Transformation: War Trauma to Clown Bliss
Hunter “Patch” Adams
For the past four years, Patch Adams M.D. and the Gesundheit Institute have been working with psychiatrists in the US Department of Veteran Affairs to offer a transformative context for combat veterans dealing with traumatic experience from war. This context is a week-long clown trip to Guatemala City. Ten vets, whose lives have been adversely affected by their war experience, travel with Patch and other seasoned clowns to hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and mental asylums to experience the joy of bringing laughter and love to others. In this presentation Patch will describe the Vets, their self-descriptions at the beginning of the trip, the daily clown events, the Vets self-descriptions at the end of the trip, and then what he’s learned of their lives once they go back home. Video footage will be shown.
All Heads of Lettace
Patch Adams, Lars Adams
I’m tickled to say that for the first time my son, Lars (30), will join me at this year’s Performing the World Conference. Using an intimate father/son autobiographical map with storytelling, strange vaudeville, quirky audience participation, and a freeform Q&A, we want to help people push their best selves to be instruments for a healthy beautiful world. Sometimes it can be appropriate to develop the naughty!
Greensboro in Poetry and Play: Where Are We From, Where Are We Going
Omar Ali, Tiera Moore
The presentation will be a co-created poetry movement performance based on the history of Warnersville, a working-class black community founded by African Americans and Quakers in the wake of Emancipation in Greensboro, North Carolina. Led by scholars-activists-performers from Greensboro–producers of Community Play!/All Stars Project Alliance–will create a performance that looks at this community-in-the-making. Grounded in the cultural-performative approach of Lois Holzman, Fred Newman, and Lenora Fulani and inspired by the work of co-players around the world, CP/ASPA performance workshops are supportive of people ‘becoming’ and continually developing through collaborative creative activity.
Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre: A Yin-Yang Dialogue
Francesco Argenio Benaroio
Playback Theatre (PT) honors and serves the Teller, the feelings and stories of the past and present that resonate within the community in a given social context. Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) creates conditions for the Tellers and community to collectively research and act out alternatives to issues in their present and future. TO feels more “Yang”, outside, action, critical thinking, reactive. PT feels more “Yin”, inside, honoring feelings, being there, listening. Can these two languages create a whole and find a common point? We invite participants to experiment how TO and PT creatively enrich and complement each other’s practices, in order to serve our communities, and create the conditions for personal and social transformation.
“Still We Rise”
Jeffrey Aron, Molly Raskin
Still We Rise will engage filmmakers in conversation about the unique challenges of portraying people with serious mental illness on screen. Questions of how to make visible an illness that is at once invisible and devastatingly apparent, without contributing to stigma and sensationalism, will be explored. Since mental illness alters thoughts, words and behavior, it can be hard to capture and convey the humanity of people who live with it. We will show clips from Molly Raskin’s documentary film Still We Rise, the inspiring story of three Liberian health workers, the first to tackle an invisible but deadly epidemic of mental illness in their tiny West African homeland.
Let’s Develop Research
Saliha Bava
Research is one of the bastions for knowledge construction, whose rules define what constitutes not only knowledge but also how we come about that knowledge is valid or not. How do we perform research as practice that develops the methodology of research? How do we bend the rules of who performs research? How do we make research an everyday activity that is a joint inquiry with the people who will be shaped by the research? Come join us for a session on making-up such research, where we will improvise together a research design for “how couples play” using the methodologies of design thinking, performance, and tool-and-result.
From PPLG to Performing The World on the Move in Europe
Elena Boukouvala, Francesco Argenio Benaroio, Esben Wilstrup
September 2001, New York: Performing the World is born. April 2018, Thessaloniki: A group of refugee, migrant, local and international organizers build “Play Perform Learn Grow (PPLG)” which brings together 130 people from 30 countries to create new communities in response to the dehumanizing conditions of the refugee crisis in Europe. September 2018, New York: In this performance, PPLG organizers share how they have built with the history and the organizers of PTW to create PPLG and set the stage for “PTW on the Move in Europe”. Join the launch of this mobile conference that will travel around Europe in the years to come. We invite you to be with us in history and to create new history together.
Performing Politics & New Realism: Lecture Demonstration
Eva Brenner, Alexander Stamm
This presentation will begin with a video screening and report on a production of Refugee Dialogues by Bertolt Brecht (1940), with a focus on the development of Community Theater which integrates artists, refugees, migrants, and people from the community. Following the screening there will be a political performance workshop using a text from the performance and personal commentary to explore space improvisations, Viewpoints and Parcours’ works creating political performance in open spaces. In three steps, reading, improvisation and performance, we will explore how to transport a literary text by personal commentary and thus add to social transformation based on the textual material by Brecht.
Breaking the Ice: From Meaningless Performance to the Performance of Meaning
Andrew Burton, Teresa Cavanaugh
The basis of a great deal of theatrical and performative work is the use of theatre games. An often asked question during classes or workshops is; “What was that for?” The great Brazilian theatre director, Augusto Boal used to tell students not to say what a theatre game “was for” but rather to ask participants what they got out of it. Asking that provides a range of meanings for the exercise rather than one defined by the instructor. This exercise will explore, through the use of theatre exercises, how participants create meaning from experience, how the meanings created from those experiences interact with and build upon previous experiences and beliefs and how new ways of seeing and being can be explored and created through seemingly innocuous activities.
From Reaction to Awareness: Reshaping Our Personal and Collective Body in the Face of Patriarchy
Valentina Caprotti
How do we experience and nurture gender violence in and through our body? How do our bodily tensions and postures relate to our experiences of gender roles, oppression and discrimination? This workshop combines theater image, improvisation, creative writing and body cartography with the aim of creating a collective ground to explore and reflect on how gender-based conflicts and violence shape our soma and how increasing our somatic awareness can be a powerful process for both personal and collective processes of healing and transformation.
Fostering Environmental Empathy Through Our Bodies and Voice
Ursula Carrascal Visarreta, Terisotto Guillermo Fabian
During this session, participants will create a 12-minute performance of collective choreography about how global warming affects their communities. The workshop will begin with dance and live music performed using images of how Peru was widely impacted by the Phenomenon del Niño in 2017. Focusing in on how dance is a normal behavior found in nature, this presentation will provide reflection on the connection of pollution and environmental empathy. Visual arts, dance and social therapy will be used to create the collective dance answering the question what is environmental empathy?
