July 3, 2018
Old Friends and New
The 10th Performing the World 2018 (PTW) will take place in New York City, September 21- 23, 2018. Addressing the theme, “Let’s Develop!” the three-day event will feature 85 presentations, workshops and performances.
Since the first PTW in 2001, the conference has been a gathering place to explore and celebrate performance as a catalyst for human and community development and culture change. PTW is now a global community of hundreds who creatively engage social problems, educate, heal, organize and activate individuals, organizations and communities, and bring new social-cultural-psychological and political possibilities into existence.
PTW’18 includes many returning participants as well as many attending for the first time. Here’s a tiny sampling of that potent mix.
Rita Ezenwa-Okoro first shared the work of Street Project Foundation, the organization she founded in Lagos, Nigeria, at PTW 2012. Street Project works with young people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods using performance as way to build confidence and perhaps earn a living. This year, she’s bringing some of the Street Project young people to PTW. Eight young actors will be performing a play they created, One with the Sound, based on their experience of living on the streets of Lagos.
Coming to PTW for the first time are Smail Kanouté
(above) and Batiste Darsoulant (below) from Paris, France who, under the direction of Bruno Freyssinet, artistic director of La Transplanisphere, will perform Acts From the Desert, a dance about Kanouté’s father’s journey across the desert from Mali to France.
Patch Adams, the world-famous clown and medical doctor, who has led popular (and pretty wild) workshops at the last two PTWs, will, this year, be joined by his son Lars “Dolphin Boy” Adams in a vaudeville show featuring storytelling, clowning, audience participation and moments for questions.
Sabine Choucair (above), a clown from Beirut, Lebanon will be presenting at PTW for the first time. She’ll be leading a workshop Healing Through Laughter in which she will share the techniques she’s been using with refugees around the world “turning the sad and tragic upside down.”
Alex Sutherland (above), who has led performance work with street children and prisoners for some twenty years in her native South Africa, first attended PTW in 2003. This year she’ll be attending her sixth PTW where she’ll be sharing the current work she’s doing as the Coordinator of Creativity in Activist Education at Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education in Cape Town.
Attending her first PTW this year is Shoshanah Tarkow, who recently completed her MA in Performance Studies from New York University, where she was the recipient of the Emerging Scholars Award. She will be bringing her Digital Happening (DT) to the conference. DT uses social media to contemporize and expand the Happenings of the Sixties to the global village; participants in her workshop will learn how to create Happenings across geographical and social barriers.