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.

Gita Vygodskaya (Lev Vygotsky’s daughter) died on July 13. She was in her mid-80s. I and so many Vygotskians around the world will miss her wonderful stories, her warmth and sparkle, and the joy she took in meeting people the world over whose work was inspired by her father’s writings.

Gita was nine years-old when her father died at age 37 in 1934. His works were then banned by Stalin and   his widow and two daughters kept the manuscripts safe under their beds in their apartment in Moscow for years. When her mother died, Gita took charge of keeping the  manuscripts safe and getting a volume of them finally published in 1956. Over the next two decades she worked, along with some of Vygotsky’s students, to turn the manuscripts into six volumes of his works published in Russia in the 1980s. She received her  doctorate in psychology from Moscow University in 1959 and worked with deaf children for many years.

I first met Gita in Moscow in 1993 when she invited me to visit her in her apartment. She shared memorabilia and stories of her childhood with her father, something she continued doing with people until her final days. The next year, I and the East Side Institute brought her to the US for her first ever visit to visit with our community, visit the Vygotskian school we were running at the time (Barbara Taylor School) and give a conference presentation.  Over the years, Gita and I saw each other a few more times. Our last visit was this past November at the home outside of Moscow she shared with her daughter, son-in-law and their family. With friends Carrie Lobman, Elina Lampert-Shepel and Dot Robbins, I spent a memorable and lovely night there.

“As progressives we have come to believe that if people address the issue of human development—in direct and practical ways—we might indeed change the world.”

So reads the title page of a booklet the East Side Institute put out several years ago on our history, philosophy and programs. I was reminded of this during the week when I was reading the dialogue among our faculty (myself, Chris Helm, Carrie Lobman and Fred Newman) and students in the Institute’s Social Therapeutics Online certificate program. The 20-week course is winding down and people are revisiting what we’ve read, written and said in reflecting together on the impact (or not) on our lives of what we’ve been doing. The conversation is too rich to keep private and, with the permission of the students and the rest of the faculty, I will share some of it on this site.

Alex is a theatre director and on the drama faculty at a university in South Africa. She’s been involved in community theatre and performance work with adults and young people for years. Throughout the course, she’s been sharing the performance work she’s doing with men in prison, and here she tells us of their conversation at the end of the program.

I had the most amazing group conversation with a small group of the men I have been working with in prison.  It was part of an evaluation of our process, and also part of my research (as a university teacher, I do need to always ‘explain’ what I do), and also part of our process together as we talked about what we believed drama and performance mean for us.  What they talked about was an enactment of all the things that social therapy says is developmental, growthful, educational, about group building through performance.

This group has certainly not been framed or established as a therepeutic group, yet each person talked about how therepeutic their involvement with the group and our activities had been.  I need some more time to listen to the conversation again (which I recorded) and process it all – there were just so many beautiful gems which dialogue with the theory we have been reading in Vygotsky at Work and Play.  In particular, I have just read the last sentance of chapter 2 – “my proposal goes in the opposite direction, namely, that education could be advanced if we consider the teacher as therapist”.  My work with this group has always been constructed educationally – yet, when we had our conversation yesterday, most of the participants ‘learning’ was articulated therepeutically, or socially.

For example, they all talked about how drama had helped them understand others better far more than any other programme, that through becoming another person through performance, they were able to leave the stress of their everyday lives behind and play with new possibilities, it helped them work well with others, communicate better, and most of all, understand themselves and their futures in new ways.  All of them reflected on how performing had helped them with anger and to understand their emotions differently, particularly relationally:  so that they found different strategies when dealing with conflict or understanding where other people had come from.  One of the participants talked about how he had to go and receive a certficate for something but was nervous, and thought that he would just perform confidence, stuck his chest out and collected it with pride.  ”A”, who is a passionate leader and initiator in the group, talked about how he is now always performing – both on and off stage, as he learns new ways to ‘be’ (and become, although these are my words, not his).  He seemed to see himself as what Lois says about “people are primarily performers, not thinkers or knowers”.