SOULva Bar: Experiencing the Shift from Therapist to Light Warrior
Michael Chan-Frazier
The process of be-coming and experiencing development can be a tricky road to navigate. In this presentation, Michael will share his journey of attempting to hide as a therapist for many years, and his process of becoming a Light WorQer, and stepping into his purpose as a SOULva Specialist & Therapist. Michael will share how being a part of the Social Therapy and member of Developing Across Borders community will support you in be-coming congruent and creatively developing in your unique ways for your life.
Healing Through Laughter
Michael Chan-Frazier
If I don’t seriously play, I fail in my job! As a clown and I would like to invite you to play with societal, political and cultural issues, as well as with logic, life, death, hierarchy and perfection. We will look into how clowning is being used with refugees around the world, and how we have been turning the sad and tragic subjects upside down; they remain tragic of course but in a more playful and acceptable way.
The Development of Creative Dialogue of Deaf and Hearing in Ebisu Theatre
Atay Citron
In 2016, Ebisu Sign Language Theatre Laboratory performed its first production, It’s Not About Ebisu, at PTW. Two years later, we will share with you the process that led to Ebisu’s second production, Read My Lips! Focusing in on the dialogue between deaf actors with a hearing director and on the decisions made within the production to highlight the issues concerning deaf culture, deaf politics, and deaf education in the era of cochlear implants.
Ways to Perform and Develop as Learners Without Grades
Natalia Collings
The main call of PTW is to find new ways to perform and develop. In this session we will focus on grades as a practice that stops performance and development. Grades are an obstacle in creating community and relationships among students and teachers. Based on contemporary appropriations of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, and especially the notion of ZPD, this presentation will offer practical ideas and a theoretical foundation for abandoning grades in a college (and potentially any) classroom, orchestrating learning as a set of routinely created collective performances, and imagining what opportunities de-grading can create for cultural-historical formations.
Performing Communities de Esperanza
Miguel Eduardo Cortes Vazquez, Omar Bolado Villegas, Jorge Burciaga Montoya, Sandra Paola López Ramírez, Óscar Losoya, Mariana Soledad Loya Parra, Estefania Luciene Ortega, Chris Reyman, Jesús Rafael Rodríguez Esquivel
Crossing borders, a powerful image evoking actions of resistance, going beyond boundaries, and working on the margins. We will talk about our efforts to create a binational community of performance activism in a highly charged political environment: the US-Mexican border. The southern border in the US is bringing issues such as border walls and illegal immigration to the forefront in a charged political environment. In this context, it can be very clear what you are against but less clear what we can do differently. We will present our response to this intense historical moment in our frontera with a binational coalition: Performing Communities de Esperanza.
Exploring Safety in Gendered Dialogue
Matthew Costanzo, Joy Radish
An interactive, performative exploration about the contemporary lapse in safe, dynamic communication between genders due to current political historical trauma of violence against women, disparity in the US around antiquated versus progressive gender norms/presentations, office politics, online dating, sexual harassment versus sexual assault, political correctness, etc.
PROJECT TIKKUN: Tikkun Olam – “To Repair” the World
Carolyn Dorfman
Led by acclaimed artist director, Carolyn Dorfman and company members, this unique creative/performance experience is designed to inspire awareness, break down barriers, and create dialogues, both literal and performance, that speak to the human story, social action and social change. Based on Dorfman’s visceral and moving dance, TIKKUN (To Repair), participants will explore their own concept of TIKKUN, where they see the world today and their vision of the future. In her signature way, “shoes” are used as an important and versatile metaphor and are key to explorations of the ways we separate and divide, bind or link, engage or disengage. Dorfman explains: “As I look at the world, I am struck by our individual and collective uniqueness, yet our absolute interconnections and interdependence. I have looked at delicate balances before. Once again, our survival as the human race depends on it.” In TIKKUN, Dorfman looks at the world as it is and, ultimately, as it could be.
2-Theatre for Change: Performance to Raise Consciousness About Diversity in Higher Education
Renee Emunah
Therapeutically oriented social justice theatre allows emotional components to be at the forefront so that audiences begin to feel in new ways, inspiring reflection and action. The graduate Drama Therapy Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies has been producing original theatre pieces aimed at furthering awareness about diversity, augmenting an institutional climate of inclusion, and broadening understanding of complexities pertaining to privilege and oppression. The pieces are developed via improvisation, drama therapy, autobiographical theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, and dialogue. Several clips will be shown, and issues around process and product will be discussed.
“One with the Sound”: A Journey of a Thousand Miles
Rita Ezenwa-Okoro, Ezenwa Eleazar Okoro, Wole Oguntokun, Eduvielawhe Olutimayin, SPF Ambassadors
One with the Sound is a total theater stage play about five young people, from some of the most poverty-stricken areas in a developing nation. Not having met before, they have one thing in common, a driving desire not to give in to the unforgiving squalor and heartache they are born into, and which had always created an unending circle trapping the majority of young people born under the same circumstances. The actors in this play are Street Project Ambassadors who are beneficiaries of Street Project Foundation’s youth development programs in Lagos, Nigeria.
Show UP!: How ENACT Helps NYC Put-At-Risk Youth Display “Power In Motion”
Diana Feldman, Alicia Thompson
This workshop will focus on ENACT’s annual drop-out prevention performance series Show UP! Show UP! is a year-long process, connecting students with professional actors, drama therapists, playwrights, and directors in order to extract salient issues that are then developed into moving original performances directly guided by the students’ needs and aspirations. Participants will learn how to apply ENACT method data collection techniques to the development of original works, while maintaining core ethical and aesthetic principles, and understand the evolution of this performance series in terms of outreach, theme, and impact.
Art Activists in Dark Times
Lynn Fels, Patti Fraser
What are the challenges facing young arts activists today? This presentation will screen a short video of interviews with young performing arts activists who work in the field of social change. The questions we ask are: what are the barriers that you face, what gives you hope, as you work in community-engaged arts? What might mentorship look like in today’s world? We will then share our experiences, and brainstorm together, how, in the midst of chaos, we might recognize our engagement in the arts as an act of resistance, social inclusion, community building, and celebration.
The Narrative Salon: Empathy in a Disconnected World
Shari Foos
This award-winning group experience interweaves big ideas with compelling media clips, storytelling, creative writing and open discussions that challenge how we’re isolated by contemporary culture. It is a transformative adventure with depth, humor and an unapologetic subversiveness that broadens our perspectives. See the world through the eyes of a stranger and discover your common humanity. Outsiders are insiders. Come and play.
