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ANNOUNCING!

Performing the World 2024

Thursday, September 26 — Sunday, September 29
Create the Power

A question facing those of us who want to make a more humane and sustainable world is, “What happens after the demonstration (or occupation or strike or uprising)?” How do we maintain social motion, pass our values on to new generations and continue to build power at the grassroots?

Much of the struggle for social justice and human development around the world has been focused on what we’re against. For decades Public Enemy’s rap classic, “Fight the Power,” has been an anthem for millions. But what can it mean and how does it shape us if we are defined primarily by our opposition, our resistance, our against-ism?

What if instead of simply fighting the power, we focused on creating the power?

In 1968 Ursula LeGuin pointed out that, “To oppose something is to maintain it. … You must go somewhere else.”

That somewhere else is right here and right now. For more than two decades Performing the World 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 that authority imposes on us. Performing the World is an annual gathering and an ongoing networking of those who “create the power.”

We invite you to join fellow performance activists, play revolutionaries, dancing developmentalists, and those generating power at the grassroots at Performing the World 2024.

Register HereProgram

ABOUT

Welcome to the Performing the World Community!

Performing the World is a global community of hundreds of “performance activists” who explore the power of performance and play to create a better world. The PTW community creatively engages social problems, educates, heals and activates others, to bring new social-cultural-psychological and political possibilities into existence. A project of the East Side Institute and All Stars Project, the biennial Performing the World Conference in New York — the first in 2001 — has been a gathering place to explore and celebrate performance as a catalyst for human and community development and culture change.

Some recent Performing the World history:

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we canceled the in-person Performing the World 2020, planned for that fall. But the show did go on! The East Side Institute mobilized to produce virtual Performing the World Happening(s) festivals in 2020 and 2021. Across multiple weekends, PTW-H welcomed joyfully exuberant participants and presenters from dozens of countries to showcase and develop their work in online community. The PTW-H virtual platform opened the work of performance activists to wider participation, generated new ways of participating and building relationships and allowing for a new and unanticipated kind of intimacy.

WATCH VIDEO SESSIONS HERE!

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We have to perform the world again – and we’re all involved in this – because this one stinks.

Fred NewmanCo-Founder, Performing the World

I am inspired by the growth of the global performance movement and the role that PTW is playing in it, as not only a conference/performance festival but also a unique community event bringing people together to perform a new world.

Lois HolzmanDirector, East Side Institute

I have always felt alien at conferences, but this time I was swooped into the centre by curious, adventurous and inclusive people. I have a latent performer within, that got to go nuts a bit. And that was great!

PTW participant

I am inspired to know that there are many other people ‘out there’ who are as interested in radical change and development as I am.

PTW participant

Contact Us!

Have questions? Want to find out more? Please use the contact form, and we’ll be happy to connect with you.