Welcome!

 

It’s a privilege to be hosting Performing the World 2018, the tenth international gathering known as PTW. As both conference and community, PTW has matured since October 2001, a month after the attack on the World Trade Center, when a hundred people or so people came together (in sadness, grief and fear) to share ways that creative arts, performance and play create possibilities for changing how we live. Today, PTW is larger in number, deeper in passion and commitment, and broader in scope. It has been one of the forces drawing people all over the world to make “the performance turn” and has given them a home and a community they can grow. 

 

Along with this maturity, PTW has become over the years, more playful. I love this about PTW. And it makes perfect sense to me. Children develop through play. To grow ourselves, our communities, our organizations and our world, to imagine beyond what exists, to generate possibilities and to act on them, we must continue to play. 

 

And create more and more varied ways to play. The uncertainty of our times demands it. Things are falling apart – nations and government apparatus, norms of diplomacy and civil discourse, civil society, the glaciers of the Arctic – and much more. It’s scary, it’s depressing, but it’s also an opportunity to create something new. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I’ve come to believe that our response needs to be playful. It needs to be performed. Any hope of giving some humanizing shape to what’s going on in the world lies in our individual and collective capacity to create new ways to play, perform and improvise so as to organize and activate individuals, organizations and communities who will bring new social-cultural-psychological and political possibilities into existence. 

 

Those of us gathering this weekend have the opportunity to share and examine dozens and dozens of performatory practices carried out in so many different places and situations. My hope is that we make it joyful, playful – and above all – developmental. 

 

I look forward to meeting all of you.