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). I am a play revolutionary and performance activist.
We live in a historical moment filled with rancor, fear, and distrust of corrupt institutions that no longer give us a sense of stability — plus a global pandemic. It is a time that 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 activism 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 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.
I am proud to be part of a movement that offers performance to people as a radical way to break out of existing dualistic paradigms and ideologies (i.e., “the far left/the far right,” the “two party system,” etc.).
In June of 2020 we launched the Global Play Brigade, bringing together an international grouping of performers, improvisers, therapists, educators and clowns to connect people across borders (of all kinds, be they geographic, cultural, gender, ethnic, racial or political). We offer free play workshops and emotional support sessions and our main resource is love. As of March 2021, we have over 100 volunteers and facilitators from 35 countries, and more than 4000 participants from over 50 countries have attended our sessions on Zoom and WhatsApp since we launched. We play with everything, including the pain, fear and deprivation of our world. Play is transformational.
Many of the performance activists who created the Global Play Brigade are also long time builders of Performing the World (PTW), a biannual conference that began in 2001. PTW 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 co-lead the International Organizing Committee with my fellow performance activist, Miguel Cortes, from Juarez, Mexico. Through the ongoing activity that is Performing the World, we create cross-border play, performance and activism that makes a powerful statement in a time of increasing authoritarianism and nationalism.
I’m hopeful. Let’s perform a new world!
