From its inception a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Performing the World (PTW) has been international in scope and spirit. Bringing together people from different parts of the world and exposing them to each other’s cultures, worldviews and performance practices has been a fundamental part of what PTW is about. This year, as presenters from 24 countries grapple with the question, “Can We Perform Our Way to Power?,” this internationalism takes on even more significance. PTW 2016 will have presenters from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Let’s look at some of the PTW 2016 presenters from Latin America.
Ursula Carrascal-Vizarretta from Peru and Guillermo Terrisoto from Argentina will share their work creating music and dance with children who live in environmentally contaminated areas of Lima and elsewhere. In their workshop “Hope,” they will share the live music and creative processes through which they are empowering children to play and perform in even the most poisonous environments.
From Brazil, Fernanda Liberali and Maria Cecilia Magalhaes, both professors of Applied Linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, will share their experience-amidst the economic development and political turmoil of the last decade-to shake up traditional approaches to primary education by bringing Vygotskian-inspired, performance-based approaches to learning into Brazil’s educational system.
Tom Verner, the founder of Magicians Without Borders, who is based in Vermont, USA, and Carlos Lopez, the founder of The Smiling League, based in Bogota, Colombia, and three young people from Colombia and El Salvador – Esteban Carrillo, Tamara Jimenez and Manicela Medina – will lead a conversation, “Empowering Youth by Performing as an Entrepreneur.” They will share their experiences performing magic on the streets of Bogota and San Salvador and how they were able to turn this playful activity into a means of making a living.
Mexico will be represented by three presentations at PTW. In “Performance as a Tool to Empower Students at the University Level” language professors Maria Guadalupe Talavera, Vilma Zoraida del Carmen Rodriguez Melchor, and Gabriela Scartaascini Spadaroof the Universidad de Guadalajara, will share their use of performance in the classroom to teach language and expand the cultural horizons of their students. Armando Justo, originally from Mexico City, now living in Washington, D.C. where he works for an international development organization, will report on the lives of young adults who are neither employed nor in school and socially isolated. He will share how utilizing a performance-based approach to development can help these young people reinitiate their growth. From Ciudad Juárez, Jorge Buriciaga-Montoya and Miguel Eduardo Cortes-Vasquez, founders of the Fred Newman Center for Social Therapy, will share their working in building relations with other grassroots organizations to bring into being “a community of performance and growth” in the face of the city’s endemic violence.
The next PTW Newsletter will look at some of the presenters coming from Africa.