I know hundreds of performers-social change workers (and know of hundreds more). But I’d not heard of Hector Aristizabal until Amazon sent me an email (just for me of course!) recommending his book written with Diane Lefer, entitled,  The Blessing and the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation. Hector grew up in Colombia, where he faced hardshp, violence, repression and torture. He moved to the US and as an activist, performer and therapist, he uses his suffering and anger to help others grow through performance/therapy/conversation. The book chronicles events in his life and that of his country and the world, interwoven with how he approaches poverty, pain, people and performance.

I liked the book a lot; it’s completely engaging and unusually honest. Throughout the book, there were comments that so very close to my experiences and beliefs about performance and development. Here’s a few of them:

“Those of us who’ve survived torture or any other trauma need to see it as simply one event in our lives, not the definition of our identity. I don’t want to hold on to the trauma but rather to reimagine it, see it with new eyes. The wound can be both tomb and womb…”

In sharing some performance work he did with Israelis and Palestinians in Bethlehem, Hector tells us how performing together is a way people come to work together: “People are not forced to change who they are; they are invited to experience the Other, the unknown, through creating something together.”

“So I dance and I stumble; but there’s no such thing as a bad dance. The only thing that’s bad is not to dance at all.”

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.

“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.

One of my weekly treats is the arrival in my inbox of Talk Talk, excerpts from a dialogue Fred Newman and Jackie Salit have after watching the political talk shows on TV.  Newman, co-founder with me of the Institute, is many other things – among them a philosopher and astute political strategist. Salit is president of the Committee for an Unified Independent Party, Inc. (CUIP) and executive editor of The Neo-Independent magazine.  I always learn something from reading their conversations, especially when they combine two seemingly disparate topics.  The February 21 column, “Brokent Government, Unscientific Psychology,” was especially fascinating. Here’s how it opens:

Salit: There was something strangely similar for me about the political discussions that we watched on Hardball, Morning Joe and CNN’s Campbell Brown and the PBS NewsHour discussion about mental illness and the DSM-V. DSM stands for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, the diagnostic guide of the American Psychiatric Association. DSM-V is the proposed update of DSM-IV. I’m trying to think how to characterize the similarity. One word comes to mind…

Newman: Try “mythology.”

You can read the rest at Talk Talk

I just got back from six days in London where the highlight of my trip was leading a two-day training workshop for therapists and counselors at the KCC Foundation in London—entitled: Learning to Play the Philosophy Game: A Workshop on How Social Therapy is Done. KCC is a dynamic learning organization that, among other things, provides training in a systemic-social constructionist approach. I worked with 20+ women and men, about half of them experienced practitioners who had trained at KCC and half postgraduate students (also practitioners) currently training there. It was a joy!  And a tool-and-result—we all agreed! I look forward to creative collaborations in the near future and beyond.

In a few weeks, I’ll begin working (and playing) with a new International Class—grass roots community activists and scholars who will gather at the East Side Institute for their first residency. Coming from different places and professions, they share a desire to change the world—and an eagerness to take advantage of the unique opportunity that 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.

At the same time as this new grouping is forming (it’s the sixth year of the program), recent grads continue to work together and support each other. Some of them composed letters/emails sharing their experiences of the Class and its impact on their work and lives. Before sending them to colleagues, they posted them to each other. For the past week or so they’ve been discussing how people in therapy are referred to in their different cultures, and engaging in a fascinating deconstruction of various terms. I asked their permission to post some of their conversation here (they said yes!).

The catalyst was part of the letter Lisa, alum from Brooklyn, NY, wrote:

During this time I also came into social therapy as a patient. I had been in therapy before. Some of it was helpful. But for the most part it was focused on understanding myself—why I was the way I was, what was wrong with me, how to fix my problems. In social therapy the focus was on the group—on what and how I could create with other people in the process of building the group. Social therapy didn’t fix me or take away my craziness, but it helped me build relationships and create my life without being overdetermined by my craziness and my problems.

When they read Lisa’s letter (which they liked overall), some alum questioned the word “patient.”

Peter, in Uganda, commented:

Hi everyone,

Great to read from everyone. I really have enjoyed your writings, thank you.

Lisa, thank you for that piece, I think it’s great. However, I wanted to comment on the word “Patient” as used in the 2nd paragraph. ”… having been a patient for a number of years…..”

Since you have not sent it to the people you don’t know yet, I thought we could change that to another word, though I really don’t know the best word to use, probably “Client”, but I am not sure. Maybe I can invite the group/Lois to comment on it. Otherwise, it’s great.

Lisa responded:

I am open to changing the word “patient,” but I am curious to know more about why you think it would be a good idea and also what everyone else thinks.

One of the things that I think is revolutionary about social therapy is the concept that the “patient” is not a vulnerable, passive, stigmatized person but rather a powerful, active agent in changing his or her life and the world. Or to put it another way, in creating his/her group/therapy. That’s why I am inclined to use/challenge that word. But I could also say “client” or “member of a social therapy group.” Thoughts?

The conversation continued.

