Performing the World 1 - Comments

Read this dialogue between two Performing the World participants. Thanks to New Therapist for permission to post it here.


Fred Newman and Lois Holzman perform an unusual function in the therapy world. They perform. And they recently invited a bunch of other therapists of a postmodern persuasion to join them in New York for a grand performance they called Performing the World. Nominally, it was a conference,with offerings from the likes of Ken Gergen and Harlene Anderson. But in practice, it was one hell of a show, as audience participants Tom Strong and Tom Conran report.

Tom S
What drew you to Performing the World?

Tom C
PTW promised to bring together theater professionals, political activists, academics, and therapists into vivid contact for mutual inspiration. It sounded more like fun than education, and tired from a busy practice, I trusted the Gergens and Harlene Anderson would be onto something good, so I signed up.

Tom S
Me, too. I was pleased and curious to see them co-sponsoring a conference with the Eastside Institute whose work on social therapy is quite performative and constructionist. Minimally, I thought PTW would offer intriguing possibilities for seeing therapy and life as performances of meaning.

Tom C
I didn't know much about the Eastside Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy or Fred Newman and Lois Holzman before the conference. What interested you about their work?

Tom S
My contact began about three years ago after I reviewed Fred Newman and Lois Holzman's 'The end of knowing', a very provocative book merging ideas from Vygotsky, Wittgenstein and Marx into a therapeutic view of learning and development: performative psychology. I met them in the summer of 2000 at Eastside.

Tom C
I have heard most about their political perspectives and appreciate their efforts to end oppression, but didn't understand too well how they did therapy. What, to you, is distinctive in their therapy?

Tom S
My understanding is that: development occurs when people become active participants in constructing the realities they live by. This means challenging or playing with where they've stopped growing. The performance piece — improvisation actually — is about re-engaging people in developmental activities.

Tom C
So, do they use theater and movement techniques, like those we did at the conference, with their clients in regular sessions? I wonder what their clients think.

Tom S
My brief experience was both uncomfortable and liberating. I had been feeling painfully stuck in a relationship; one activity re-engaged me right at that stuckness and helped me bring forth new ideas I was later able to bring to that relationship. Their therapy seems partly about re-creating social circumstances where meaning making has bogged down, where people feel alienated from (i.e., reluctantly accepting of) how they live their lives. By turning things improvisational, they are invited back into recreating their social realities - an exercise in social constructionism where they can bring creativity to situations where they have felt stuck. The Marxist piece in their work relates to workers feeling alienated from the products of their labour. By inviting people to perform the social realities of their lives, they revisit how they create and live those realities, finding opportunities to improv how they would prefer things to be.

Tom C
And it seemed they tried to create their kind of therapeutic encounter with the conference as a whole. They invited presenters who had us improvise, like when Cathy Salit had us move and walk very very slowly, having us focus on what exactly we were doing. On the one hand, we were like a group of zombies from Night of the Living Dead; while on the other, the increased perception had me highly aware of myself, my surroundings, and no longer on automatic pilot.

Tom S
Yes, and I liked when Fred Newman interviewed Susan Jaffe, prima ballerina with the American Ballet Troupe. The conference focus seemed to be on how we could use improvised performance to help us grow 'a head taller' - their phrase for how improv makes us rise to, and beyond, our circumstances. PTW's theme of performance seemed to be about bringing out everyone's best so that they could inspire the same in the people with whom they work and live.

Tom C
I enjoyed seeing their corporate consulting program called "Performance of a Lifetime." I wondered how these Marxists worked with some of the biggest corporations of the world, a veritable Fortune 500 cocktail party. Apparently, their theatre connections led them into a project where they had each business person stand up and briefly act out some significant experience of their life, the "Performance of a Lifetime." They work with theater professionals and stage it like a mini-theater, asking each person to do the life demonstration one at a time and then creatively or humorously reworking their piece. For example, a woman who played a scene as a timid secretary was asked to do the same scene as a teen-age feminist, with hilarious results. In addition, they had groups act out scenes, such as a corporate board cutting jobs, and then said, "Now do it again only this time in Opera form." Then, do it in French or some other wacky alternative. It was deliciously funny. I began to see their point of taking anyone in any context and helping them free themselves for further growth. A couple of the business executives there swore it helped them not only get along better with their co-workers but also be more sensitive to the broader social implications of what they did. Behind it all seemed to sit Fred Newman holding court and periodically throwing out curve ball provocations.

