27 Sep Can We Perform Our Way To Power?
Can We Perform Our Way to Power?
The ninth Performing the World (PTW) conference will be held in New York City, Friday, September 23 through Sunday, September 25, 2016.
As the practice, understanding and appreciation for performance and play continue to grow, the world context in which it spreads becomes more conflicted. Globalization and the rapid spread of technology spur economic and social growth, while at the same time they produce and exacerbate poverty, war, famine, mass migrations, violence and environmental contamination.
This cultural/political crossroads raises anew the question of power. How is it created? What are the limitations and where are the opportunities for ordinary people to exercise power? Increasing numbers of artists, educators, psychologists and academics are attracted to performance because of its creative power as an alternative modality to “knowing” and “authority.” By the same token, many activists and community organizers have become increasingly concerned with creating and discovering new approaches to human development and political crisis, as old and traditional tools for progressive change have proven to be inadequate to the times.
It is from this perspective, that we come to the theme of Performing the World 2016: Can We Perform Our Way To Power? The current distribution of power is, at best, limiting and, at worst, destructive to humanity. Performance challenges the status quo by creating new ways of relating, new ways of learning, new ways of seeing and feeling, new kinds of institutions—new possibilities of all sorts.
PTW is a gathering in which to explore and celebrate performance as a catalyst for human and community development and culture change—and thereby, create a new and more humane world. We welcome proposals that relate to this theme from a variety of perspectives, practices, disciplines and settings.
We invite participation from performers and performance scholars, psychologists and social workers, physicians and nurses, educators and youth workers, community organizers and activists, and all others for whom performance offers a new kind of tool in their human development, community building and political organizing work.
The sponsors of Performing the World 2016 are the All Stars Project, Inc. and the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy. PTW will be held at the All Stars Project’s performance and development center on 42nd Street in New York City.
Proposal submission forms are available at www.performingtheworld.org Proposals are due February 21, 2016. If you need a visa to enter the United States, your request for housing or a scholarship cannot be acted upon until your visa has been granted.
Conference Fees
On or before June 1, 2016: $240 (US)
After June 1, 2016: $295 (US)
There is no one-day rate for the conference.
A key part of the Performing the World experience is the person-to-person connection — the building of new relationships with people from around the globe. If your attendance at the conference is dependent on having a place to stay during the conference, our Housing Committee will make every effort to find you a bed or a couch in a home of a New Yorker. Forms are available on the website.
Additional information about the conference, and forms for registration, housing and financial aid can be found on the website, www.performingtheworld.org
For any questions about your visa or registration, please contact Melissa Meyer at 212-941-8906, ext 304. For questions related to proposals, please contact Sarah Plotkin at 212-356-8431 or email us at ptw@allstars.org. For all further inquiries, contact Lois Holzman, Conference Chair, at lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org.
loisholzman
Posted at 23:48h, 27 SeptemberThanks, Andrew. The issue or question of power is complicated to be sure, even made murky by its various uses/meanings. I read much or most of what you say as relating to authority, i.e., those who hold power from the top (including the institution of psychology which has shown an incredible capacity to co-opt what have been alternatives to it for over 100 years). Power as who is in power, who is on top is what I think you mean. And indeed, history shows that those in power more often than not turn into oppressors.
There is the unfortunately nearly lost meaning of power as people’s power, coming from the bottom. People exercising their power to create. I believe in and have experienced in most parts of the world the power of people’s creating new performances as a way they excercise their power. It is a new kind of activism. People must crete new possibilities—and experience themselves as the creators of them—as an alternative to “being sheep.”
I invite you to read “Performing the World: The Emergence of Performance Activism” which you can find on this site under Chapters.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.
Andrew Tyson
Posted at 23:26h, 27 SeptemberHi Lois
Why would you want to ‘perform your way to power’? Your right that the world is getting done over by the big corporations and self-interested governments; but power is a very seductive thing and the most likely outcome of ‘taking power’ is to become the next source of oppression – as demonstrated again and again throughout history. I suspect that what you are aiming for is that people stop being semi-somnolent sheep, and actively choose to participate in society in a creative and reflective way – thinking about how to respond to the negative pressures that make everyone (even the poor where possible) into mindless ‘consumers’; productive automatons in the machinery of the oppressors. With the distraction of technologies and the circus of social media; to ‘wake’ people up is a hard thing. More and more people end up having vested interests, including the educated elites, in pretending that the systems we have now are the only way to reach to proffered paradise – the mythical golden age.
All I can say is good luck, but I don’t expect much. Psychology in general, and even Narative therapies (now they are becoming part of the accepted maitstream, rather than a minor protest movement) are as much part of the problem as any other part of society and offer so little alternatives. If life is restricted to the purely physical phenomena that science is often utilized to promote, and is truly a meaningless accident, a mere abstraction in the existence of a greater accident – the universe; then what does it matter if we destroy ourselves, and in the process live meaningless self-absorbed lives? There has to be a reason for people to ‘wake up’; and it better be more than merely taking power for powers sake.
Regards
Andrew