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Performing the World 2008

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Thursday, October 2– Sunday, October 5, 2008

New York City

www.performingtheworld.org

Performing Practice

Around the globe, people are sweeping aside old notions of how we learn and develop, how to educate and to help, and what it is to build community — by developing new practices based in performance. With 25 years of experience in implementing, researching and teaching performance-based psychology, education, health care, youth development, therapy, and organizational and community development, Lois Holzman is a leader of this growing performance movement.  Along with Fred Newman, she is developing, in both theory and practice, a new psychology that understands our  ability to perform — to pretend, to play, to improvise, to be who we are and other than who we are — as key to our emotional, social and intellectual growth and well-being. As a consultant to organizations that utilize this new psychology, she is advancing the use and understanding of performance as the engine of human development at any age and social circumstance.  And as organizer of the 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2008 Performing the World conferences, Holzman is helping to build an international cross-disciplinary community of practitioners and scholars who take a performance approach in addressing educational, mental health, health and social policy issues.

To Holzman, performance is more than a metaphor. It is a methodology for living.  Seizing on Lev Vygotsky’s discovery that young children learn and develop because they are supported to do what is beyond them — to play at being who they are becoming or, as Vygotsky says, to “perform a head taller” — she and her colleagues practice a method of relating to all people, no matter their age, as performers who create the millions of scenes (scripted and improvised) of their lives. Holzman, Newman and their clients and students have discovered how people, when organized as an ensemble, can transform how they relate, understand and feel. Performance, in this creative, activistic sense, is how we can go beyond ourselves to create new experiences, new skills, new intellectual capacities, new relationships, new interests, new emotions, new hopes, new goals, new forms of community — in short, a new culture. 

Research and Writing

Nearly all of Holzman’s writings touch on performance and its role in human development.  She writes not only of practice but also of how different theoretical perspectives, such as postmodernism, cultural-historical activity theory and critical psychology, can be greatly enriched by a performance approach. Her latest book, Vygotsky at Work and Play (Routledge) is a prime example. Earlier writings on performance and the performance movement are: Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind (Routledge); “Performative Psychology: An Untapped Resource for Educators” (in Journal of Educational and Child Psychology); “Lev Vygotsky and the New Performative Psychology: Implications for Business and Organizations” (in Organisational Behaviour: Social Constructionist Approaches); and “Performance, Criticism and Postmodern Psychology” (in Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice and Political Life).  In addition, she has initiated research on performance projects in youth development (“Young People Learn by Studying Themselves: The All Stars Talent Show in Action”), teaching English as a second language, and the social development of elementary and middle school children. Holzman is currently working on a book on the international performance movement that will feature intimate portraits of performance innovators.