Performing the World Happening(s) 2023

Thursday, September 28

10:00am – Opening Ceremony

11:15am – Playing for Change: It’s Not Just Our Name, It’s What We Do
Presenter: Mark Johnson, Co-founder

Playing for Change was created two decades ago to inspire and connect the world through music. It grew from the lived experience that music has the power to break down barriers and overcome distances between people. Since it started, Playing for Change has produced 400 videos involving 1,400 musicians from 60 different countries—videos that have been viewed by two billion people. Inspired by the love and hospitality encountered in some of the poorest communities on the globe, the Playing for Change Foundation has developed 21 music and arts education programs in 13 countries. Mark Johnson, co-founder and chief musical director of Playing for Change, will talk about the organization’s history and mission, share how it puts together its videos, unpack the relationship between creating music and building schools, and involve us in making some music together.

4:30pm – Let’s Improvise New Possibilities with/in Higher Education
Presenters: Luke Perone and the Improv in Higher Education Book Ensemble

We are all improvisers, improvising in all kinds of spaces, including spaces of higher education. What can improvisation offer? Come meet and create with improvisers in higher education who are emergently offering new possibilities, including co-creating a book that celebrates transforming higher education with improvisation. We will share a bit about our book in progress and focus on performing together how we are creating our book ensemble as a practical-critical activity of upending how groups create in higher education. Folks interested in transforming higher education and anyone hoping to create something new with others are welcome!

Friday, September 29

10:00am – Yes, Let’s Play the World! A GLOCAL Approach to Human Development
Presenters: Jeff Aron, Rita Ezenwa-Okoro, Ruben Reyes, Cathy Salit

The Global Play Brigade (GPB) emerged during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. The GPB community/movement was founded with an inspiring outpouring of responses from play and performance activists worldwide who pulled together their superpowers of imagination, improvisation and human connection to embark on a mission to bring strangers across borders closer together. It has been three years since GPB launched, and the possibilities of the
movement’s capacity to mainstream play keep unfolding. New improvisational offers keep emerging. We are discovering/creating methods and structures that work with the changing times. We are challenged by how to grow. How can we build a global movement with a focus on strengthening local grassroots activity? And what does building a global movement mean to the local GPB regional leaders and activists? What are the possibilities that come with the challenges of building a social change movement that, by design, is a work in progress? Yes, Let’s Play the World! together in this exploration of these creative and challenging questions.

12:00pm – Engaging and Transforming Ecology Despair: Creative Community Responses to Global Warming
Presenters: Jim Martinez, Jame McCray, Sinisa Rudan

As forests burn and sea levels rise, people and organizations all over the planet are coming together to engage and overcome the physical and emotional damage caused by global warming. This session brings together activists representing three organizations using play, performance and community-based technologies to provide alternatives to the fear and hopelessness being generated by the profit-motivated and seemingly unstoppable changes to our climate. Superhero Clubhouses creates theatre, stages performatory street happenings, and holds performance workshops that enact environmental justice, cultivate hope and inspire possibilities for a thriving future. Climathon-Belgrade develops games for preschoolers, teenagers and adults that instill environmental values. Collective Infrastructures Corporation creates low- cost physical and digital infrastructure to aid communities in managing energy, water and public health resources. Session leaders share their work and explore their common goal of generating hope, and even joy, in the face of something as daunting as climate change.

2:00pm – A Bonus Practicum, “Talking to Strangers”
Presenter: Katy Bee, Founder, Joy First Foundation (open to all)

4:30pm – Family Resemblances in Therapeutic Practices from Activist Communities in Brazil and the United States
Presenters: Evelize Dalla Costa, Thecla Farrell, Bruno Lenzi, Steven T. Licardi, Randy Wilson

The moment we speak what we are not, we become that thing: We are not the presenters of this workshop.

In our pre-session conversations, we (five non-traditional therapists and coaches) realized that we wanted to play together with who we are and how we work. In a continuation of these conversations, we will share our practices, their resemblances and singularities, especially around social therapeutics, group/community development, life coaching and collaborative dialogic practices. We are hoping to meet people who are sensitive to working-class struggles; to be working with (not to or for) transforming the world. Come play and overthrow with us!

Saturday, September 30

10:00am – Shifting the Narrative by Shifting the Narrator: Movement Art of the Poor People’s Campaign
Presenters: Daniel Blake, Jamel Coy Hudson, Pauline Pisano, Mauricio Tafur Salgado

The Arts and Culture committee of the New York State Poor People’s Campaign will explore the expressive arts as a critical tool for building a successful movement. Through its unflinching commitment to “shifting the narrative by shifting the narrator,” The Poor People’s Campaign lifts up the voices of the poor and dispossessed through creating new instruments for social movements such as the We Rise Movement Songbook, the recently-completed documentary Face of the State, Dancers for the Poor People’s Campaign, and the workshop curriculum known as Songs In the Key of Resistance. In this session, participants will learn about the work of the The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival through its song and dance, and how a movement’s core goals can be expressed and modeled through the joyful communal creativity of arts and culture.

12:00pm – Blackness Around the World: Creating Communities Together
Presenters: Viviane Carrijo, Jessie Fields, Lalenja Harrington (presenting on video), Raquell Holmes, Nomsa Mazwai

Join us in a session on Blackness coming out, unbound and emergent. Hear and speak with five Black women leaders from Brazil, South Africa and the United States, as they discuss their work and our world. In song, in call and response, and in collective imagining, they invite the audience to explore together all of who we are as creators of community, power and history.

2:00pm – A Bonus Practicum, “Talking to Strangers”
Presenter: Katy Bee, Founder, Joy First Foundation (open to all)

4:30pm – Integrative Community Therapy (ICT): Community in Conversation
Presenters: Marilene Grandesso and Bruno Lenzi

This session will start with a brief presentation of the Integrative Community Therapy (ICT) approach, first developed by the Brazilian therapist Adalberto Barreto. ICT can be done with small and large groups in any place where people can be together listening one to another. Among other possibilities, ICT creates a propitious context where people silenced by degrading suffering caused by poverty, social inequality, violence inside and outside family, can talk and share, not only their problems, but their survival strategies. Marilene will then lead an ICT with participants (in English and Portuguese).

Sunday, October 1

10:00am – Games are Magical
Presenters: Tim Conibear, Carlos Lopez, Mel Young

When the world is facing so many serious problems, why play games? The play activists leading this session would respond, “It’s precisely because we are facing so many serious problems that we need to play!” Games, sports and other forms of play are universal. They are also magical. Wherein lies their magic? Join social change activists and joy makers from grassroots organizations, The Homeless World Cup, Magicians Without Borders and Waves for Change, in an exploration of these questions—and make some magic in the process!

12:00pm – It Takes a Planet … Globalization at the Grassroots
Presenters: Jeroo Billimoria, Olivier Bréchard, Florencia Garcia

Join Performing the World founder Lois Holzman in conversation with representatives from three audaciously hopeful organizations. Catalyst 2030 is a platform and support for networking and partnering among individuals and organizations working to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Glasswing Foundation merges a global perspective with local expertise to harness the power of community to provide children and young people with opportunities that equip and enable them to thrive. The Learning Planet Alliance is a global community of practice dedicated to the transformation of education and the co-construction of a learning society that allows individuals to “take care of oneself, others and the planet.” A team of improvisors will highlight the stories of these “imagineers” with short performances.

1:30pm – Closing Ceremony