Performing the World Happening(s) 2021

Saturday, September 25

Opening Ceremony
9:00 am – 9:45 am
Hosted by Lois Holzman

“I didn’t know I needed to Play w Strangers!” Rediscovering the Value of Play with the Global Play Brigade
10:00 am – 11:15 am
Creative Director: Cathy Salit

Participants:
Jeff Gordon
Valerie Monti Holland
José Carlos Barbosa Lopes (“Ze”)
Rita Ezenwa-Okoro
Sean Kwan

When the pandemic hit and tens of millions of people around the world had to lock-down, improvisors, clowns and performance activists of all sorts stepped up. They organized the Global Play Brigade (GPB) to bring play, via Zoom and WhatsApp, into homes around the world. In a year and a half, the GPB has grown to 150 volunteer facilitators from 40 countries. Five thousand people from 62 countries have participated in 275 free virtual workshops created and led by the GPB. In the midst of sickness, death and political crisis, strangers came together and discovered the need and joy of play. Come learn how it happened, and why it works!

Creating the Ensemble: Reimagining Dementia as Community Performance
12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Creative Directors: Mary Fridley and Dr. Susan Massad

Does the onset of dementia have to be the “beginning of the end” for us as creative, social and productive human beings? Across the globe, a growing movement of people—including people living with dementia—are re-imaging dementia by engaging our culture(s) which insist that we human beings “are our brains.” In so doing, they are challenging the prevailing narrative that dementia is a tragedy to be ignored, stigmatized and feared. Instead, they are approaching dementia as an offer—varied, uncertain and unpredictable—that we can create new possibilities with. This playful and philosophical interactive workshop, led by leaders of the Reimaging Dementia movement is open to everyone (no matter your relationship to dementia) who wants to collectively create a dementia performance that embraces our humanity, relationality and growth and supports us all of us to joyfully navigate this challenge in an increasingly uncertain world.

Identity: Myth In Progress
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Creative Director: Marian Rich

Participants:
Drazen Horbatic (Serbia)
Aurelie Harp (U.S./France)

We are in the midst of an identity revolution. Our assumptions around identity, and gender specifically, are being challenged. Such times give birth to both cruel and often violent reactions by those threatened by change, but also open previously unseen doors to those willing to explore and embrace new possibilities of being in the world. Can we creatively transform those static categories and find new (and more) identities, or indeed, can we do away with the conservative constraints of identity altogether? What if there was no identity? What if there are no words? This workshop is an invitation, with creative identity benders and shape-shifters, into a playground to explore, challenge and play with who we are becoming.

Saturday, October 2

Creative Responses to Political Repression
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Creative Director: Dan Friedman

Participants:
Khin Ohmar, Myanmar (in exile in U.S.A.)
Sanjay Kumar, India (pandees Theatre)
Ruben Reyes, Nicaragua
Andre Liberali, Brazil
Gold Lim, Gail Billones, Philippines (Philippine Educational Theatre Association)

All over the world, hard won—and always tenuous—democratic rights are under attack. Representative forms of government, however limited and weighted in favor of the rich, are giving way to the naked violence of authoritarianism. How can those seeking to preserve democracy—and extend it beyond limited political rituals to encompass the economy, education, culture and social life—effectively respond to this trend? What can be done to oppose authoritarianism and generate positive alternatives in the face of tear gas, bullets, prisons, and hate fueled mobs? Given the limitations of traditional forms of resistance—demonstrations, elections, general strikes, occupations—this question is particularly pressing. “Creative Responses to Political Repression” brings together activists from various countries facing different forms and levels of repression. Together they will share their attempts at creatively responding and generating alternatives to authoritarianism, repression and violence.

Performing Blackness Together: Humanity Stepping Out Around the World
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Creative Director: Raquell Holmes, Jessie Fields

In 1903, the great African American sociologist and progressive activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Building on Dr. Du Bois, in 2013 Dr. Lenora Fulani, the leading African American developmentalist, political independent and activist, wrote, “the problem of the 21st century is the problem of the development line”. It is clear that racism, poverty and the stifling of human development remain cutting-edge barriers to human flourishing in the United States and around the world. In 2021, what will we write? This session will look at how humanity, in its many hues and rhythms, is stepping out in new performances of Blackness that may lead us all to transformative possibilities.

