ANNOUNCING PTW 2025!
Meandering in the Mess
Creating and Organizing Power
Thursday November 13 – Sunday November 16, 2025
For its first two decades PTW was an in-person conference held in New York. During the pandemic, the conference went online, which opened it up to people who didn’t have the money to fly to New York or who lived in countries that the U.S. denied visas to. Zoom does away with airplane tickets and national borders. PTW has been enriched as more grassroots organizers and people from a wider range of cultures and nations have been able to participate.
As we look forward to PTW 2025, we, all of us—human beings and the planet we are a part of—are meandering in a mess. The mess is not new, but it is spreading and deepening. What can we do about it?
We can, and are, responding by creating and organizing power—and like the mess, the Performing the World community is also spreading and deepening.
What does creating and organizing power look like? Sound like? How is it created? How does it move? How does it dance? How does it sing? What ideas, emotions, relationships does it generate? How is the mess impacting on the nature and tone of our creativity and how is our creativity and power impacting on the mess?
Those are some of the questions we want to explore at Performing the World 2025. We’re not interested in exploring these questions abstractly, we want to learn from each other, from the far-flung communities of activists, artists, educators, therapists and play revolutionaries what we are doing, what we are creating and how we are organizing power.
The beauty of meandering is that we don’t know where we’re going. We don’t even know what we’re doing. It’s a fumbling, bumbling, risk-taking activity. Meandering is how we fall on our faces, how we get dirty and frustrated. It’s also how we discover and create qualitatively new processes and activities. Let’s do some meandering together at PTW 2025.
Since 2001, Performing the World (PTW) has been a global gathering for all who are using play, performance and the arts to engage and transform the world.
