in