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

What is relationality and how does it play out in psychotherapy these days? Are all therapies relational? Or at least all non-medical model therapies? What challenges do relational therapists confront?

A communication from a therapist in Norway sparked these questions for me. I have the privilege of lurking in an online course the East Side Institute is currently running—“Helping Clients Discover the Other: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy.” (The course is taught by my dear friend and colleague Christine la Cerva, a gifted and very creative therapist, director of the Social Therapy Group and the Institute’s clinical training programs; you can check out her newsletter, The Community Therapist.) In response to Christine’s first post and invitation to the 20 participants to introduce themselves and share how a deeply-held assumption was challenged in their lives, Paul writes of his history of professional training, his attraction to relational approaches as doing away with the imposition of the therapist’s authority, and the challenge  that social therapy’s radical relationality presents to his practice. I think Paul’s story (excerpts below, with his permission) not only encapsulates a journey he and many others are making, but also begins an exploration of a critically important ethical and methodological issue that psychotherapy needs to confront.

I live in Oslo, Norway. I work as a psychologist and for two years I lived in NYC and trained with the East Side Institute. ?At the time I moved to NYC in 2004, I was only a few years out of school, and heavily influenced by the diverse therapies coming out of family therapy that had developed from the 60s to the 90s from an interest in cybernetics, epistemology and into social constructionism and postmodernism. My orientation towards these therapies had much to do with a strong reaction against what I then understood to be a psychodynamic/analytic orientation to therapy and how it was built to position the therapist as an impenetrable Knower to manage the patient as a confused knot of uncontrollable and multiplying transference symptoms. Colonizing, imposing and thus hurtful to its patients.

I realize that there are friendlier and probably helpful versions of this, especially for the competent and affluent. But throughout many years of the student work I did in different institutions and clinics, the ruling and psychodynamic view of patients and their symptoms was almost always paired with a modernist interpretive stance toward patients’ lives and symptoms, often made by therapists who did not themselves see the patients, and who presented their judgements as truth. These very, very small versions of these persons (patients) became their totality, and had very real and shocking effects on the treatment, developments, lives and deaths of these people.

So I fell in love with the progressive therapies that seemed to develop responses and alternatives to that psychology, through slogans such as “the client as the expert” and methodological orientations such as “the not knowing stance.”

I think I became allergic to imposition. And in my assumptions, I thought I knew a lot about the million ways of imposing on other people’s lives, and the way to counteract them. One of my versions was to become a therapist of lightness, to aim to leave no trace, and the method would ideally be: ”a tap on the client’s shoulder… for the client to re-orient (in what I did not need to know nor impose on) and know how to go on.”

I was perhaps a friendly ghost.

Then I came to the East Side Institute and met social therapy and radical relationality.?And my assumption that not imposing, colonizing, or hurting other people in therapy was the invention, preparation and solo work of the therapist was strongly challenged!

I was told that this was impossible. That I could not by myself decide that authority was no longer an issue. I could not throw all the cultural commodities of possible imposition out of the therapy room before the client enters. We would have to build something together, from what we had to build with, that might or might not transform or challenge the imposition at hand. We might not even have what we would need to begin that work.

 

 

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.

Question: What’s it like to participate in an academic conference taking place in China and on the topic of contemporary capitalism?

Answer: An academic conference.

Which is to say that you have to do the work to create human connection/conversation outside the rigid conference structure of one person after another lecturing. It’s hard work, especially when you don’t speak the language of 90% of the participants!  But it’s well worth it in the new friends you make and the new learnings you gain.

The conference banner

This past weekend I was one of four non-Chinese guest speakers (the “Western Marxists”) at the Third International Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies in Hangzhou, China.  The sponsors were the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory, Department of Philosophy, and School of Marxism at Nanjing University, and the Center for Marxist Studies at Hangzhou University, About 70 people were there in total, “senior” and “junior” scholars, postdocs, and graduate students in philosophy, social theory and Marxist studies. While the presentations were all over the place with regard to topic, the challenge many of the Chinese presentations tried to engage was understanding how China is (and/or should be) facing capitalism: Do Marxian concepts shed some light on this question and, if so, which ones? What role do traditional Chinese values play in China’s growing economy; are they hindering or helpful, both or neither?  Are we witnessing capitalism ‘s (“inevitable”) collapse; if we are, then what’s next?

My presentation, on Fred Newman and the Practice of Method introduced Newman to the Chinese scholars and explicated our development community’s work as the postmodernizing and therapeutization of Marx. The other Westerners—Neil Harding from Wales, David McNally from Toronto and Ian Parker from Britain—introduced new conceptual tools as ways of seeing current class struggle, building socialism and engaging in resistance.