The Joy of Dementia: You Gotta Be Kidding!
Mary Fridley, Katharine Houpt
In this experiential workshop, we will use improvisational games, creative exercises and performed conversation to explore what it means to create an environment which supports everyone involved in the “dementia ensemble” to enjoy the “non-knowing growing” that is possible when improvisational play is how we are doing everything in our lives. We welcome everyone looking for new and more creative ways to approach this issue; who are interested in using diagnosis as a starting point for creativity; and who wants to learn more about improvisation as an especially valuable tool for more creatively navigating the dementia experience.
Route60+ : Stories That Shaped a Better Europe
Salvatore Greco
This presentation follows a back-and-forth journey through Europe’s achievements and challenges. It’s about a new narrative of and for Europe. It’s about the virtuous path of “Europe” because there is one, or even more than one path. With Route60+, we want to tell the story of that path and share it. When talking about Europe, you will experience likes, loves, laughs, dislikes, anger and wonder, but the future and present of Europe are also about the stories we tell and share, and about how we share those stories or how we don’t.
“Reconciliation”
Marilyn Green
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Movement Choir of Trinity Church at Wall Street first performed Reconciliation. Trinity’s chapel, St. Paul’s, is directly across from the site of the attack, and became a center of the rescue work, communal grieving and healing that followed. Reconciliation has since been performed in venues from Chautauqua Institution to the International Sacred Dance Guild. It has come to have broader meaning, as audiences have applied the dance to events in their own countries and lives, but the message remains the same. There is a route from agony through service, from numbness to a return to full life: a willingness to come into contact with love, breaking the chain of revenge and injury.
Social Presencing Theater: From Liminality to Communitas in Our Current World
Jamie Gutiérrez Vélez
Social Presencing Theater (SPT) is a methodology developed under the leadership of Arawana Hayashi for understanding current reality and exploring emerging future possibilities. Drawing on the arts and contemplative traditions, SPT brings body-based experiential learning into individual, organizational and social change efforts. This is not “theater” in the conventional sense, but uses simple body postures and movements to dissolve limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition, and to make visible both current reality, and the deeper, often invisible, leverage points for creating profound social change.
Unruly Bodies: Expanding the Creative Mind and Unrestricting the Imagination in Higher Education
Lalenja Harrington, Catherine Minton
Here presenters will share experiences with higher education, art and activism. Lalenja will discuss how she has incorporated concepts of “unrestricting the imagination” and artistic inquiry into her scholarship, as well as the “rhizomatic” nature of existing as a teacher, researcher and artist on a college campus. Catherine will discuss her ideas about the importance of expanding the creative mind from the student perspective and will present examples of her creative work at UNC-Greensboro. Designed to spark thinking about how we can use art to challenge ideas of normalcy as a tool for advocacy and ensure all voices are heard.
Murderously Funny: How Humor Helps to Cope with Threatening Reality in an Extreme Intergroup Contact Situation
Peter Harris
In workshops attended by prisoners serving life sentences and theatre arts students, humor has been shown to affect a social and therapeutic processes. This session focuses in on the process in which actor/performer transitions between reality and fiction, and distances the real-life drama via humorous manifestations, even aiding in humanizing the murderer.
Generating Ideas for Comics with Specific Humor Used for Chemistry and Health Education
Marisa Holzapfel
We have developed a special genre of humor called “Fachspezifischer Humor” (subject specific humor) to create comics that teach students health education and science. To generate new comics, we need scientists with expert knowledge and also the unprejudiced view of those who are non-experts in the area of science or health. During this workshop, we will use a combination of two different creative methods, semantic intuition and the 6-3-5 method, to attempt to generate new ideas for future comics.
Magic of Miniatures
Ruth Howard
This presentation and workshop will invite participants into a hands-on consideration of the capacity of making and animating miniature worlds to explore and express subtle, playful, deep and varied material through collaborative and community-engaged art-making and gentle performance. The session will include a short presentation, a process of rapid creation and time for reflection and discussion. No supplies needed and no experience necessary.
“Dreaming of Life”
Morteza Jafari
Morteza came from Iran as a refugee in 2008. He was an accredited film director in Iran. In 2015, the refugee crisis escalated, and Morteza filmed the Dreaming of Life. He walked through the camps in Greece, from Lesvos to Eidomeni in the borders with Skopjie, and filmed the journeys of the refugees. He remembered his own journey to Greece, moments when his boat flipped upside down, and he promised that he would film the journey. Dreaming of Life was accepted into different film festivals across Europe and was broadcasted in Europe and USA. In this presentation, Morteza will share parts of the documentary and his own journey to make it.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® For Supporting Life Transitions
Camilla N. Jensen
Big life transitions require us to reevaluate and make sense of who we are and where we’re headed. Many types of transitions, from retiring, to having a child, graduating college, or divorcing, can pose challenges to our identity. In this session, Camilla Jensen, Ph.D. shares her efforts to help veterans transition from the structured life of the military to the open-endedness of civilian life. Using the mediated storytelling method LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Dr. Jensen leads veterans through activities that explore past, current, and aspirational identities, thereby sharing one’s story and building closer relationships both among veterans and civilians.
Magicians Without Borders Breaking Barriers
Tamara Estefanya Jimenez Florez, Carlos López
In this workshop we will curate an unforgettable experience for attendees, diving into self-awareness, developing artistic humanity, and learning one’s capability to become a great leader. All this will be accomplished through magic and all those present will become magicians for a day. We will break into groups to discuss the importance of changing the world in a non-traditional way, in making the impossible, possible, and how to bring smiles and adventure into our every-day lives and the world.
“They Call Teachers by Their First Names!”: An Ethno-Drama of Pre-Service Teachers Visiting Schools
Michael Kamen, Sarah Buchanan, Abigail Earle, Adaire Kamen, Abigail Luna, Kelli McLaughlin, Alys Mendus
This performance of a co-created ethno-drama shares several pre-service teachers’ journey as they embarked on a week of school tourism with two seasoned school tourists and a young NYC playwright. We share the story of this group visiting “innovative” schools in New York City. We see each tour as a performance created by each school and perform monologues and scenes to explore these pre-service teachers stepping from familiar pedagogy to the unknown and unfamiliar. Confronted with dissonance regarding power relationships, conversations about discomfort with informality, lack of structure, no letter grades segued into conversations about social justice, empowerment, and activism.
