Innovative therapies and playful-performative approaches to working with individuals and communities to heal trauma and develop emotionally have been an important part of Performing the World (PTW) from its beginning in 2001 and remains so at PTW 2018. Here is a sampling of some of the therapists, healers and developmentalists – old friends and new – presenting at this year’s conference.
Barbara Silverman is a long-time social therapist and passionate community builder trained by social therapy’s founder Fred Newman. She has attended all ten PTWs, and her presentations demonstrating group-building therapy have been very popular. This year, Barbara will be leading a workshop introducing participants to Developing Beyond Borders, a weekly virtual social therapeutic environment she leads that provides emotional support and development to cultural and political activists, educators and community builders around the world.
Fostering Environmental Empathy Through our Bodies and Voice is the name of the workshop-and the life’s mission – of Ursula Carrascal of Lima, Peru, presenting at her 6th PTW this year. With climate catastrophe causing more and more pain, particularly to the planet’s poorest and most marginalized people, Carrascal, the director of the Cultural Asociación Minaq Ecodanza, an organization working since 2008 to create environmental awareness through movement, therapy and the visual arts, will lead participants in creating a collective dance to discover environmental empathy-not only for our fellow human beings but for other animal and plant species being made extinct and for complete geographies that are disappearing as the planet warms.
The medicalized and diagnostic model of “mental illness” is increasingly being challenged throughout the world-and by a number of presenters at this year’s Performing the World. Among them are conference returnees Elly Litvak andJustean Lebel, Family Navigators for Family Outreach and Response in Toronto, Canada. In their workshop Beyond ‘Mental Illness’ – Performing Human Development, participants will use performance-based exercises to explore the constructs of ‘mental illness’ and ‘recovery,’ including playing with diagnostic language and turning the idea of ‘crisis’ on its head.
New to PTW is Rachel Williamson, a graduate student in interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma. In her session, Diagnosis: Performing Our Way Out of the Box, Williamson will share the work she’s been doing with children and young adults on the “autistic spectrum” to step out of their diagnostic labels and create new ways of performing themselves in order to move beyond their diagnosis.