Unfortunately, there was little dialogue that might have led to us creating some new understandings. But informally I had some wonderfully lively and moving conversations with “the younger generation” who were eager to explore what it means to practice method (and not just do theory), to create emotionality, and to build community. Some of these took place at the spectacular West Lake and the park that surrounds it, and at extraordinarily delicious banquet meals.

New Friends Jayson and Lily

From Hangzhou we went to the city of Nanjing, where I led a class for philosophy postdoc students on Marx, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein and Social Therapy. I began with a brief introduction of how I came to Marx, philosophy and therapy as a political organizer (and developmental psychologist). Then I asked them to perform part of the play, “The Myth of Psychology” in which Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are in therapy and talking about Karl Marx. Just as participants in my Thought Leadership of Fred Newman class in NY, those in Nanjing really got into it. They asked how could we speak of fetishization outside of political economy, what Social Therapy looks like, what to do about “objective” unhappiness in the world, and the relationship between changing the world and changing ourselves.

I thank the students for their willingness to create a playful and open learning environment with me and for their great questions. Professor Huaiyu Liu and Dr. Jing Wu  (who translated for me) were fabulous “completers” of my thinking and my English words. All in all, a great time was had by all! I later found out that I had given No. 88 in the Marxist seminar series of the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory!

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.

Celcilia Magalhães, Lois Holzman, Carrie Lobman, Fernanda Liberali

November 22, 2010

With friend and colleague Carrie Lobman, I just returned from a ten-day trip to Brazil as the guests of two wonderfully talented educator/researchers—Fernanda Liberali and Maria Cecilia Magalhães from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Carrie and I were guest presenters at two events they organized, a symposium in Fortaleza and a course at their university in São Paulo.

For about a decade, Fernanda and Cecilia have been developing a Vygotskian, socio-cultural pedagogy and a creative community of researcher-educator-activists who advance, expand and inform the pedagogical approach. They do this through several programs and groups with names that include the words citizen, collaboration, creativity, social activity, and performance.  We became friends and began to collaborate in 2006, with one prior trip I made to Brazil and three they made to NYC (presenting at Performing the World conferences and visiting the East Side Institute, the All Stars Project and NYC schools).

First stop was the northeast city of Fortaleza for the 4^th annual Symposium on Acting as Citizens (Simpósio Ação Cidadã), held at the 7th of September University. It was a great conference experience—about 500 Brazilian professors, teacher educators, and university, high school and primary school students presented their work on developing social activities and performances in schools across the country. Carrie and I led off the first day sharing our play and performance approach to learning and development and its practice in the US and internationally. The first day ended with Multiple Worlds-All Stars, a three hour talent show featuring dance, song and skits performed by children and adults. It was wonderful! Some highlights were dancers from from public and private schools, and a charming performance of a scene between Piaget and Vygotsky from Fred Newman’s play, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage.”

Fabio, us and some of the production crew of SIAC

On our third day we played outdoors! With Cecília we drove to three gorgeous beaches, took a roller coaster dune buggy ride, and had a great lunch on the beach. Before we left Fortaleza, we visited the 7th of September School with our host Fábio Delano Vidal Carneiro, who supervises the educational development at the school and teaches at the university, and the impressive youth dance school, Edisca.

Poster of educational influences at entrance to 7th of September School

In São Paulo, Carrie and I visited a public preschool and a private pre-through-middle school, both innovatively performatory. We led a two-day course, Performance: Creativity and Collaboration, for about 40 faculty, graduate students and teachers (many of them teachers of English). Among the hot topics were different views of “mediation,” instrumentalism and tool-and-result methodology, and performing and acting. In light of our particular understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the Brazilian people right now, Carrie and I—as postmodern Marxist internationalists from the US—presented who we are and the kinds of activities we have found effective in building community and creating developmental opportunities, both inside and outside of schools.

Classroom in a public preschool

The large grouping in Fortaleza and the smaller one in São Paulo are very special, comprised of lovely, talented, creative people, who are building something unique that, I think, hás the potential to influence the direction of Brazilian education and youth development. It is a privilege to know them and to participate in their ongoing “search for method.”

Some of the São Paulo Group

Participate in discovering/creating responses to this question by attending the sixth Performing the World conference: Performing the World 2010, September 30-October 3, 2010, New York City (hosted by All Stars Project, Inc and East Side Institute for Group and short Term Psychotherapy)

“Can Performance Change the World?”

