The eighth Performing the World (PTW) conference will be held in New York City, October 10-12, 2014. As the performance movement grows worldwide -both within and across geographical, cultural and professional borders - PTW aims to make the most of the creative potential of this growing diversity. International, cross disciplinary, conversational, experiential, and practical-critical, PTW 2014 will provide an opportunity for practitioners, scholars and activists to share and showcase their work in order to create something new together. If you practice and/or study performance as a means of individual, community and world transformation (or want to), then PTW 2014 is for you.
Our theme for 2014, "How Shall We Become?", is on the one hand reminiscent of the American civil rights movement anthem, "We Shall Overcome." A beautiful and powerful musical statement of resistance and determination to stay strong in the face of opposition to change, the song not only inspired activists in the U.S., but was embraced and adopted by social movements around the world.
"How Shall We Become?" also responds to the historical moment we live in. With revolution and counterrevolution raging in the Middle East, seemingly endless war laying waste to much of central Africa, economic collapse and stagnation in southern Europe, paralyzing political polarization in the U.S., increasing poverty combined with growing disparities in opportunity everywhere, and millions of people moving around the globe seeking a better life, "How are we becoming?" has become the cutting-edge question.
"How Shall We Become?" looks forward to the attitude and practice of performance - if we are to overcome, we must become. What and how we become is, of course, unknowable. But it is performable.
The shaping of "what" we become - in the arenas of culture, politics, economics, education, medicine, interpersonal relations, and daily life-as-lived, lies in the "how." How we have always done it, including how we've done revolutionary change, is clearly not working. That is where the creative power of performance becomes evident, in the ongoing creation of new ways of relating, new ways of learning, new ways of seeing and feeling, new kinds of institutions - new possibilities of all sorts.
Performance around the world has been brought into daily life by performers of all occupations, who have stepped onto the stage in theatres and village squares, urban streets and dirt roads, classrooms and community centers, doctors' offices, science labs, therapy rooms and board rooms. And people are discovering, through performance, how "we shall become"- as they create it.
Conference Fees
on or before June 30: $225 (US)
on or after July 1: $295 (US)
Conveners
All Stars Project, Inc.
Gabrielle L. Kurlander, President & CEO
Founded in 1981, the ASP uses an innovative and
successful approach to fighting poverty - creating and sponsoring outside of school, educational and performing arts activities for poor and minority young people, producing community and experimental theatre, offering leadership training, and pursuing volunteer initiatives that build and strengthen communities. Each year the ASP reaches 10,000 young people and thousands of adults from all walks of life, and works in the most underserved communities of New York City; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Newark, New Jersey; and the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Through formal and informal cultural exchanges and connections, ASP is a vibrant nexus for the international community in the practice of and conversation about developmental performance. (www.allstars.org)
East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy
Lois Holzman, Director
The East Side Institute develops and promotes social therapeutics, the approach to human development and social change that relates to people of all ages and life circumstances as social performers and creators of their lives. The discoveries about play, performance and collective creativity made by the Institute's founders Fred Newman and Lois Holzman are internationally recognized and studied as a practical-critical alternative to mainstream psychology. Through its training programs, education courses and scholarship, the Institute's "psychology of becoming" is transforming how education, therapy, youth development and community building are being practiced and studied the world over.(www.eastsideinstitute.org)
Performing the World 2014 will be held at the All Stars Project's international headquarters its performing arts and youth development center on 42nd Street in New York City.
Conference Chair
Lois Holzman