Embodying Possibilities: Dance Activism in Latin America
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Creative Director: Paola Lopez

Liberation is not primarily cognitive; it is, far more, an emotional, visceral, and physical activity. Our histories, oppressions and generational traumas are embedded in our musculature, our postures, our ways of moving, our nerves, our guts. They are in the lines of our faces. Featuring dance activists from throughout Latin America, this session will share the role that movement and dance can play in the struggle for social justice and development.

Saturday, October 9

Creating Community Approaches to Emotional Distress
10:00 am – 11:15 am
Creative Director: Lois Holzman

Participants:
Ishita Sanyal, Founder and Director of Turning Point, Kolkata, India
Kiyoshi Hayasaka, founder, Bethel House, Urakawa, Japan (with translator Mana Mukaiyachi)
Jeff Aron (or someone else he suggests), the worldwide Club House movement
Prativa Sengupta, psychologist, Kolkata, India

Around the world, creative, non-psychological approaches to helping people with psychosis are emerging. These approaches involve “patients” in the activity of creating environments in which they are supported to be interactive, creative and productive—to join the global human community supported with what they need to be able to give and grow.

Performance in Higher Ed: Sparking Creativity Within an Uncreative Box
12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Creative Director: Carrie Lobman

Participants:
Syed Rahman, Head of General Educational Development and Director of Students’ Affairs, Daffodil International University, Dakar, Bangladesh;
Fernanda Liberali, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo;
Omar Ali, Dean, Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

All over the world, colleges and universities have evolved into learning factories, designed to train not only the ruling elite (in the elite institutions) but to prepare the rest of us to fit passively into our various alienated roles in a drastically unequitable and tightly scripted global play. As the Authority of Knowing bears down on students and teachers alike, is it possible to break out of that script, exercise power and improvise new performances, new methodologies and new ways of seeing in Higher Education? Well, yes it is. Here three playful educators share what they have done to spark creativity within the uncreative box of the university.

Emotional Development in Time of Crisis
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Creative Director: Steven Licardi

Participants:
Barbara Silverman (Developing Across Borders),
Hugh Polk (Creating Our Mental Health)
Jen Bullock (International Emotional Support Group)
Jessie Fields

In the face of the COVID Pandemic, political repression and economic hardship new ways of reaching across national and cultural borders to collectively engage and develop our emotionality are emerging. This session brings together three pioneers of this work. After brief introductions of these activities by their initiators, participants in each program will join the conversation.

Saturday, October 16

Psychology, Politics and Transformation: The Building of a Taiwanese Development Community
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Creative Director: Pei Yu, Wei Hsuan (Dragon) (working with Lois Holzman)

In Taiwan for over 30 years a core of creative political, community and cultural activists have engaged everything from trade unions to political elections, from organizing sex workers to advocating for immigrant women, from Indigenous rights to support for the disabled. This is the story of that intrepid group of organizers’ experimental and constantly evolving approach to social transformation that has allowed them to endure and develop.

Youth Development and Community Building
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Creative Director: Rita Ezenwa-Okoro

Participants:
Chantelle Burley, All Stars London
Peter Nsubuga, Hope for Youth Uganda
Pamela Ateka, Community Focus Group and Women in Democracy and Governance, Nairobi
Alex Sutherland, Tshisimani Center for Activist Education, Cape Town, S.A.

In large parts of the world, particularly the Global South, the population is drastically trending younger. Providing young people with the experiences, methodologies, and tools to not only navigate life, but to transform it, has become an increasingly important aspect of building communities for growth and development. Innovative youth organizers will share their approaches to creating a unity between youth development and community building.

Closing Ceremony
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Host: Juan David Garcón, Lois Holzman