Performing artists, community organizers, theatre workers, educators, scholars, youth workers, students, social workers, psychotherapists, psychologists, medical doctors, health workers, and business executives are coming from 31 countries to discuss/perform that question and their responses to it.  Performing the World 2010 is well underway.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share  with you some of the nearly 100 presentations, workshops and performances that will be featured at this year’s Performing the World. Here are samplings of theatre related sessions and presentations dealing with performance, health and wellness. Future posts will highlight sessions on performance and education, performance and trauma, and performance and mental health.

Play On Stage and Off

A Day in the Life of the World – The Living Theatre has been pushing the boundaries of the theatre and working to change the world since 1947.  Founder and artistic director Judith Malina and company members will lead a workshop on Living Theatre performance techniques and a discussion on the Living Theatre’s perspective on performance and social transformation.

Performing Change – One morning a group of young people fan out through the downtown streets stopping people at random to engage them in conversations about problems in their community and what they think needs to be changed in the world.  A few days later this group of young people present a performance illustrative of the concerns raised on the streets. Members of the Street Spirits Theatre Company, based in British Columbia will share their play-creation process.

Towards a New Educational Theatre with Chinese Characteristics – Huizhu Sun, President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, will share his efforts to introduce devised and educational theatre in China based on traditional characters derived from Chinese Opera.

Reinventing Avant-Garde Theatre – Projekt Theater Studio in Vienna has transformed itself from a classical left avant-garde theatre to a community performance space, the Butcherie, creating new performance forms with immigrants, refugees, women and the elderly.  Founder and artistic director Eva Brenner will discuss these changes and lead a workshop in the Butcherie’s performance techniques.

Bubbles on the Subway – Play in Unexpected Places – Throughout 2009 Kristen Pedemonti played with people on the subways and streets of New York City using bubbles as a means to engage.  She wanted to help people remember what it is to play and demonstrate play’s potential to help people grow.  Pedemonti will share her experience and explore how adult play can change energy, shift focus and open us up to each other.

Performance and Health

Patch Adams – the Clown Laureate of Medicine, comes to Performing the World for the first time.  He will share his work from around the world, bringing performance and hope to the sick and suffering.  In addition to his own workshop, Patch will be joining Jim Mangia, executive director of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Los Angeles, and other innovative doctors on a panel entitled, “What is Health?”

The Performance of Resiliency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital – Oncology nurses from John Hopkins Hospital and performance coaches from Performance of a Lifetime share how performance games and workshops helped the nurses to regain the sense of humanity that initially led them to professional nursing.

The Power of Performing Our Story – Lewis Mehl-Madrona will share her work helping people transform the stories of their illnesses into performance and discuss healing as social performance.

Clowning at Hospital Changes the World – Clownetterna, a Swedish hospital clown group, brings performance to children in hospitals, and shares the special magic of the clown/child encounter.

Housing the World

The PTW 2010 Housing Committee is busy securing free housing for the hundreds of performance activists and scholars who will be attending. They have already secured, as of this writing, 80 beds for visitors in households throughout the five boroughs of New York City.

If you want to stay in a NYC home while at PTW, you must fill out a housing form (available at www.performingtheworld.org). The deadline to apply for housing has been extended to July 24. Housing forms will not be processed until conference registration is received. Additionally, if you live in the New York metropolitan area and would like to host a performance activist or scholar from around the world, please contact Jenny or Esther at 212-941-9400 x 414, or fill out a form on the website (http://eastsideinstitute.org/page63/page63.html).

Conference Schedule

Thursday, September 30, conference begins at 5:30 PM

Registration and Opening Reception

Friday, October 1

Concurrent Sessions and Evening Performances

Saturday, October 2

Plenaries, Concurrent Sessions and Evening Performances

Sunday, October 3

Concurrent Sessions and Closing Plenary

Conference ends at 6:00 PM

Registering for the Conference

Registration for PTW 2010 can be completed online at (http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=204261) or contact Melissa Meyer at 212-941-8906 x 304.

In 2004 I initiated a program to support grassroots social entrepreneurs and activist-scholars whose work is too new or innovative or radical to get much support. The program is called  The International Class of the East Side Institute. As of today, over 50 people from five U.S. States and 16 countries have been a part of it. Among them are psychologists from India and Brazil, applied theatre practitioners from Kenya and Canada, community organizers from Uganda and Taiwan, psychotherapists from South Africa and Argentina, youth workers from Nicaragua and Mexico, and educators and social workers from the Philippines and the United States. Coming from different places and professions, they share a desire to change the world-and an eagerness to take advantage of the unique opportunity the International Class offers them to create a global support network, to engage the philosophical, political and psychological issues of their practice, and to study and train as developmentalists with the creators of social therapeutic methodology.

Here is the first issue of The International Class alum newsletter, Reports from the Field.

Enjoy!