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.

I don’t know Michael Thomas, Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce & Business in Japan, but I intend to. I want to thank him for the favorable and thoughtful review of Vygotsky at Work and Play that he wrote for the British Journal of Educational Technology.  He says so well what I was trying to do in writing the book! The review begins…

The influence of Lev Vygotsky’s thought, particularly in relation to social constructivism and socio- cultural theory, has become one of the most prominent methodologies associated with a reorientation of learning in the digital age. This book examines the development and impact of Vygotsky’s thought using an engaging first person narrative and personal account, and examines how it has been applied to a range of learning situations both inside and outside of traditional educational contexts. Although this is not a conventional academic introduction to Vygotsky’s thought then, key concepts such as the zone of proximal development (and the author’s idea of the zone of emotional development) are introduced, and Holzman skillfully interweaves theory and practice throughout the book’s six chapters.

You can read the complete review at the Reviews page

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!

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.”

These days, la Cuidad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico is pretty much known for one thing—violent crime. No denying the destruction of life and transformation of culture that’s hit this city so hard. But it is not the whole story (it never is).

Looking at El Paso and the fence that divides the countries

Houses near CASA

I had the privilege and challenge of spending four days last week in this city on the US-Mexico border just south of El Paso, Texas. My colleague Carrie Lobman and I were invited to share the social therapeutic approach to learning, development, therapy and community building with a diverse group of people in Juárez. Our visit was hosted by CASA (Centro de Asesoría y Promoción de Juvenil, A.C.) and the Department of the Humanities, Universidad Autónomia de la Cuidad Juárez, and arranged and organized by CASA’s Miguel Cortez, a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class.

Work/Play Under the Mexican Sun

Our work began Thursday morning with a presentation I made to a packed auditorium at the university, entitled, “Como debe Cambiar la Educación: Juego, Performance e Improvisación para el Desarrollo Humano y el Cambio Social.” After that about 80 of the over 100 attendees crossed the campus courtyard to the workshop room. For 3 hours that day and 4 the next, Carrie and I led the group in performing conversations and improv activities, with both words and body. Near the end of the second day, we divided the group (by now very warmed up and into creating together) into smaller groups to design projects to “grow the city and its youth” and then performatorily share them with the large group. They had great ideas, like Cultural Caravan, Urban Complement, Winds of Change, Shoot Me with Your Ball.

A Performing Group

Tere and Miguel

CASA has a strong and solid presence in the poor community of Juárez. Headed by Maria Teresa Almada (“Tere”) CASA’s staff and practice is passionately progressive—unwavering in their conviction that people CAN develop in the worst of conditions. And they have what appeared to us to be a productive, non-hierarchical working relationship with the university. Throughout our conversations with staff, university faculty and students, and young people we never heard anyone blame either the young people who are killing and being killed (hired by the drug cartels to do their bidding) or their parents. They are, instead, focused on the community as a whole taking responsibility for what is going on and working together to provide prosocial things for young people to do.

On Saturday we led another workshop, this time at CASA. The group of about 60 included many teens—some from a CASA high school project and some who don’t go to school but who volunteer with CASA—and women from the community who are involved in CASA programs. Carrie and I saw some new things of value from leading the group in improv games, especially those involving mirroring and creatively imitating each other. One of the most moving was the transformation of both teens and adults when they started playing together, and seeing the teens’ joy when adults imitated them!  In the environment we all built, Vygotsky’s views on play and creative imitation—and their advancement in social therapeutic practice—were living, breathing forms of life.

CASA Workshop Players

At the CASA Workshop

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.

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!

Quite a few readers have asked  to read the entire chapter I quoted from in my post, Could Developmental After School Eliminate the Need for Remediation?  So I’ve just added it to articles/chapters/talks (above). The title of the chapter is Without Creating ZPDs There is no Creativity