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

I love my responsibility as chair of Global Outreach for the All Star’s Project’s UX because of the opportunities I get to bring people together who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. Like the immigrant young people from Rome who run their own community, the inner-city young people and adults in New York City who participate in growthful learning opportunities at the All Stars, the student body of the East Side Institute, and any other interested New Yorkers.

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.

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.

I’m on a working vacation at the beautiful ocean community of Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. Today, after the preparations for and actuality of Hurrican Irene (which was not too bad out here), I got to some reading. One book is Rom Harre’s Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, an unusual but very accessible book about how living things have contributed to a scientific understanding of the world. It got me thinking about my friend and mentor, the late Fred Newman. How much he would have enjoyed Harre’s book (Fred was enamored of the creativity, rigor and improvisational nature of science). And how much Fred contributed to a new understanding of understanding the world (not scientific, but not unscientific either).

What do I mean by that? Here’s the brief introduction I wrote to the revised (2010) edition of Fred Newman’s book, Let’s Develop! (It’s a great book!)

1994, the year that Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth was first published, was also the year that the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) came out. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Let’s Develop!, written by philosopher and lay therapist Fred Newman with the assistance of his friend, sociologist Phyllis Goldberg, is informed by hundreds of ordinary people, the clients he saw in his social therapy practice. Its subject matter is people and their emotions, their pain, their dreams, their relationships, their therapeutic conversations, and their activity of growing. DSM-IV, written under the auspices of the American Psychiatric Association, is informed by over 200 psychiatrists and psychologists (nearly half of whom had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry). Its subject matter is 297 classified mental disorders, which serve as prototypes for judging patients’ symptoms and behaviors. When the DSM-IV came out there was minor protest, most of it around the pharmaceutical connections of the writers. In contrast, work on new edition due out in 2013 (referred to as DSM-5) is being carried out in a flurry of controversy over the even greater proliferation of mental disorders than with prior revisions.

Fred Newman thinks the DSM (all editions) is silly. Scientifically silly. Since he loves science and is quite knowledgable, his opinion on this carries some weight. If diagnose we must (and it’s not at all clear that we must), Newman says, then we should diagnose ourselves and each other, rather than take up the diagnoses of the so-called experts, people who don’t know us. Newman is one of many, many therapists, social scientists and philosophers who have written thoughtful and often scathing critiques of the medical model and pseudoscientific diagnostic approach to mental health and illness for academic books and journals. However, Newman is not primarily interested in critiquing; he’s interested in helping. Let’s Develop! is a self-help book, written for ordinary people. It’s an exceedingly practical book, which attempts to give the everyday usefulness of Newman’s social therapy to the average Joe and Jane. And precisely because it is so practical, I think it’s perhaps Newman’s most thoughtful and scathing critique. It is, to use a term Newman and I like very much, practical-critical.

In 1994 there was not all that much receptivity for the practical-critical from scholars. The divide between theoretical critique and alternative practice was great. Newman and I were emerging voices in the intellectual dialogues taking place on the unresolvable problems that arise from forcing human life into a natural science framework, and advocating for the creating of new psychologies. With Newman’s philosophical sophistication and my grounding in human development across the life span, we more than held our own. But it was our practice, in particular Newman’s social therapy practice, that set us apart as the most practically oriented of theoretical critiques. To make that statement loud and clear, we decided that Newman should write the practical guide that is Let’s Develop!

During the sixteen years since the book first appeared, the sharp distinction between critical intellectual debate and alternative practices in psychology and psychotherapy has begun to blur. New critical practices have developed and, like Newman’s social therapy, others have grown, and this has significantly advanced the overall substance and quality of the intellectual conversation. The debate continues, but critique and practice are now closer together.

If you’re not involved in these intellectual conversations, you might be wondering why you should care about this history and debate. Well, think about where your therapist, your child’s school counselor, your uncle’s addiction counselor or your mother’s social worker got her or his training. What were these professionals taught? How many different approaches were they exposed to? What understandings of how human beings grow and learn and feel and think do they work with? Do they think you and your family can grow emotionally, or do they think that all that can be done is modifying the most dysfunctional ways you all relate? Can they help you create your life (including your emotional life) or are they only concerned to treat the symptoms of your so-called mental disorder? The more that critical practice and theoretical critique intermingle, the more likely it is that the training future counselors and therapists receive will be broad and inclusive, and the answers to these questions will be thoughtful and rich with possibility.