MASKulinity: Actions and Beyond
Katlego Kolanyane-Kesupile
What is it that goes into the formation, embodiment and ownership of MASKulinity, and what does it take to see behind the mask? In this session, Kat Kai Kol-Kes invites you to explore the nuances of masculinity as one of the most ever-present entities we all live with and grapple with. Through facilitated exercises, you will be tasked to query how you see masculinity, and how we can develop new pathways for us to access and dismantle masculinities when necessary.
“Cracked: New Light on Dementia”: Creating a Better World Through Theatre
Pia Kontos
Persons living with dementia are among the most stigmatized in society. The arts, specifically drama, are increasingly advocated for in education and research as ways to address social injustices. In this presentation we will screen Cracked: New Light on Dementia (60 minutes), a research-based drama developed to foster a space to critically and creatively explore stigma, and to envision new ways of relating. Discussion will follow highlighting key themes of Cracked and aspects of the development process. Cracked is well-positioned to reduce stigma associated with dementia, and to help audiences to see, imagine, and create a better world for persons living with dementia.
Letting Go of Perfection: The Power of Creating Performance Across Differences
Lisa Kramer
In this session participants will discover how letting go of the desire to create a perfect production, and encouraging collaboration between diverse communities, results in powerful performance that cultivates new forms of understanding. Drawing from her experience developing community-based learning projects that are shared through performance, Dr. Lisa Kramer will guide participants into thinking of new ways of approaching community, process, and performance as a tool for performance activism, community building, and social change.
Help Ensemble Engulf Schools
Deborah Kronenberg
So often in high schools/colleges, learning is categorized into subjects, programs are department specific, and the school is more institution than community. But in individual theatre classrooms, passionate educators are building ensembles that, if grown in a particular way, could spread through the school community and beyond. In this interactive workshop, come see how ensemble and some connected concepts create community out of an educational institution. Part of our time will be feedback on the workshop and the model it represents. Please help me find ways in which this work connects to others and what it may be missing.
You Will Fail (and that’s okay!)
Richard Krysztoforski
You will fail this workshop (and that’s okay!). Using a combination of mindfulness, applied improvisation, and fun, participants will learn how to regain control in the moments before and after the point of failure. You will be exposed to exercises that purposely induce failure and learn how you uniquely react to failing, in both body and mind. Developing this understanding enables you to move past and learn from inevitable moments of failure. The only way to succeed, is to fail!
Performing Kashmir: A Political Stasis and Development Through Theatre
Sanjay Kumar
This presentation intervenes in a complex vortex of war, state politics and theatre. It seeks to graph the tenuous experience of creating theatre in the war-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir. The backdrop features the continuing hostility between India and Pakistan and highlights Kashmir as the violent center of the binational conflict. The “political” drama consists of the struggle between Indian government and Islamic “radicals” and the changing nature of the Indian governments. Beginning from the first intervention in 2002, the presentation tries to pull together onto one canvas the diverse narratives from Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh highlighting the shifting prisms of victimization and victimhood. How do we radicalize? Activate? Develop?
Creating and Developing in a Nonsensical World: The World Doesn’t Make Sense So Why Should I Paint Pictures That Do – Pablo Picasso
Gabrielle Kurlander
In this panel conversation, leaders from the Creative Youth Development (CYD) field and Afterschool Development (ASD) movement will come together for a discussion of the cutting edge issues facing young people and our poor communities and innovative approaches to human growth and development.
Performing New Models of Scholarship at the Ronin Institute
Alexander Lancaster, Jon Wilkins
The Ronin Institute (2012), is a self-organized community of scholars from the sciences and humanities formed with the idea that researchers should create their own measures of success. A non-profit organization, Ronin provides an affiliation for scholars, and a structure whereby researchers can apply for federal and state grants. This organization also cultivates organic scholarly cultures that focus less on career milestones and more on scholarly work and the conditions of the scholars doing that work. This develops new structures for scholarship rather than adapting to institutional expectations. In this panel we will bring Ronin Scholars to discuss their experiences and invite attendees to help continue our adventure in independent scholarship.
Sing Like Your Mama: Stage Performance and Promotion of Indigenous Language in Nigeria
Bashiru Akande Lasisi
Language endangerment usually starts with the reduction of native speakers of an indigenous language. This may be born out of the language being unused for social and economic purpose, being considered archaic or simply, preference for other languages. Cultural promoters and linguists watch for these warning signs and strive to protect language from extinction. Various strategies have been explored to promote these languages, however, the stage is rarely seen as a platform for salvaging languages from extinction. This session will discuss how stage performances were utilized to promote and protect indigenous language in Southwest Nigeria and cover the process, challenges and lessons learned.
Tap, Tap, Tap Dance: Stepping on the Alienation in the Lonely City, Tapping to Growth and Community
Powpee Lee, Ginger Hsiao, Jaminie Liu
We are a group assembled from different corners of New Taipei City in Taiwan: representing a student, hair stylist, manager, insurance agent, mechanic and saleswomen. The only common thread was one of loneliness in the city, before coming to Ludi Community School. Here we met and became partners, supporting each other’s growth. Ludi Community School provides over 80 diverse and heterogeneous classes, creating the environment for individual growth which formed a community of adult learners. This Tap Dance Class joined us, and in tapping our steps, we became closer to each other, stepping onto the road of liberation which we plan to share with you.
Collaborative Storytelling as Activism: Cross-Border Theatre-Making for Young Audiences
Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, Cherae Halley, Jessica Lejowa
In this session we will play a video excerpt of the play, Dear Mr. Government, Please May I Have a Meeting With You Even Though I’m Six Years Old? We will follow this presentation with a discussion in which the creative team addresses the role of children in the devising process, activism in storytelling, and the crafting of theatre for young and cross-generational audiences. We will then open the floor for questions and comments from the audience.
“Human Again”: Searching for Transformation Inside a Maximum Security Prison
Bruce Levitt, Nick Fesette, Phil Miller
Human Again is the story of the Phoenix Players, an incarcerated group of men in Auburn Correctional Facility. The film follows the men as they prepare to perform their original theatre piece that combines soliloquies from Shakespeare with original dramatic material written by the performers. The film documents the journey these men are taking toward their own transformation and redemption. A discussion of the film follows its screening with the producer, a PPTG facilitator and a member of the phoenix Players.
