Congratulations to the many hundreds of participants, volunteers and housing hosts who made Performing the World 2008 a great success! The conference/festival, held October 2 – 5 in New York City, brought together activists, artists, educators and scholars practicing with performance as a new way of relating to, understanding and changing the world.

Performing the World 2008 was the fifth Performing the World (PTW) gathering and by far the largest and most diverse.

This reflected the growth of the international performance movement and also two unique

features of PTW’08 that made it very attractive: its affordability by virtue of being held in the headquarters of its sponsors, the All Stars Project and the East Side Institute (two long-standing NYC performance-based learning and development organizations), and the opportunity to stay in the homes of New Yorkers. The All Stars and East Side Institute reached out to their extensive grassroots network to find free housing for all participants who asked for it.  All told, 135 PTW ’08 participants stayed in local homes, establishing people-to-people relations between international performance activists and New Yorkers from all walks of life.

Participants came from rich and poor countries of the world, from rural and urban areas, and from traditional and modern cultures, where they work directly on the toughest local and global social issues—whether as theatre artists, researchers, educators, psychologists, social workers, business people or community organizers. All told, they came from 28 countries and 22 U.S. states.

PTW ’08 was a big step forward in moving the international performance movement onto the world stage. Proclamations and good wishes were received from the United Nations Population Fund; the United States Olympic Committee; Michael R. Bloomberg, the Mayor of the City of New York; and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitiz.

There were an unprecedented number of young people involved. Fifty young people from the youth programs of the All Stars Project helped to staff the conference in virtually every capacity, including being bus tour guides on Sunday, October 5 when the conference traveled to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn to visit community based cultural organizations and attend PTW ‘08’s final plenary, “The Grassroots Still Grow in Brooklyn.” Young people were also prominent as presenters. Fifteen of the one hundred sessions were led by or included children and teenagers, including the plenary sessions “Performing Youth: A Conversation Across Borders” (featuring young people from Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Holland and the United States) and “The Performance of an All Stars International Talent Show.”

Performing the World is more than a conference; it is an international community.

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