Overview

Per­form­ing the World 2 (PTW2):  The Sec­ond Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence Explor­ing the Poten­tial of Per­for­mance for Per­sonal, Orga­ni­za­tional and Social-Cultural Change

Octo­ber 17–19, 2003

Mon­tauk, NY

Con­fer­ence Con­ven­ers — Lois Holz­man, Sheila McNamee, Fred New­man, Lois Shawver

Con­fer­ence Spon­sor — East Side Insti­tute for Short Term Psychotherapy

The 240 par­tic­i­pants from the US and 14 other coun­tries impro­vi­sa­tion­ally cre­ated a play­ful, learning-teaching-networking (per­form­ing) envi­ron­ment. In count­less infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions, more than 50 expe­ri­en­tial work­shops and dis­cus­sions, six chal­leng­ing ple­nary ses­sions, and one dance party, they cre­ated what one par­tic­i­pant called “a per­for­mance marathon that had intel­lec­tual rigor.” In a sim­i­lar fash­ion, dozens of PTW2ers, in com­ments dur­ing and after the week­end, jux­ta­posed how much fun it was with how much they learned about new and seri­ous ideas and ways of thinking.

From what peo­ple said, I think that what we suc­ceeded in doing was cre­at­ing a fun envi­ron­ment in which peo­ple could and did learn some pretty dif­fi­cult mate­r­ial. The bal­anc­ing of a fun form and seri­ous con­tent isn’t easy to achieve. A par­tic­i­pant described the chal­lenge this way:

“The bal­anc­ing of the form and con­tent is always intrigu­ing for me: too much one way and the expe­ri­ence becomes or feels ‘shal­low’ or insignif­i­cant; too much the other way and the expe­ri­ence becomes too bound up with intel­lect, ‘knowl­edge’ and tak­ing our­selves seri­ously: which in itself can become ridicu­lous!… I think that at this con­fer­ence, a lot of peo­ple man­aged to keep an aware­ness of how impor­tant the things were that they were play­ing with; whilst not let­ting this ‘sense of impor­tance’ neg­a­tively effect the qual­ity of the play.”

On dis­play were dozens of instan­ti­a­tions of per­form­ing in every­day life-performing such activ­i­ties as pol­i­tics, pain, ther­apy, dis­abil­ity, phi­los­o­phy, bereave­ment, doc­tor­ing, lead­er­ship, learn­ing and rev­o­lu­tion. These gen­er­ated new ways to play and per­form, excite­ment, inspi­ra­tion, cre­ativ­ity, friend­ship, trans­for­ma­tion, con­cerns and ques­tions. What is per­for­mance? Do we need to define it or are we cre­at­ing its mean­ing in what we’re doing? If every­thing is per­for­mance, then what is per­for­mance? Do we need to agree in order to go on together? Won­der­fully, the gath­er­ing reached no res­o­lu­tion! Which is not to say that the dif­fer­ent posi­tions on these ques­tions aren’t impor­tant, but rather that they are the ele­ments out of which some new mean­ing can be created.

Lois Holz­man
Direc­tor, East Side Institute