Performative Interventions in Schools: Resisting Expanding in Unsettled Times
Fernanda Liberali, Feliciana Amaral, Maria Cecília Camargo Magalhães, Susan Clemesha, Maria Cristina Meaney, Francisco Estefogo, Beatriz Feliciana Amaral, Laurizete Ferragut Passos, Elisângela Janoni, Clarissa Liberali, Selma Regina Pato Vila Granado, Elias Paulino da Cunha Junior, Everton Pessôa deOliveira, Camila Santiago, Marisol Patrícia Saucedo Revollo Lage, Viviane Letícia Silva Carrijo, Carla Regina Sparano Tesser, Brenda Treco Padre
Brazil is experiencing a dismantling of achievements in social, political and educational areas, which increases fear, anxiety and despair, as well as violence in the urban landscape. Striving to resist and continue to expand, we find inspiration in Freire (1979/1987) and act together to create the “viable unheard of”. In this workshop, LACE research group proposes interventions generated in the project Digit-M-Ed Hyperconnecting Brazil when creating new possibilities for schools and communities. Relying on “otherness” as a mindset to foster collaboration and development, performances trigger participants to reflect on how affecting and being affected by others can impact our conatus.
Art of Dying Death Café
Amia Lieblich, Shatzi Weisberger
We live in a death-phobic society. Individual fears and denial is not a personal shortcoming, rather a cultural phenomenon. Fortunately, there is a growing receptivity to understanding the place of death in human development and how we can die well and support our loved ones to die “a good death.” We will explore the political, the practical, and the mysteries of death and dying as we embrace the reality of our mortality. Dying is not the end of life, it is the fulfillment of life.
Beyond “Mental Illness”: Performing Human Development
Elly Litvak, Justean Lebel
This workshop explores the meaning of “mental illness” and “recovery”, encouraging people to think outside of those labels. Participants will actively engage in performance-based exercises to explore the meanings of madness and healing. Some of the exercises include playing with diagnostic language and turning the idea of crisis on its head.
transfronteriza: A Community Created Dance by Women from the US/Mexico Border
Sandra Paola Lopez Ramirez, Marayah Angeliz Vigo, Estefania Luciene Ortega Jaramillo
transfronteriza is a collectively created dance that involved over 200 people from the US-Mexico border in the cities of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. The images, sounds and movements were created with people as young as seven and as old as 70, and in spaces as varied as university classrooms, museums, women’s shelters, street art festivals, community centers, and public libraries. This piece is part of a broader project conceived as a women-ledcultural organizing effort focused on generating developmental spaces where women could lead and shape powerful ways to share their (or create new) stories.
Everything is a Remix: How Copying, Imitating, Stealing (and Other “Bad Stuff”) Reinvigorates Collective Creativity for You and Your Community
Gwen Lowenheim, Derek Baylor, David Belmont, Nancy Maloy
Join a theatre artist, three language educators, musicians, and a record producer, all remix aficionados, as we celebrate everyday creativity by building a playground for philosophical, musical, theatrical and poetic exploration of how nothing is original. Learn techniques for remixing with both man-made and natural processes/products. Find out how creative imitation can develop your own voice! Discover how connecting ideas initiates “creative leaps.” We will explore what all of this means for ordinary people, who are in dire need of creative leaps if we are to develop amidst the chaos and alienation of 21st century life.
Let’s Develop as Entrepreneurs!
Andres Marquez-Lara
All over the world there are thousands of performance activists helping to build creative communities. They use their creativity and playfulness to transform themselves and others. Yet, most of them do their performance activism on nights and weekends while working full-time or part-time doing something that is not necessarily connected to their passion. This interactive workshop is for people who want to make more space and time to grow their passion but either don’t know how or are afraid to do so. It is designed to help reframe the concept of entrepreneurship from a money-making activity to a developmental activity. Join us!
How to Grow Your Community Project Developmentally: A Conversation About the Challenges of Scaling Up!
Jim Martinez, Amy Bravo
This workshop invites interactive conversation with participants who will play with and consider challenging scenarios. Dr. Jim Martinez and his collaborator Amy Bravo will tell the story of their successes and the challenges in bringing development and community engagement to the New York Institute of Technology. Their projects together have ranged from creating STEM-focused service-learning environments with one elementary school to a large scale multidisciplinary campus-wide initiative in Harlem in New York City. Join them for a playful exploration of how the idea of growing to “scale-up” is different than growing a community developmentally.
Creating an Ensemble for Performing Health
Susan Massad, Barbara Silverman
The western dominated dualistic approach to health and illness relates to illness as a “thing” located in the individual, and disease as something that can be abstracted and studied outside of the socio-emotive-cultural context in which it resides. The approach is authoritarian and leaves consumers disarmed in the face of serious and/or chronic illness. This workshop will present a social collaborative practice of health and healing, the Health Team, that has been developed by members of the East Side Institute and used with self-organized groupings of patients and friends for over 30 years. Workshop participants will perform a Health Team followed by a discussion with people who have gone through the Health Team experience.
Play Diplomacy: A Playful Response to Hate and Violence
Dr. Smita Mathur, Dr. Maryam S. Sharifian, Kanika Shirole
Through playful execution of citizen-diplomacy, can we leverage the benefits of play to develop a healthy response to hate and bigotry experienced by our communities? This idea of developing community-play as a tool for play diplomacy will be discussed in this interactive session. Our goal is to harness the benefit of play and citizen diplomacy to create space for community play.
Meet the Heartist Collective: Art That’s Connective
Barbara Ann Michaels
Are you a Heartist, too? This joyful and meaningful interactive panel discussion with the New York based Heartist Collective explores and expands the realm of transformation-focused participatory art. Our work moves hearts and opens minds to human connection, often via both humor and depth. See and experience live-in-the-room projects by our Heartist members. Hear best practices, discover inspiration sources, and understand the ripple effect of emotionally evocative participatory art. Ask questions. Feel and know for yourself if Heartists are one of your kindred art tribes, too.
Experiencing Active Listening Through Theatrical Processes
Angelo Miramonti
In this experiential session, participants will experience various forms of non-verbal listening using theatrical processes. This method of empathic listening was created by the theatre facilitator Paolo Senor, who was inspired by the “person-centered approach” to therapy of Carl Rogers. The facilitator of the session (Angelo Miramonti) was trained by Paolo Senor and is currently applying these exercises to work with people affected by armed conflicts and natural disasters.
