Performing the World 2024

10:30 – 11 am (30 min)

Opening Session

Presenters: Lois Holzman, Dan Friedman

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11 am – 12:30 pm (90 min)

Music is Power: Playing for Change Returns to PTW

Presenter: Jake Groshong

Playing for Change, which joyfully kicked off last year’s Performing the World (PTW), is returning to open PTW 2024.

Founded 22 years ago, Playing for Change grew out of 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.

This year’s session will focus on the work of the Playing for Change Foundation, which creates music schools and programs around the world. Inspired by the love and hospitality they encountered while making music videos in some of the poorest communities on the globe, the Playing for Change Foundation, launched in 2007, returns and, working local artists, has built 27 free music and arts education programs across 55 locations in 19 countries. In addition to musical and cultural development, the Playing for Change schools have generated other community-led initiatives that are benefiting over 15,000 people every year.

Playing for Change Foundation CEO Jake Groshong will share the work of these programs, introduce some of the leaders and participants who, building on local musical tradition, teach and learn voice, dance, a wide range of instruments, music theory—and the power of music.

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2:00 – 3:30 pm (90 min)

Toward a Future Where Together We Own What We Make

Presenters: Ben Fink, Gwen Johnson, Denise Griffin Johnson, Tiffany Sturdivant

Performing Our Future is a multiracial grassroots coalition linking rural and urban communities in Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Initiated by members of Roadside Theater, an ensemble of storytellers and theater makers based in the coalfields of central Appalachia, Performing Our Future has been growing since 2015, working toward a future where everyone belongs, everyone’s contribution matters, and we own what we make.

The session will be led by three founders of the coalition — Ben Fink (formerly of Roadside Theater, East Kentucky); Gwen Johnson (Letcher County Culture Hub, East Kentucky); and Denise Griffin Johnson (formerly of the Arch Social Community Network, West Baltimore) — as well as the coalition’s current organizer, Tiffany Sturdivant (Appalshop, East Kentucky). It will start with a presentation/story-sharing session about Performing Our Future’s theory, practice, origins, and challenges, before turning to an interactive sharing of questions, conversation, stories, and ideas from all who are attending.

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4:30 – 5:30 pm (60 min)

Creating Power in the Face of Disaster

Presenters: Jim Martinez, Farzana Gandhi

How do people feel in the aftermath of a climate disaster? Powerless. There are many reasons for this: lack of civic participation, government bureaucracies, and limited access to resources. However, people have always managed to create sustainable access to food, shelter, and water in even the most challenging climates on Earth. By engaging in participatory activities, individuals can reframe “challenges” as “opportunities,” creating limitless possibilities, including power and hope.

In this workshop, architect Farzana Gandhi, AIA, LEED AP, and associate professor of interdisciplinary studies, Dr. Jim Martinez, co-founders of Collective Infrastructures, will strive to foster a mindset that operates with hope rather than fear by demystifying the decision-making process in the aftermath of environmental crises. You will participate in a role-playing activity, debating with fellow participants in a hypothetical disaster scenario. You will articulate a point of view that embodies the role you choose and experience firsthand how communication between stakeholders can either fail or succeed. We will then transform your performances to explore possibilities beyond failure and success—creating power out of powerlessness.

10:30 – 11:30 am (60 min)

Create the Power: India

Presenters: Ishita Sanyal (host), Alokananda Roy, Juin Dutta, Subhadip Sen, Chaitali Gami, Reshmi Chatterjee

In India, inequality has been rising sharply for the last three decades. The richest have cornered a huge part of the wealth created through crony capitalism and inheritance. They are getting richer at a much faster pace while the poor are still struggling to earn a minimum wage and access quality education and healthcare services, which continue to suffer from chronic under-investment. These widening gaps and rising inequalities affect women and children the most.

Instead of putting the onus on the Government, many ordinary people have come forward to bring the needed change. This session will be hosted by Ishita Sanyal, founder and Director of Turning Point, a center for the growth and development of people with serious mental illness. The center helps them to connect with society, get a job and help in entrepreneurship programs so that they can become physically, socially and economically independent in life. She is the recent recipient of the Shane J. Lopez Award for Professional Contributions in Positive Psychology by the American Psychological Association.