Drama always claims that it does these things that the group reflected on, but this is the first time I have heard a group talk about the effect of their work together in this way.  It was a thrilling hour.  When I think about it and the creative activities we have been involved in over the past few months, I start to understand what Lois talks about as the ZPD not being a zone, but an activity.

On April 15, my good friend and colleague Lenora Fulani delivered a brilliant statement about educational policy at the National Action Network’s Annual National Convention in New York City. Dr. Fulani, a developmental psycholoigst and political activist, co-founded the All Stars Project, Inc. and its Operation Conversation: Cops and Kids program. She made her remarks on an education panel that included NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (and was followed by a talk by US Education Secretary Arne Duncan).

Dr. Fulani opened by callling for an end to the discussion about the achievement gap:

“We’ve been asked to speak today about closing the achievement gap. I want to talk to you today about closing the discussion of the achievement gap. I’ll be very blunt. There is nothing to discuss. Poor kids – including poor kids who are black or otherwise of color – do less well in school than white kids who are middle or upper class. There’s no mystery there. It’s been studied to death.”

She then spoke of some of the intellectuals whose discoveries in philosophy, psychology and education are used to develop effective and meangful approaches to the underdevelopment of poor and black children—and whose ideas are being debated worldwide. She closed with these words:

“We must demand that our leaders get themselves educated in the most innovative breakthroughs across the globe. That’s the achievement gap we need to close. And we need to close it now.”

You can listen to Dr. Fulani at YouTube — it’s worth it!

I don’t usually post news items but I’m so thrilled about the All Stars Newark expansion plan — a partnership through which everyone grows — that I want to share it!

From The Star Ledger

NEWARK — The All Stars Project of New Jersey today announced a $9 million fundraising project, comprised of private donors, to foster after-school programs here, and with $3 million already raised, the group is hopeful the goal will be reached within four years. Read more

I’m so pleased and honored that my book Vygotsky at Work and Play was nominated for the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, given by Divison 7 (Developmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association annually. I just posted the nomination on the Reviews page under Vygotsky at Work and Play. Check it out! And heartfelt thanks to the international group of nominators!

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!

Here’s the link to a video of the scened from the Work/Play described below

January, 15, 2010

I was delighted to see The Work/Play – the current production of Youth OnStage! (the youth theatre of the All Stars Project) – featured in a column by Ellen Galinsky in today’s Huffington Post. I work with and am a huge fan of all the All Stars programs and have a special love for its youth and adult (Castillo) theatres. I’ve seen this production and attended the Culture Talk last Sunday that Ellen refers to. In addition to Ellen (president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute), Daniel Banks (founder and director of Hip Hop Theatre Initiative) and Dan Friedman (artistic director, Youth OnStage!) and the young cast of the play created a lovely conversation among equals.

Here is Ellen’s column:

A Tale of Two Worlds: B-School and High School

I’ve spent the past eight years immersed in the science of early learning, working with researchers from the world’s great universities. We have distilled this science into seven essential life skills you can teach your children (not typical academic achievement-oriented skills. Real life skills). The result of this journey is Mind in the Making, a book, awareness campaign, and teaching approach to early learning. The best thing about these skills is that you can apply them to your daily life, no matter how old you are. Each week, I’ll share with you real-life examples of these skills at play, and I encourage you to share your observations with me on Twitter (@ellengalinsky). Here is my first story:

World One:
Picture this: a group of young people from Youth Onstage have created and are performing a play called Work, Play & You–A Love/Hate Triangle at New York City’s Castillo Theater:

Here is one of the first scenes called “Security Check:”
Some of the young people in the cast play security guards; others play students waiting to be checked into their school building. They have obviously created this scene from their own experiences attending inner city schools. Because the scene is so powerful, I will share it with you from the play’s script:
Guard 1: Come on, come on. If you were any slower, you’d be going backwards.
Guard 2: Take that hat off. And get those rainbows out of your pockets.
Student: Hey, man I got the right to have rainbows in my pockets.
Guard 3: Don’t give us no attitude. Empty ‘em. Now!
(Student 1 empties his pockets and exits.)
(Second student comes through.)
Guard 2: Wait a minute. Is that glitter?
Student 2: (holding up the bag) Yes, it is–this backpack is sprinkled with happiness.
Guard 2: Go back outside and clean it off.
(Student 2 goes back out.)
(Third student comes through smiling.)
Guard 2: Discard that smile.
(Student has a hard time getting rid of her smile.)
Guard 2: Do you want it ripped off your face?
(She stops smiling and is waved in. Fourth student comes through.)
Guard 1: Wait, wait, do you see what I see in that bag?
(Guards 2 and 3 look.)
Guard 3: Yes, it’s definitely a glimmer of hope.
Guard 2: (opening bag, taking the hope out) We’ll keep that. If it’s still alive at the end of the semester, you can have it back.
Student 4: Please officer, I need that hope. It won’t hurt anyone.
Guard 2: Hope has no place in school. Get to class.
(Student 4 exits. Fifth student come in looking very sad.)
Guard 1: She looks depressed enough for school.
Guard 2: Yeah, she’s fine, let her through.
(Student 2 returns.)
Guard 1: Her bag’s clean now.
Guard 2: Yeah, but she’s a troublemaker. Scan her.
Guard 3: Okay, assume the position. Spread ‘em, spread em.
(Student 2 holds her arms out and spreads her legs. Guard 3 scans her. Looks in student’s hair.)
Guard 3: Wow! There’s dreams in her weave.
Guard 1: You’ve got some attitude problem, girl. Go home and wash those dreams out of your hair. Don’t come back until they’re gone.
Guard 2: I don’t know what’s wrong with kids these days.
(Sixth student enters.)
Guard 1: This bag has set off every alarm.
Guard 2: Open it up.
(Sixth student takes things out of bag.)
Guard 1: Self respect? You know that’s against the rules here.
Guard 2: Songs? Creativity is banned.
Guard 3: Imagination!
(The Security Guards are shocked.)
Student 6: I need my imagination.
Guard 1: Not here you don’t.
Guard 3: This one’s a real criminal.
All Three Guards: You’re expelled!

As this powerful play, directed by Dan Friedman, continues, there is scene after scene where a character named Work and a character named Play compete for “everyman.” As one of the actors says in the beginning of the play: “When you go to school, you’re forced to leave play at home or on the street or wherever. They just don’t want it in the classroom.”

World Two
I saw this play on Sunday January the 10th, and following the play served as one of the discussants for a conversation with the audience and the cast. Then I went home and turned to the most serious of serious sections of the Sunday New York Times, the business section.

And there I read a front page article by Lane Wallace, entitled, “Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School? The point of this article is that business school students need to learn the essential skills of critical thinking and perspective taking. As the article says, students need “to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.”

Lest you think that this is only a radical idea, it is being implemented at such august B-Schools as Harvard and Stanford and the C.E.O. of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, John J. Fernandes, estimates that while about 25 percent of association-accredited schools are changing their curriculum to develop more sustainable leaders now, he expects that figure to reach 75 percent in 10 years.

B-Schools are making these changes because they lead to better results–future business leaders who can possibly make better decisions.

So it was a day of two worlds–the world of high school education where students have to leave their best selves at the door and the world of business schools, where some of the leading institutions are revising their programs to help students obtain important life skills.

Is A Reconciliation Of These Two Worlds Possible?

That is the hope of the students from Youth Onstage and the play’s conclusion. I certainly hope they are right.

Having spent the past eight years studying how children learn and filming many of the best experiments in neuroscience, cognitive science, and child development research, it is clear to me that education must focus on what is learned (content AND life skills) and how it is taught (using techniques that include what researcher Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and her colleagues are calling playful learning).

I also know that these essential life skills of critical thinking and perspective taking develop early and that there are hundreds of everyday ways that teachers and parents can nurture them. We shouldn’t have to wait until graduate school to try to reintroduce them to students. If we do, we are losing far too many students and potential leaders along the way.

I ended 2009 with two adventures—one in Russia and the other in Serbia. Two different trips, two different countries, two different organizing milieus—connected in our collective histories with each other and with Vygotsky.