Newman sees and does therapy as a creative activity, not as a medical procedure. Together, therapists and clients create the therapy—that’s how it works. He relates to people as creators of their development, no matter how severe their pain, “presenting problem” or psychiatric diagnosis. He never tries to fix a problem. Rather, he supports people to grow, to create their lives. There’s always a choice. Not as a denial of how one is, but as a loving act. Ask for help. Be giving. Share the shame. When a conversation is heading toward a screaming match, start it over again. Do something completely unlike you. You’ll still be “you” but it’ll be a you who’s actively becoming. Becoming what? Becoming you.

Newman’s social therapy is unique in its focus on people’s development, but it’s not alone in being humanistic and creative. This is good news for the growing masses of adults, children and families in need of help for whom the choices have been to “tough it out” without therapy or to be pathologized. Those who engage in social therapy or another of the dozens of alternative therapies that now exist are, by their very activity, critical psychologists as much, if not more, than their academic counterparts. Their voices, and those of their therapists, are slowly being heard in the seminar rooms and clinics that train tomorrow’s therapists and counselors.

It is in this revived playing field that we reissue Let’s Develop! Some slight changes have been made throughout the text to reflect life style changes that have occurred over the years but, overall, the content remains not only intact, but equally—if not more—relevant.

As a new reader of Let’s Develop!, you’ll be joining a global grouping of tens of thousands. Unlike most books, its following wasn’t built with advertising dollars or critical reviews, but by a community that it helped to grow through viral marketing. Across the US, social therapists gave it to clients, psychology professors to students, youth workers to urban teens, teacher trainers to school personnel, business coaches and consultants to executives. Colleagues of ours in other countries xeroxed chapters from their copies and handed them out to friends and family. Chapters were translated into different languages (the ones I know about are Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish) and used in university courses. Zdravo da Ste, a community of hundreds devoted to human development in Serbia, translated the book in its entirety, found a publisher and promotes it throughout the country to both the public and professionals.

I’ve worked with Fred Newman for most of my adult life on many social change projects. But none has been as difficult or rewarding as working to liberate psychology from its own pathology. “You don’t have to be sick to get help,” Newman insists. That’s the practical-critical message of Let’s Develop! It’s critical psychology at its best. Welcome to the “grassroots” critical psychology movement!

Hundreds of messages are filling my inbox—outpourings of condolences, love and respect on the passing of Fred Newman. From all corners of the world those who studied with Fred, read one of our books, heard him speak in person or on video, or “met” him through others are writing to share their appreciation for all he has built. And share their stories—what they remember from an encounter, a life-changing therapeutic or performance experience, a radically re-orienting world view provocation. Reading these messages from so many friends and colleagues, and responding to them, is very moving. It’s as if societal time has momentarily stopped and I/we are world historical.

Fred’s life and accomplishments are noted in an official New York Times obituary that appeared this past weekend. It focuses on his influence on independent politics in the US and New York City politics overall. As you’ll see, the first line comments that Fred’s influence defies easy description. Fred would be gratified to read this, as he was very sceptical of the value of description, easy and otherwise, in the human social activity of creating a new world.

July 9, 2011

Fred Newman, Writer and Political Figure, Dies at 76

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description.

He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states.

He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.

Mr. Newman, who died at 76 in his Manhattan home on July 3, eschewed conventionality. He insisted, for instance, that there was nothing wrong with psychotherapists having sex with patients. He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot.

“If it weren’t for the Independence Party, Mike Bloomberg might not have become mayor,” said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College.

In turn, Mr. Bloomberg supported the Independence Party’s goal of nonpartisan municipal elections and gave the party more than $650,000 of his own money. His administration arranged millions of dollars in bond financing in 2002 and 2006 for a building for Mr. Newman’s nonprofit All Stars Project, which uses the performing arts to help low-income children.

Mr. Newman began his climb to influence in New York in the 1960s, when, from his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he formed a Marxist collective called “If … Then.” Its members, many of them self-professed anarchists, collected money on the streets for the group. Most participated in Mr. Newman’s newly articulated “social therapy,” which encouraged patients to change themselves by seeking to change society. He encouraged collective members to sleep with one another, an activity he called “friendosexuality.” The collective published newspapers and started a dental clinic.