Tom S
Yes, along with Ken Gergen, he seemed the central figure of this conference. He has been, along with other members of his development community, a controversial figure. What was your view of Fred's participation in the workshop; or Gergen's?

Tom C
Fred Newmann seemed to inspire many of the people there. Many openly discussed being his clients, and most had been his student or colleague at one time. I smelled a little Guru Worship, but then tempered my cynicism with the idea that all revolutionaries are charismatic. He does therapy and writes plays. He promotes Marxist causes and consorts with multinational elites. He has written a small library of books and articles. I think he intends to offend, with a wry smile. I can only imagine that he hopes to inspire controversy because for him that may be essential to growth. It is interesting to contrast him with Ken Gergen, a gentle diplomat who focuses his passions for liberating values on entrancing scholarship and building bridges between social constructionists around the world. Then there's Mary Gergen, who brazens her scholarship into fascinating mini-dramas. Her in your face drama about "older" women's invisibility in our society rocked me. Altogether, the conferences' speakers attracted a crew of polyglot postmoderns, and then stirred to see what we might distill out of the froth.

Tom S
You seemed quite struck by the Playback theatre workshop. Could you say some more about this and any other PTW events that made impressions on you?

Tom C
I was curious to see Playback Theater, a development of psychodrama by theater professionals. Cymbeline Buhler, after taking us through some basic nonverbal representations of emotions, had people tell a brief autobiographical story and then had four participants nonverbally re-enact the story in a "Tableau" of montages. That was fun enough, but then a social worker from Manhattan, stood and shakily told of walking out of her office on 9/11 to see the first tower burning. She then saw the second plane hit and each tower fall. I had just visited the debris site the day before and had been deeply moved by the tragedy. Cymbeline had four of us come up and I stood there with my fists clenched at my side, my body rigid looking up, quivering, with the single word "Noooo!" gasped out of my clenched teeth. The others moved somberly. The woman and other New Yorkers in the audience said, "That was it, that was just it." We all cried. Tears well up even as I write this now. The Playback promoted an improvisational transformation we often hope for through psychotherapy but in truth rarely see.

Tom S
PTW continually highlighted improvisation as a way of promoting change — in meanings, in behaviors, in relational patterns, and so on. However, it suggested that, knowingly or not, we are always improvising — even in circumstances of routine. How do you regard this performance metaphor for conceptualizing human interaction and change?

Tom C
I appreciated the emphasis that we are always improvising our life performances, that such is the nature of human development and interpersonal relations. The very words therapy, art, ritual, and theater have common linguistic roots in the sense of transformation of self through symbolic expression. Clifford Geertz popularized this in his critique of text and game metaphors, seeing drama as a way to re-present us to ourselves. Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson relentlessly pointed out how all therapy is "just" conversation that inevitably changes both; while Bakhtin felt the use of language consumes the meanings of utterance, interpretation, and response in each exchange. Like the dialogue we are having right now.

Tom S
What did you learn at PTW that you think would be helpful to therapists, generally, to consider in how they practice?

Tom C
For example, I use Playback ideas when I ask a couple to replay the argument they just told me about, but to do it the best way they know how. To have a conflict and to speak fairly and smoothly about what they each really want and how they can possibly re-do the fight successfully. Also, I ask abusive children to cartoon out their unhappy experiences with a change — drawing themselves doing something different, something they wish they could have done. PTW excited me about doing more of these active improvisations and to expand my repertoire. I especially like the opportunities for Reflecting Teams. We can enact many different kinds of questions, conversations, and even play back what we've heard from the folks.

Tom S
What else would you like to say about this conference?

Tom C
When can we do it again?

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