Connections
Fred Newman and I began Performing the World (PTW) in 2001. The 7th PTW conference/festival will take place in October 2012.
PERFORMING THE WORLD 2012
Can Performance Save the World?
October 4–7, 2012
The seventh Performing the World (PTW) conference will be held in New York City, Thursday, October 4 through Sunday October 7, 2012. International, cross-disciplinary, conversational, experiential, and practical-critical, PTW has come over the decade to play an increasingly important role in supporting and expanding “the performance turn” around the world. If you practice and/or study performance as a means of individual, community and world transformation (or want to), PTW is for you.
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?”
Improvisational Learning is a blog started by a group of educators and trainers from around the world who are practicing, exploring and promoting playful and creative approaches to how people learn and develop. It’s a place to share your practices and ideas with an international audience.
East Side Institute Community News
Launched in the summer 2011, this interactive blog supplements the Institute’s official website, with news presented in a timely way — more informally and as its evolving.
Zdravo Da Ste/Hi Neighbour is a local, non-governmental, non-profit organization officially registered in 1994. The Programme was initiated by a group of volunteer developmental psychologists from Belgrade in 1992, and during the following years expanded to a network of psychologists, educators, social workers and others covering 24 municipalities in Serbia.
The Hi Neighbour Global Approach is an alternative based on original ideas of Lev Vigotsky:
• Human development is an endless process
• HN Programme is process oriented, not outcome oriented
• HN Programme is strongly connected with actual life
• Workshops are an interactive source for development
The Gesundheit! Institute (a not-for-profit health care organization chartered under the Nonprofit Corporation Act of the District of Columbia) is a project in holistic medical care based on the belief that one cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the family, the community, the world, and the health care system itself. Gesundheit’s model is designed to protect care as the core of the medical interaction. You’ll find Patch Adams’ blog here too.
Cultural Historical Special Interest Group
The Cultural-Historical Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) is a diverse grouping of researchers who approach learning, development and social change from a cultural-historical, socio-cultural and/or activity theoretic perspective. Common themes of research and conversation draw on Vygotsky, Luria, Leont’ev, Bakhtin, Mead (and others). Check it out—you don’t have to be a member of AERA or the group to join the Facebook group.
Esben Wilstrup’s blog. See the kind of performance play he’s organizing in Denmark.
Fifteen years ago, IDEA (the International Association of Drama/Theatre and Education) launched its founding world congress in Porto, Portugal. Since then, thousands of drama and theatre education teachers, grassroots activists, scholars and artists from across the world have met at six world congresses to exchange and celebrate workshop techniques, case studies, pedagogical theories, new curricula and performances, united by a deep respect for difference and a shared vision: to develop our creative, empathetic and analytical intelligences through drama/theatre and education to nurture a just and peaceful world.
The All Stars Project, Inc. (ASP) is an amazing organization. Out of its performing arts complex on 42 St, in the heart of New York’s commercial theater district, the ASP runs performance-based development programs for young people, the majority from poor and working class communities, and provides training and organizational support to those wishing to start All Stars programs in their communities, both in the US and internationally. In the New York City metropolitan area, the All Stars programs annually involve thousands of young people, ages 5 – 25, in different activities that invite them to perform their lives, both on and off stage. The All Stars staff is aided by hundreds of adult volunteers – both trained professionals and “ordinary” people from all walks of life. Some volunteers work directly with the programs and others raise the funds that make the programs possible. The All Stars takes no government funds and raises millions of dollars annually through a unique fundraising model that reaches out to individuals of all income brackets for financial support, and first hand involvement if they wish. The ASP is also the home of the Castillo Theatre, which brings experimental political theatre, dealing with contemporary and historical social issues, to the heart of New York’s commercial theatre district.