Message from co-covener Dan Friedman
For more than two decades the East Side Institute’s Performing the World conference and festival has been bringing together groups of people from all over the planet who are creating power, building organizations, and experimenting with activities that are more humane, cooperative, playful, and developmental than those imposed on us by authority.
This year, Performing the World will forefront organizations and individuals new to the PTW community that are working to “Create the Power” through play, performance, and the arts.
International Organizing Committee
What if instead of simply fighting the power, we focused on creating the power?
Join the International Organizing Committee! The 2024 PTW IOC, led by Associate Director Melissa Meyer, is starting to come together and is committed to making PTW another powerful event bringing hundreds of people from across the globe together. Our task will be to generate power and community at the grassroots through the promotion of PTW by recommending presenters, organizing watch parties, creating and posting on social media, creating videos and designing posters, and, of course, fundraising. We invite you to create the power with us. To join write to mmeyer@eastsideinstitute.org.
Meet the founding members of the 2024 IOC:
Melissa Meyer, Chair of the IOC. In addition to being the Institute’s associate director, Melissa is a social therapeutic coach in three weekly Developing Across Borders groups — spaces where people perform as world citizens, invent new ways of being and seeing, and produce new possibilities for each other and their communities.
Alex Sutherland is a former professor in Applied Theatre at Rhodes University, South Africa, where she specialized in the uses of improvised theatre in criminal justice settings and with many communities who wished to play with creativity as a means of self-determination. From 2017 she worked as a co-ordinator of creativity in activist education and organising at the Tshisimani Centre in Cape Town. There she led a youth arts project with colleagues from the UK called Imagining Otherwise which aimed to bring young people from across Cape Town together to use visual and performing arts, film, and creative writing, to explore spatial inequalities and political and social violence that impacts young people across the city. She has been a long time collaborator with many ESI projects, including facilitating workshops for the Global Play Brigade.
Sandy Friedman has been a community organizer for most of his life. He started working in his first full-time organizing position as a 16 year old with the United Farm Workers on their national boycott in support of union recognition. He joined, with Fred Newman and others, in the 1970’s in the building of The NYC Unemployed and Welfare Council, a union of NY’s poor. It was that work that directly gave birth to the All Stars Project. He was a national field organizer in Dr Lenora B. Fulani’s historic campaigns for president in both 1988 and again in 1992. He led organizing drives throughout the country, from the devastated streets of Harlem and The South Bronx to the fabulously wealthy communities of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights and Marin County. His most recent work had been with the All Stars Talent Show Network where for over 20 years he trained young people in the activity of community outreach as they built their own youth-run neighborhood cultural events.
A Look Back at PTW 2023