Playing with “Let’s Develop!”: Performing Giving in the Culture of Neoliberalism
Yuji Moro, Takumi Hirose, Otsuka Sho, Ryota Kitamoto
In this session, the participants will play with Fred Newman’s ideas on giving and getting from his book of Let’s Develop!. Participants are asked to explore Newman’s words from his book, comparing responses from this session to the remarks which Japan All Stars collected from interactive reading sessions on Newman’s book with poor, or socially withdrawn youth, with community builders, and with mothers who have children with special needs. In these interactive reading sessions, five to seven participants presented sections from Newman’s book and were asked to discuss freely on them. From these discussions we will garner a multi-voiced and multi-perspective discourse.
Let’s Perform Healthcare!: The New Teamwork Training Program Applying Anime and Improv
Etsuko Nakagami-Yamaguchi, Yasuko Hasegawa
Quality and safety is one of the most urgent issues in healthcare of the world. In the United States, 100,000 people or more die every year because of preventable medical errors. However, “To err is human.” So what should we do? For better quality and safety, development of safety culture is essential and can be developed through education. To face this challenge, we developed a new cross-disciplinary training program for hospital staff, incorporating an animated movie, mini-lecture, group work and improvisation. Today, we would like to share this new program, and enjoy it with you.
Interactive Game “Let’s Develop”
Tamara Nikolić Maksić, Ivan Pantelić
“Let’s develop!” is an interactive educational game specially designed for learning social therapeutics. The game is an opportunity for all participants to explore key ideas that constitute social therapeutics, and at the same time, sharpen their improvisational skills and share their learning with others through an intense group process. The use of interactive educational games enriches learning and facilitates creating playful learning environments. Having the opportunity to intensely engage with others in what they know and what don’t know by playing a game, will allow participants to create new meanings of social therapeutics with each other.
The Other Nollywood: Tunde Kelani and the “Politics” of New Nigerian Cinema
Abiodun Olayiwola
Tunde Kelani is a foremost Nigerian filmmaker and one of the most distinguished in Africa. He has distinguished himself in an industry that is constantly in transition. His films carefully reflect a rich blend of the complexities and dynamics of the diverse experiences of cultures, art and politics, religion and development issues that define Nigeria as a nation. This paper examines how Kelani has revolutionized the poetics and aesthetics of the “new Nollywood” by inspiring a generation of young and aspiring filmmakers whose works now shape the politics, culture and development of modern Nigeria.
“STOP THAT”
Susan Parenti, Patch Adams
STOP THAT will be the debut performance of two-person piece involving the audience in a strategy called “sting-and-tickle”: addressing the audience with a ‘sting’ of an audacious premise, and then ‘tickle’ them with playtime allowing the sting to return without teeth. The ‘sting’ is a proposal for how to face global warming, but then there’s a chicken on stage, a very cross road wondering how, and references to Rosa Luxemburg W.C. Fields and Herbert Brün and other koochie-cooes. The tickled parts of the audience member assuage the stung parts. But then, the stung parts of the audience could be marinating the tickle: The Nation under MariNation. Is this development?
Play and Theater with Adolescents’ Families: A Transformative Experience in Costa Rica
Mayarí Pérez Arroyo
What kind of bonds are we building with our teenagers for them to become catalyst of change? What kind of support are parents receiving in approaching their teenagers’ reality? In Costa Rica, Colegio ILPPAL works as an alternative for teenagers and families having trouble adapting to the traditional educational system. In a world where teens are misconceived as problematic even from their families, we use play, theater of the oppressed and psychodrama as tools for parents to get close to their inner adolescent, build empathic environments at home and find ways to be supportive in their children’s development. In our work to help families deconstruct the rigid myth of the “perfect family”, performance and play disclose their inside resources in building stronger and understanding relationships between them.
“Sorting Through the Rubble”
Robin Post
A memoir: A solo theatrical tapestry of past trauma, power and an integrating of the self by sifting through the rubble, living in the rumble of deep vulnerability, the wildness of healing and the finding wisdom through expression. During the present culture shift where women are finally feeling the possibility of agency and the potential for a cultural shift in the patriarchal system that has effectively silenced women and men for years, Robin is contributing her voice and story. Some of the content is specific to sexual abuse and therefore may be a trigger for some.
Bridging Academic Institutions and Their Communities through Performing Arts
Kathleen Potts, Lydia Fort, Julio Agustin Matos, Jr., John McCarty
Lydia Fort (Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia), Julio Agustin Matos, Jr. (University of Miami, Florida), John McCarty (Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, Virginia), and Kathleen Potts (The City College of New York, CUNY) present the panel “Bridging Academic Institutions and Their Communities Through Performing Arts.” These academics/performing arts professionals will be sharing their experiences mounting various types of performance pieces, interrogating the ways in which these works deepen engagement between the universities and their communities. On this interdisciplinary panel, they will discuss music and theatre as arenas for cultivating communal space while engaging with some of the critical issues of our times.
Three Experiments in Developing Unwritten Laws/Norms
Sara Ramshaw, Julie Lassonde, Kristen Lewis
This workshop, led by a lawyer/performance artist, a law student/dance artist, and a law professor, explores the development of performance activism in aid of social justice by making visible unwritten laws and norms that can perpetuate discrimination, injustice and intolerance in society. Workshop participants will be asked to engage in attentive listening and embodied practices that explore the relationship between written and unwritten laws/norms and will be encouraged to think about how we might create new “laws,” as we navigate our way to a more just and equitable future.
I am Us, Us is Me
Muneebur Rehman
Is it possible to engender personal transformation that encompasses the individual as much as the social, to synergize the evolution of self with the growth of the community, to coincide the personal with the universal? This workshop explores such possibilities through embodied forms of theatre that facilitate concretizing of our dreams in relation to the chaos of our environments. Treating life journey as spiritual quest and drawing from wisdoms of ancient cultures and frameworks of Change Management, the workshop employs theatre with the mindfulness that helps dream futures emanating from our connection with the Earth whilst drawing roadmaps communally that are sustainable and evolving yet playful and fulfilling.
Let’s Develop: A Podcast!