I spent a week in Moscow and its surrounds, mostly at the 10th Annual Vygotsky Memorial Conference, organized by psychologist Elena Kravtsova of the Vygotsky Institute of Psychology at the Russia State University for the Humanities and aided immeasurably by Dot Robbins. For many years, Elena has been implementing the ideas of  her grandfather Lev Vygotsky in creative and significant ways in schools and university training, along with her husband Gennady Kravtsov.  (They were featured  at a conference on Vygotsky and Culture that I and the late Leslie Williams of Teachers College Columbia University convened in 1997; a chapter in my book, Schools for Growth, is devoted to one aspect of their work, based on first-hand experience in the late 90s.)

The conference offered a lot: a chance to experience first-hand several voices of Russian non-classical/Vygotskian psychology; the fun and challenge of leading a performatory workshop for more than 100 Russian university students with my dear  colleague Carrie Lobman; the privilege of  delivering a plenary address with the incomparable translation of another dear colleague Elina Lampert-Shepel; being reunited with Gita Vygodskaya after after nearly a decade (in addition to being together in Moscow and parts of Europe a few times, I and the Institute hosted Gita’s first ever visit to the US in the mid-1990s); and walking, talking with and learning from many of the other participants.

What I offered was a “Vygotsky without truth” — by which I meant the work of the Institute and its broader performance and development community.  I shared some of the theory/practice of truthless therapy and truthless developmental learning in and outside of schools, where it has come from, and how I understand it to be a worthwhile pursuit in the current social-cultural-political climate.

I think that the talk was challenging. For one thing, it didn’t do what many talks (not just at this conference but in most academic and intellectual contexts) do, which is to focus on what Vygotsky meant by something he wrote and make the argument for the correctness of that interpretation (“the truth”). I actually love following the train of thought of such speakers and authors and admire their smarts. It’s just not what I chose—or choose—to do. For another, putting “Vygotsky” and “therapy” together in the same sentence was completely new to the majority of the audience and, understandably, it took awhile for them to wrap their heads around it. It was fascinating and gratifying to me that it was the Russian psychologists who caught a glimpse of the newness and potential of our social therapeutic approach to emotionality and were the most eager to pursue the topic. The conversation continues!

I returned home for about two weeks and then traveled to Serbia, something I’ve been doing nearly every year since 1998. I go at the invitation of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”) to participate in their annual meeting. Zdravo da Ste is a unique organization initiated by volunteer developmental psychologists in 1992 originally to provide support to refugees—its work is Vygotskian based and delightfully focused on play, creativity and performance in all of their programs. Each year, guests like myself create a panel discussion and lead workshops on the theme chosen by the organization (this year it was play and development). Others who have become regular participants are Volker Bunzendahl (Denmark), Lina Kostarova-Unkovska (Macedonia), Paul Murray (UK and Serbia), Thomas Sorensen (Denmark), and Leif Strandberg (Sweden)—we were joined this year by Tim Prentki (UK). We’re an odd lot—academically trained (and somewhat academically located, on the fringe) practitioners and researchers who persist in creating environments for play, and who love to theorize about it too.

At the annual meeting (which took place in Golubac, a village in northeast Serbia) and again in Belgrade, Zdravo da Ste hosted a book launch for the Serbian edition of Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth, by Fred Newman (Institute co-founder, colleague, friend and mentor). A popular seller in English since 1994, the translation and publication came about through the efforts of  Zdravo da Ste psychologists (Vesna Ognjenovic and Bojana Skorc in particular), along with publisher Dragan Stojkovic and MOSTART.

Thus completed a year of travels, rich with new performances for me and others in our modest efforts to help the world develop. Here are some slides of some of the people and places I visited and people I worked and played with. It is great privilege to be building these relationships with colleagues who playfully and passionately resist “the tyranny of the normal.”

Esben Wilstrup—self-described Danish roleplayer, postgraduate psychology student, and playful activist— and former student and very much current friend and colleague has just launched a blog. He calls it Performing Psychology. Check it out and talk to Esben!