Sanyal will introduce us to:

• Alokananda Roy, an internationally celebrated Indian classical dancer, choreographer, dance educator, therapist, and social reformer, who, since 2007 has been bringing dance therapy to inmates at the West Bengal Corrections Home, the Alipre Women’s Correctional Home, as well as the transgender community, Acid Attack Survivors of West Bengal—and to the Kolkata Police Force.
• Juin Dutt, president and founder of the Srotoshwini Trust, who runs three free educational programs for children living on the streets, as well as a skills training program for women.
• Subhadip Sen, the founder and director of the Peace Welfare Organization, Rupnarayanpur, West Bengal, which, among other projects, runs a free night school for children who work in the coal mines during the day. The school provides not only free education but also free food for the often-hungry child laborers.
• Chaitali Gami founded and leads Parivaar Bengal, West Bengal’s largest residential educational institution, serving 1,200 orphans, street children, children abandoned by their mothers, children with critically-ill parents who can’t care for them. She is also founder of the South Kolkata Parasmoni, which works with and advocates for children and adults with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy.
• Reshmi Chatterjee is the founder of Halo Heritage, which works to preserve and promote the art, culture & craftsmanship of the traditional artisans of Bengal.

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12:15 – 1:45 pm (90 min)

Poetry, Performance and Power

Presenters: Gerard Bester, Sibahle Mangena, Stacy Hardy, Thabang Matsaung

The Windybrow Arts Centre, located in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South Africa, is a social hub and creative spark for the community’s young people. Associated with the world-famous Market Theatre, it provides arts and literacy programmes for young people and generates socially engaged plays, performance pieces, music and street theatre created and performed by the young participants.

The session will focus on the creation and performance of “Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into Hillbrow Night,” a collectively created poem/performance piece inspired by the Martinican poet and playwright Aimé Césaire’s 1939 surrealist classic “Notebook of a Return to The Native Land.” Working with Stacy Hardy, Head of the Creative Writing Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, a group of Windybrow participants, calling themselves “Césaire Youth” reimagined and transposed Césire’s poem into a reflection and embodiment of their community today.

The session will be hosted by Hardy and Thabang Lucky Matsaug, one of the young artists involved in the project. Together they will provide background on Windybrow, share the process of the poem’s creation and introduce performances from the poem. Then, the creators of “Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into Hillbrow Night” will have a public conversation with students from Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

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2:00 – 3:00 (60 min)

Creating New Performances of Faith: What Dementia is Teaching Us about Hope, Healing, Possibility and Power

Presenters: Mary Fridley (host), Lynn Casteel Harper, Jay McDaniel

For centuries, faith and religion have offered people the world over a sense of community, meaning and spiritual/moral guidance, even as they have also been used as what author Karen Armstrong calls “…sticks with which to beat those who are different.” At a moment when the authority (and violence) of “sticks” often overshadows the power (and possibility) of community, please join Reverend Lynn Casteel Harper and Dr. Jay McDaniel for a playful and philosophical conversation about how they are creating new performances of faith, and why the reimagining of dementia is at the heart of their explorations. The session will be moderated by Mary Fridley, Co-founder and Leader of The Joy of Dementia (You Gotta be Kidding!) and Coordinator of Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice.

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4:30 – 6:00 pm (90 min)

“Say It Beautifully,” Connecting with Strangers Through Poetry

Presenter: Angelo Miramonti

Born on the streets of Lima some two decades ago, the “Live Poetry” movement is spreading across the globe. Developed by Peruvian poet and community organizer Luis Enrique Amaya, Live Poetry consists of two phases. In the first phase, the poet interviews a passer-by on the street and asks them to talk about someone important to her or him (a family member, a friend, a lover). In the second phase, the poet asks the interviewee to wait for a few minutes. Then the poet sits alone for about ten minutes and composes a poem dedicated to the person chosen by the interviewee. When he has finished, the poet gives the poem to the interviewee as a gift saying: “After listening to you, I composed this poem, and I give it to you as a gift. But beware: it is not for you. It is to invite you to give it as a gift to the person you told me about.”

In this workshop, Angelo Miramonti, a Professor of Community Theatre at the Fine Arts University in Cali (Colombia), a Lecturer in trauma and psychosocial support at the University of Applied Sciences of Würzburg (Germany), and a registered drama therapist in Italy, shares his experience in bringing Live Poetry to Turin, Italy and leads us in a workshop to create our own Live Poetry.