Chris Reyman, Art Assoiants, Syed Raju, Janet Wootten
Let’s Develop Podcast! is a project led by ESI Associates in which we strive to present performance activism to a wider audience through emerging media. This interactive podcast features conversations with incredible people who work to transform themselves and the world around them through a developmental approach to social change. In this session, we will share our experience creating this podcast and invite participants to become part of this process through participatory dialogue and reflection. Join us as we ponder: Who are we becoming?
Indigenous Performance: (Re)Devising Place
Thomas Riccio
An introduction to how indigenous and traditional performance, ritual, and shamanism offer an alternative for performance creation, expression, and function. Indigenous performance is place-based and serves as embodied knowledge, a functional technology enabling reflection, response, and participation. But this way of being in the world has been challenged, marginalized, and colonized by dominant cultural perceptions. Indigenous performance is not human-centric, it holds and conveys place knowledge as it articulates mindfulness and responsibility. Its community is an ensemble of humans, animals, ancestors, elements, and spirits. Performance can meaningfully participate in the reconciliation, healing, and the re-imagining of our emerging, planetary indigenous reality.
Clowning and Caring: Join the Love/Play Revolution!
Marian Rich, Mariamalia Cob Delgado, Chloe Jang, Tony Perone
Historically, clowns have served multiple roles: entertainers, tricksters, provocateurs, humanitarians, and agents for social change. In August 2017, these presenters joined Dr. Patch Adams on his Clowning and Caring trip in Costa Rica. We are inspired by Patch’s description of the clown as a “love revolutionary” (2016), as we are by Dr. Lois Holzman’s TED Talk (2014) about being a “play revolutionary.” In this workshop, presenters will share their experiences, offer insights on the personal and community impact of these experiences, engage participants in humanitarian clowning activities, and invite participants to consider new possibilities of clowning and caring in the world.
CoLaboArthon: A Socio-Technical Ecosystem for Development of Performance Activism
Sinisa Rudan, Tamara Nikolic Maksic, Sasa Rudan
In this session, ReMaking Tesla team will take you on a creative trip by using internationally practiced methodology, CoLaboArthon (www.cha-os.org/CoLaboArthon), that empowers exploration of individual and collective ideas and guides the gamified emotional-cognitive dialogue.It supports the buildup of collective awareness, guiding performance communities toward collective creativity and creation of performance activism. We will augment and innovate collective Play and Performance processes through by technology and methodology in support of social innovation. We will practice the sustainable development thinking, inspired by the UN SD Goals, and we will continue Engelbart’s augmentation of collective intellect, through multidisciplinary interplay of science and art. We will examine the role of the performance in the contemporary world, which is both over-connected and under-connected.
The City as a Stage: “Balcony Theatre”- A Model of Activist Site-Specific Performance
Sara Sibony
Balcony Theatre is the culmination of a project seeking to develop a site-specific community-based performance. It was originally performed in Jaffa, a mixed and conflicted neighborhood of Arabs and old and new Jewish immigrants in southern Tel Aviv. Serving as the stage: a multi-story residential building with balconies. Artists from various fields lead neighborhood residents to collaborate on cultural and communal research, which served the creative process. Structured as a collage, this event uses strong elements of visual and physical performance, music, and video art, in an attempt to create a multi-cultured dialogue.
Developing Across Borders Performs!
Barbara Silverman
This workshop introduces participants to Developing Across Borders, an international weekly online group environment led by Barbara Silverman, its founder and director. Participants will learn the history of DAB and key concepts of social therapy methodology that inform DAB including: “being and becoming”; “ building the group”; “yes and”; “radical acceptance”. The workshop will have 3 Acts: Act 1- Panel Interview of long time border /crossers and community builders addressing the impact DAB has on their lives, Act 2 – Performance of a DAB group including the panel and volunteers from the audience, Act 3- Emergent dialogue inviting comments, thoughts and questions.
At the Heart of Things
Mayra Stergiou, Piedad Abarracin Seiquer, Gregory Emfietzis, Depi Gorgogianni, Georgia Konstandinidi, Jennie Rawling, Vertebra Theatre Ensemble
After Dark Matter’s sold out performance at Edinburg Festival, Vertebra returns with At the Heart of Things, a dance performance inspired by Oscar Wilde’s book, De Profundis and the Orlando shootings. Movement improvisation, visual imageries, puppetry, garbage film, and live music, explore queer identity and female sexuality. Lilly and Nina were dancing in a nightclub when a gunman opened fire and nothing will be the same. Lilly is trying to make sense in a senseless world. What does it mean to be a woman? To fall in love? Out of this frustration, Oscar Wilde is born. Now he guides Lilly toward rediscovering her sexuality and womanhood.
Creating a New Alliance for Growth: All Stars Around the World
Gloria Strickland, Omar Ali, Murray Dabby, Lainie Hodges, Sandra Paola Lopez Ramirez, Yuji Moro
In this panel conversation, members of the All Stars Alliance – a group of individuals and organizations in the U.S. and across the globe who are doing work based on the All Stars Project’s programs and/or performance approach – will come together to talk about the issues facing the young people and the cities/countries in which they work. They will also share the challenges involved in – and impact enjoyed from – bringing performance and development to very diverse populations and communities.
Paintscape Soundscape Bodyscape: An Inter-Arts Playshop
Nicole Sumner, Helen Abel
In this inter-arts playshop we’ll layer sounds, paint strokes and body movements to create a landscape of possibility for storytelling. Whether you’re an educator, artist, community builder or political activist, the RSVP Cycleof creative process offers you a simple but powerful framework for moving from raw elements (Resources)to mapping (Scores)to reflecting (Valuaction)to Performing. At the very least, our play mojo improves; at best, we’re transformed. The frameworks structuring this arts play include the RSVP Cycle (Halprin), Laban movement, and Studio Habits of Play (Sumner, Harvard’s Project Zero/Hetland).
Performance, Political Education and Activism: Insights and Provocations from South Africa
Alexandra Sutherland
The Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education provides political education programs to support the work of activists in South Africa. This workshop/presentation will introduce practical and visual examples of our work using the creative and performing arts in political education, and in supporting activists in their campaigns. We will introduce the landscape of social justice movements in South Africa and how young people learn about organizing, politics and building communities for change, and the role of cultural resistance within this work. In doing so, we hope to expand and consolidate an understanding of art, culture and activism from an Afro-centric perspective.