From Esben, in Denmark:

I had the same response as you, Lisa – I like the word patient because it’s somewhat of a joke, in the sense that it does not refer to the conventional meaning of patient as passive vulnerable recipient/victim – however, I don’t know if you should make the point clearer, i.e. that in social therapy the patient is “a powerful, active agent in changing his or her life and the world. Or to put it another way, in creating his/her group/therapy.”. I do think using the term patient in this way does help to deconstruct and destigmatize the ‘role’ of patient.

I also just wanted to note that I feel so privileged every time I discover an email from my international friends and colleagues – we’re quite a task force ;o)

Hugs,

From Simon, in Canada:

Hi All,

Regarding the use of the word patient: At first, I thought that the use of the word was just fine; however, when the word was singled out for discussion, I started to think how I dislike the word client, but it also serves a function, just like the word patient, right? Nevertheless, technically, I now wonder if Lisa was ever a patient or was she more like a client? I mean to say that this all seems to be an interesting language game or a real good “joke” (as Esben says). I am not sure Lisa was a patient when I think about - I mean, will the readers get what Lisa is doing linguistically? Well, I would like to think some will. I come to “understand” a patient to be one who has simply received medical treatment; so, the question for me is, has Lisa ”undergone” and is “undergoing” or ”involved in” a psycho-therapy treatment, which would be considered to be providing medical treatment? In North America and many other places in the world, a client is a person taking advice from an attorney, accountant, or another professional person – and in this case, what arises for me is the idea of professionalism and what is a professional? A therapist seem to me to be a professional – so is Lisa a client – does Lisa take advice and does the therapist really give advice? or does the relationship consist of something more allusive . . . is it a unquantifiable exchange or more to the point, is it not a building of community, which is so much more complicated than the capitalistic client-customer-patient model can address? In other words, the relationship between the therapist and Lisa – found within the context of social therapy - is unclear to me actually – the line of client and/or patient seems to me to be blurred, not just because money exchanges hands, which makes Lisa a customer . . . a client . . . a buyer of mental goods (however you want to describe it); but more importantly, if the patient, as a concept “is to be understood as vulnerable, passive, stigmatized person, rather than a powerful, active agent in changing his or her life”. . . I agree with those that have suggested that as long as the point is made clear – as I believe Lisa has done – that Lisa’s idea of being a patient is her “becoming a powerful, active agent in creating her group/therapy,” which is in turn, allows her to create developmental possibilities – WELL, so be it – in this case, if it is good for her, it is good for me.

It was Fun playing with you all Thank you for the opportunity – what a wonderful debate :-)

From Ishita, in India:

Dear Friends

This reminds me of the debate going on worldwide to change the term Schizophrenia. But changing the name does not always change its impact. We need to change people’s outlook, transform the perception of the community towards people suffering from mental illness. Any person can be a patient any time (either suffering from physical or mental illness), so to me patient is a state of human being at particular time and place and not a description of the human being at all.

But we in our center use the term beneficiaries.

Love to all

From Prativa, in India:

I feel that in general the term “Patient” itself refers to a sick person either physical or mental. As we have seen in social therapy sessions, each member of the group is creating an environment for emotional development where they are trying to overcome stigma related to the terms “patient” and “illness.” Lisa, you are also too bold in your expression that I could not match the term patient with you. But I appreciate your revolutionary thought and attempt in using the term “patient.”

From Peter, in Uganda:

Wow, this turns into an interesting conversation, thanks for everyone’s contribution and I feel they are all great.

I commented about the word “Patient” in the context that we (the group) are trying to invite people (both that we know and we don’t know) to learn about Social Therapy and the International Class. And it’s the reason I said to Lisa that it was good she had not sent it out to the people she doesn’t know.

This was because, echoing Prativa’s word that the term “Patient” refers to a sick person, it’s quite easy for one to exonerate/excuse themselves that they are not patients (sick) to join social therapy. But believe me or not, so many people out there, (we are all) either mentally, physically or emotionally “sick”, but they (we) don’t want to believe or accept the fact that they (we) are sick.

Quoting Ishita’s words too (by the way, thank you Ishita for your wonderful contributions), that “we need to change people’s outlook, transform the perception of the community towards people suffering from mental illness,” is another example to show that people don’t want to associate themselves to “illness.” ?I may agree with Lisa when she says, “A patient” is not a vulnerable, passive, stigmatized person but rather a powerful, active agent in changing his or her life and the world, but for any person to understand that, they need to first join and learn/understand what social therapy is all about and to whom it is intended.

Maybe if we may ask Ishita why do you (at your center) use the term “Beneficiaries” to mean “Patients”? probably it will also help us to understand more why we may or may not use the word “Patient.”

From Ishita, in India:

I am enjoying our group discussion.

These are all mainly game of language. But it has some inner meaning too. I think when you are going to a doctor, teacher, lawyer, you expect to be benefited from these professionals. So we use the term beneficiaries who are coming to our center for that particular time for getting some benefit in their life which may be due to some reason they cannot do on their own. Peter, I agree with you as people often refuse to accept themselves as patient when suffering from mental illness, but in the case of chronic schizophrenia or other problems we have seen people prefer to remain in that state as it appears to them a comfortable situation where they need not be active, face challenges of life and think, “I cannot do that because I am a patient.” They do not want to change their performance and they play the same old role day in and day out.