Why I am a Performance Activist

As a funny person who has been a community organizer, independent political activist and improviser/teacher for the majority of my life I like “doing seriousness playfully” (quoting one of my mentors — Dr. Lois Holzman).

In the midst of a Presidential campaign that often seems like a post-modern screenplay written by Paddy Chayefsky, I find that living in a historical moment where there is so much rancor, fear, and distrust of corrupt institutions that no longer give us a sense of stability requires playfulness and performance. Performance — our ability to play, to be other than who we are/to be who we are becoming — opens up possiblities and allows for discovery. It opens activism beyond the limited arenas of politics and economics. Performance activism is a cultural activity. Performance activist brings hope to millions who have none.

I am part of an international community of performance activists who engage in this new activism as a kind of performance that creates power and engages authority. Not all performance does this. Performance activism is explicitly about changing social, political, economic, cultural and personal relationships, that is, performing a new world.

A growing number of political and social activists, community and youth organizers, educators and therapists are turning to performance as a way of engaging social problems, activating communities, and experimenting with new social and political possibilities. The performance turn is allowing social change activists in all cultures to organize not around a set of ideas, an ideology, but to create, through performance, something new with what exists.

Watching this Presidential campaign unfold I am proud to be part of a movement that offers performance to people as a radical way to break out of existing paradigms and ideologies (i.e., “left, right, center,” the “two party system,” etc.).

Performing the World — a biannual conference that began in 2001 — is an international gathering to explore and celebrate performance as a catalyst for human and community development and culture change, and thereby, to create a new and more humane world. I am on the International Organizing Committee with the responsibility of raising funds to help activists from Africa, South America and Asia to travel to New York City for this year’s conference (September 23rd to 25th).

In the midst of poverty, violence, illiteracy, and environmental disasters thousands of creative activists are working in all parts of the globe — in NGOs, universities and community centers in Japan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Africa and Australia — to bring performance and development to the people in their communities. If you’d like to become a performance activist you can begin by performing as a donor — please give whatever you can to our campaign to make PTW 2016 as radically inclusive as we can. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-us-connect-creative-activists--2#/

And please join us for PTW 2016 http://www.performingtheworld.org !