How High School Students Accomplished Their Own Fashion Show: A Report from Japan
Akiko Suzuki
In this session, Suzuki will present a story about students overcoming poverty and childhood adversity to develop a fashion show together, allowing them the outlet to truly express themselves and their motivations. In Japan, child poverty has been recognized as severe social problem and in recent years new support programs have steadily become more available. However, many families facing these challenges remain unaware of these programs. In addition to this, many children in these families are facing another hurdle, struggling with low self-esteem and self-efficacy, keeping them from entering such programs. How do we leap over these hurdles? This presentation explores the success found recently in Japan and shares these stories and experiences.
From Happenings to Hashtags: The Performance of Community in a Digital World
Shoshanah Tarkow
Join a community of Citizen Curators dreaming, developing, and staging an interactive Digital Happening. The Digital Happening project uses social media to contemporize and expand the Happenings of the 60’s beyond Greenwich Village, to the larger global village. Workshop participants will collectively brainstorm, develop, and design the themes and structure for an original Digital Happening to be staged simultaneously in their respective geographic communities. By joining these various communities in a virtual global village, we will develop, transform, and perform the world—creating new possibilities, new relationships, perhaps even new villages! No digital/technological experience necessary, just come ready to dream!
A Day in the Life: Year 2030
Amelia Terrapin
It’s 12 short years from now. After decades of simmering growth, performance as a tool for sensing and creating the future has exploded into mainstream life. Humans are developing themselves and their rapidly changing world through applying the practices of movement, theater and music. This workshop takes a peek inside the classrooms, offices and meeting spaces of this new reality: Scene 1: 3rd grade science class. Scene 2: a business team. Scene 3: a Performing the World conference. Come enjoy a flourishing future!
Applied Improvisation: Growing by Leaps, Bounds (and Silly Faces)
Barbara Tint, Kat Koppett, Cathy Salit
This workshop highlights the core principles and methods of Applied Improvisation (AI) and will be offered by members of the global Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) community. AI is the use of improvisational practice for non-(traditional) performance contexts. Participants will learn and experience the fundamental AI ideas such as collaboration, co-creation, support, agility and creativity as they apply to many milieus; including in humanitarian intervention, police community relations, academia, business, non-profits, law and more. Working the muscles of creativity & preparedness, the use of AI techniques allows people to engage and impact on and with the unknown in our rapidly changing world.
And Then What Happened?: Story Unmasking to Shift Psycho-social Spaces
Jo Tyler
In this session, we will engage a concept of facilitator unmasking through storytelling. This is a way of energetically shifting a group’s psycho-social space to increase its liminality. The increased risk-taking that results then reflexively deepens and hones that space. We will do three rounds of storytelling, punctuated by noticing conversations to explore our sense of the changing nature of our psycho-social space. Participants will leave the session with experience of storytelling unmasking, and a process for guiding participants in “story sculpting” that will help them usefully reflect on the variety of ways in which it might be conveyed.
Performing Citizenship through Applied Improvisation
Don Waisanen
A lot has been written about what democracies should look like. Far less has covered how to actually train citizens in democratic skills. Don’s project studies how improv-based teaching and training methods can bridge differences and promote the types of civic engagement and civil discourse our world urgently needs. Drawing from a range of work and applying lessons from experiences teaching applied improvisation around the world, Don’s research takes up the task of producing a complete analytic framework of higher purposes and practices for applied improvisation that can pull societies upward. For the public good, this project demonstrates how scaling applied improvisation as a philosophy and set of concrete teachings and trainings can promote cosmopolitan citizens and help us improvise our way into better social worlds.
Performing as Leaders in the Midst of Despair: The Fight for Public Housing in NYC and Around the World
Micah White, Lenora Fulani
Ten years ago, Performing the World co-founder Fred Newman said, “We have to perform the world again because – and we’re all involved in this – this one stinks!” Nowhere is that stink more apparent than in the erosion of access to safe and humane housing. Across the world, and right here in NYC publicly funded housing is under a global threat, with many cities becoming inaccessible to all but the very rich. Join Lenora Fulani, Micah White and emerging leaders of the fight for public housing in NYC and discover how even in the midst of inhumane threats, people are choosing to grow and develop and perform as leaders. Following Newman’s invitation, the participants in this movement, rich and poor, are joining together to create a performance a new city—one that can include everyone.
Diagnosis: Performing Our Way Out of the Box
Rachael Williamson
A workshop focusing on the ways in which I utilize play and performance as an ABA therapist in order to shift the attention from behavior to activity. Utilizing play and performance to co-create therapy sessions with my clients empowers them by giving them a voice, encouraging them to be creative, and showing them that they can perform outside/beyond the box that deficit based programs often trap them in. This shift in attention eliminates the need for external reinforcers as participating in the joy of collective activity becomes the motivator and the reward, the results of which are nothing short of magical.
The BK Seoul Global Project
Jeremiah Wilson
This presentation will share a visual presentation of the Brooklyn Seoul Global Project. The concept behind The Brooklyn Seoul Project is to connect Brooklyn and Seoul creativity, craftsmanship and pop culture. We will present a showcase of music, arts and fashion, where not only artists but everyday people come to connect and share in their experiences with one another. The Brooklyn Seoul Project will feature an exciting lineup of musicians, art exhibitions, market vendors. Coupled with themes of music, multimedia, technology, fashion, social justice and a diverse platform of creative culture, we aim to reach a wide array of audiences with our project.
TELL: Theater for English Language Learners
Judy Wong
Learn about TELL (Theater for English Language Learners). In this presentation, participants will discover the journey taken by the founder, Judy Wong, toward the creation of a theater company that is dedicated to the performance of new and original culturally relevant theater for K-12 ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) audiences. She will discuss the premise of universal themes, intercultural communication, language acquisition and the roles they play in the company’s interactive performance. The participants will engage in a snippet of the interactive performance.
Adaptive Improv for Senior Adults
Ruth Yamamoto
The words “adaptive” and “improv” might seem redundant. Nevertheless, when working with groups of differing levels of mobility, cognition, and knowledge, there are changes to familiar games and strategies that are needed to facilitate improvisation with senior adults. In this workshop, Dr. Yamamoto (Ruth) will share some of her experiences facilitating improv with people over 65. Some of the workshop will involve role-playing so that participants can have the opportunity to problem-solve issues that they might encounter. Furthermore, Ruth invites and encourages others who have worked in this population to help describe and demonstrate other strategies and techniques.