“It’s probably fair to say I was the dominant leader,” Mr. Newman said in an interview with The New York Observer in 1999. “I hope I wasn’t an authoritarian oppressor, but I think that’s probably accurate to say that.”

His detractors, however, said his “collective” amounted to a cult. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, which studies unorthodox political groups, called Mr. Newman “a master at creating a myth of importance.” “He was a brilliant charlatan,” Mr. Berlet said.

Frederick Delano Newman was born in the Bronx on June 17, 1935, and grew up there. His mother chose the same middle name as that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hero of hers. After his father died when young Fred was 9, his mother raised her five children alone, supported by welfare checks, the rent from rooms in her house, near Yankee Stadium, and the fees she earned running poker games.

Mr. Newman hated school but tested well enough to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He worked as a toolmaker to help support his family. At 19, he joined the Army and served in Korea. He graduated from the City College of New York and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford in 1962.

He was twice married and divorced. He is survived by his son, Donald; his daughter, Elizabeth Newman; and by Gabrielle L. Kurlander and Jacqueline Salit, his life partners in what Ms. Salit described as an “unconventional family of choice.” He died of renal failure, his spokeswoman, Christina DiChiara, said.

Mr. Newman taught at City College but was fired after giving male students A’s to help them avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Other colleges hired him but fired him for the same reason. A job as a drug counselor led to his therapy career.

After forming his Upper West Side collective, Mr. Newman, in 1974, allied his group with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., originally a leftist leader who veered to right-wing conspiracy theories and ran for president eight times from the political fringe. Tensions between the two prompted Mr. Newman to break the alliance after less than a year, however. He then formed the International Workers Party from what he called his core collective, with a mission to advance minority rights and a leftist agenda.

The party was dissolved at the end of the 1970s. Mr. Newman then founded the New Alliance Party as a vehicle for moving beyond a narrow leftist spectrum. Around the same time, he met Ms. Fulani, a graduate student who attended one of his clinics and joined the collective. Mr. Newman helped mold her into a political professional who for many years was the face of his political ventures.

“She is one of my life’s proudest accomplishments,” he told New York Newsday in 1992.

In 1988, as her campaign manager, he helped Ms. Fulani get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, something no black candidate or woman had done. She received more than 200,000 votes. In 1992, Ms. Fulani ran again, and raised more than $2 million from private donors.

In 1991, the New Alliance Party gave strong support to Mr. Sharpton, then a community advocate, at a time when he was struggling for broader political recognition. It provided Mr. Sharpton with income, public relations help and up to half the participants in his demonstrations, often protesting attacks against blacks.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Newman began a campaign to encourage more independent voices in politics, almost regardless of ideology. These included Mr. Perot, Ralph Nader and even the conservative stalwart Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr. Newman supported a succession of reform parties, ultimately capturing control of the New York City branch of the Independence Party.

As late as 2005, Mr. Newman wrote that he remained a Marxist, albeit what he called a postmodern one. His final cause was to end the two-party system, which he believed stifled real choice. He wanted primary elections to be open to all parties, and to have all candidates run against one another. The top two would vie in a general election.

That proposal prompted a question from Mr. Bloomberg one day in 2001 when the future mayor was seeking Mr. Newman’s support, Ms. Salit recalled. Mr. Bloomberg asked him if he would be putting himself out of business if he were to give up the ballot line he had used so effectively.

“We’re an anti-party party,” Mr. Newman answered. “We want to be put out of business.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

A young friend of mine, Francelli Chapman, keeps a very active blog that I’m learning a lot from. An example: This great quote from Maya Angelou’s book, Letter to My Daughter—“Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.”

Francelli calls her blog, “The Life of an Actress ‘N’ Such” —and there’s lots and lots of “‘n such” from this performer, activist and community-builder. Francelli shares her discoveries from doing new things and being places she’s never been before, the pain of her community and efforts to alleviate it, her pondering of new ideas gleaned from what she’s reading and who she’s meeting and working with—any and all of which give a glimpse of a woman whose practice “takes place in” zones of proximal (or people’s) development—zones that she continuously participates in creating.

Vygotskians (and everyone), take a look!

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