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7:30 – 9:00

Control + Shift: Reclaiming and Reshaping the History of the Filipino People

Presenters: Abigail Billones, J-mee Katanyeg, Jessie Villabrille

As authoritarian and neo-fascist movements gain traction all over the world, it has become clear that the versions of history that people embrace has an enormous impact on current politics and on what direction a nation takes. Challenging the authoritarian distortion of Philippine history is what the “Control + Shift” program of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association (PETA) is all about.

PETA was founded in 1971 and played an important role in the movement to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Despite a decades-long struggle involving tens of millions of people that overthrew his dictatorship in 1986, Marcos’ son convinced enough voters that his father’s reign had been a “golden age” to get elected president in 2022. In response, PETA is working with communities and theatre troupes throughout the country to rediscover and articulate, through the creation of new plays, their histories of resistance and the exercise of power. Abigail Billones, director of PETA’s Lingap Sing program (Healing Through the Arts); J-mee Katanyeg, PETA’s Associate Artistic Director; and Jessie Villabrille, artistic director of Teatro Balagtas will share this work of, in their words, “changing narratives, reclaiming and reshaping the stories of the Filipino People.”

10:30 am – 12:00 pm (90 min)

Shakti Shalini and Pandies’ Theatre: Challenging Gender Violence with Organizing, Theatre, and Performance

Presenters: Tamanna Basu, Sanjay Kumar

Shakti Shalini was founded in Delhi in 1987, after Ms. Satyarani Chadha and Ms. Begum Shahjahan’s young daughters were burned to death alive by their in-laws due to insufficient dowry. The shared tragedy bound the two mothers to each other and launched them into a fierce battle against gender violence. Shakti Shalini was the first non-governmental shelter for abused women in Delhi, India. Over the last four decades it has evolved into a dynamic center for the support and development of oppressed and marginalized women and a dynamic grassroots organization working in socio-economically marginalized communities to prevent everyday violence and promote gender equality, individual choice, and dignity. Pandies’ Theatre, a left, feminist, atheist theatre group in India, started as a university movement in 1987 and has established itself as a leading activist theatre group with a strength of over 100 members. Each Pandies’ project has a core of at least 30 volunteers.

The session will be led Tamanna Basu, Core Lead at Shakti Shalini and Sanjay Kumar, Founding Director of Pandies’ Theatre. It will include an overview of the Shakti Shalini’s history and its current programs and projects, with specific emphasis on “Artivism,” Shakti Shalini’s “Art for Activism” project that deploys performance and the arts as means of challenging patriarchal violence and supporting individuals across the gender spectrum to practice a feminist vision. The session will include a conversation on “Theatre for Sharing,” an initiative developed collaboratively between Shakti Shalini and Pandies’ Theatre that has spearheaded performance driven activism at the grassroots.

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12:15 – 1:45 pm

The Freedom Theatre: Creating Power Through Culture

Presenters: Ahmed Tobasi, Mustafa Sheta

The Freedom Theatre was founded in 2006 in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank of occupied Palestine by Juliano Mer Khamis. It has produced 25 socially engaged plays, reached more than 50 communities in Palestine and toured 15 countries, reaching more than 100,000 people. It has trained scores of actors, stage managers, theatre technicians and filmmakers who are now running what has become one of Palestine’s largest cultural centers.

In 2011 Khamis was assassinated by what the theatre calls “an unknown enemy of culture and freedom.” Since then, despite arrests of theatre members and destruction of its original building by the Israeli military, The Freedom Theatre has continued its work of generating power through performance and art. Artistic Director Ahmed Tobasi and General Manager Mustafa Sheta will share the theatre’s history, politic, and ambitions as it carries on in the face of increased harassment and attack.

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2:00 – 3:30 pm (90 min)

Creating the power to grow community mental health from the grassroots.
Welcome to a Creating Our Mental Health Group Experience

Presenters: Jessie Fields, MD, Rachel Mickenberg, LCSW, Hugh Polk, MD

Creating Our Mental Health is a community conversation in which participants join together under the leadership of social therapeutic coaches to build environments for their emotional empowerment and to make a better life. Creating Our Mental Health groups are free and open to all. Online Zoom groups are offered monthly and draw diverse participants from the US and globally. In-person groups meet at community centers and churches in Harlem and across New York City. Participants bring anything and everything from their lives (painful and otherwise) to contribute to the group therapeutic activity. Often, groups create new relational performances: relating in new ways to themselves, to others, to the group, while questioning iron-clad assumptions about “their” emotions and “their” mental health diagnoses. In this session, we will briefly provide an orientation and introduction to the program’s grassroots/community-organizing history, then create a Creating Our Mental Health group experience with all of you.

