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Performing the World 2 - Overview
October 17-19, 2003
Conference Conveners -- Lois Holzman, Sheila McNamee, Fred Newman, Lois Shawver
Conference Sponsor -- East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy
"It is was like an academic conference, but not (because it was unsettled by the art and music events). It was like an open day of an art centre, but not (because there was theoretical reflection). It was like a political rally, but not (because it had a light, more relaxed feeling to it). All these are good things, and strange."
This is how one participant described Performing the World 2-- The Second International Conference Exploring the Potential of Performance for Personal, Organizational and Social-Cultural Change (PTW2), held in Montauk NY October 17 - 19, 2003. Sponsored by the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, PTW2 brought together people who study and practice performance-based psychology, education, health care, youth development, therapy, training, organizational and community development, etc., to display, investigate and play with performance as an alternative to individualistic, behaviorial and cognitive views of what it means to be a person.
The 240 participants from the US and 14 other countries improvisationally created a playful, learning-teaching-networking (performing) environment.Ê 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.
You can view the entire PTW2 program and bios of presenters here. News about PTW3 will also appear on the site in early 2004.
Lois Holzman
Director, East Side Institute