10:30 am – 12:00 pm (90 min)

Creating Power on the Streets of Nairobi

Presenters: Minoo Kyaa, Brian Mathenge, Mary Njeri, Otien O’Brian

Join Minoo Kyaa, a leader of the Mathare Social Justice Center’s (MSJC) Traveling Theatre, as he shares the history and ongoing activity of MSJC. Founded in 2015 in Mathare, a vast slum in Nairobi that is home to 500,000 people, MSJC is independently funded and sustained by the people it fights for and has inspired and helped lead the foundation of 30 other Social Justice Centers in Nairobi, 52 throughout Kenya. MSJC works on many fronts: extrajudicial killings (mostly of young men) by the police; the Mathare Green Movement, which focuses on water rights; reproductive and gender justice; and disability justice. They have organized the Matigare Book Club (which is dedicated to the great playwright, novelist and activist Ngugi wa Thiongo), the MSJC Kids Social Justice Center, and, featured here, the dynamic Mathare Social Justice Center Traveling Theatre.

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12:15 – 1:15 pm (60 min)

Create the Power: Nigeria

Presenters: Elizabeth Adams Oyarese (host), Oladoyin Idowu, Aminat Abdulsalam, Zakari Emmanuel, The Gift Chikere, Samuel James Femi

Facing a repressive neo-colonel government that has sold its soul to the foreign oil industry, its financial independence to the International Monetary Fund, and is ineffective against the Boko Haram terrorists in the north, the people of Nigeria are in the midst of their second youth-led uprising in four years. Even as they “Fight the Power” in the streets, they are “Creating the Power” at the grassroots. This session brings together five of those helping to generate people’s power on the ground.

This presentation has been organized and is hosted by Elizabeth Adams Oyarese, the founder of Linking Circles Academy. She is an alumna of the East Side Institute’s International Class, a brigadier of the Global Play Brigade, an ambassador of Street Project Foundation and the secretary general of its Youth Advisory Board.

Adams will introduce us to:

• Gift Chikere (aka The Gift), an alumni of Street Project Foundation, has spearheaded the organization of ARTvocacy, which grew out of the 2020 youth uprising against police violence and extrajudicial killing. It organizes young poets, writers, musicians, singers, rappers and photographers to create art at the grassroots which encourages young people to generate and develop their power and the power of their communities. In the first four years of its existence Artvocacy has involved 3,000 young people and produced 4 short films, 5 stage plays, a 20-episode podcast series and 2 photo storybooks.
• Oladoyin Idowu is the founder and director of One Word Africa, a foundation dedicated to raising awareness about dyslexia in Nigeria and throughout Africa and which advocates for dyslexics, especially those written off by the educational system.
• Aminat Abdulsalam, is the founder of Techkiddies, an organization which works to make Nigerian kids tech-savvy “one byte at a time.”
• Samuel James Femi, professional dancer and founder of DeafCanDance, organizes and trains deaf youth throughout Nigeria into skilled dance companies.
• Zakari Emmanuel, a spoken world poet, an alumni of ARTvocacy and Executive Director of Udama for Africa, a youth-led organization committed to empowering marginalized communities through the transformative power of performance and the arts. Udama for Africa is working for gender equality, climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.

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2:00 – 3:30 pm (90 min)

Parents Circle: Creating Conversation Amidst War

Presenters: Arab Aramin, Smadar Elhanan

Palestinian Arab Aramin and Israeli Guy Elhanan both lost their young sisters to the conflict. Abir Aramin was killed by a rubber bullet shot by the Border Police in 2007, and Smadar Elhanan was a victim of a suicide bombing in 1997. The Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF) is centered around reconciliation and partnership, central to which is understanding the shared humanity of grief. In this session Guy and Arab will demonstrate an activity that highlights the important role of personal experience in the bridge-building process.

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3:30 – 4:30 pm

Closing Session

Presenters: Lois Holzman, Dan Friedman