All Power To The Developing!

In this episode, Peter Harris, one of Israel’s major innovators of community-based theatre, shares the experiences and insights of fifty years of creating performances with marginalized communities.  With the war raging in Gaza, he also talks about his work over the last decade in the Theatre Studies Department at the Western Galilee Academic College bringing Arab and Jewish students into “the aes...

In this episode of All Power To The Developing, Host Desire Wandan sits down with Murray Dabby and Carrie Sackett, the authors of "Social Therapeutic Coaching: A Practical Guide to Group and Couples Work." Our conversation dives into the heart of their upcoming book, exploring the innovative approaches and transformative methods they use for group and couples coaching. Carrie Sackett, known for he...

In 2020 with the pandemic ravishing Brazil and the country’s president doing nothing to combat it, a group of progressive Brazilian educators, led by Dr. Fernanda Liberali, of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and an East Side Institute Associate, found a way to move forward through play.  Inspired by the Global Play Brigade, which was (and is) bringing play and performance out aroun...

On the 30th Anniversary of the Taos Institute, co-founder Kenneth Gergen shares the birth of social constructionism, its challenge to the assumptions of modernism, and the impact it has had both in and beyond the academy.  During this wide-ranging conversation with host Desire Wandan, Gergen discusses the practices, such as appreciative inquiry and narrative therapy, that social constructionism ha...

Francine Kilemann and Marcia Donadel are bringing their experience with site-specific, immersive theatre to elementary school education in Brazil.  Through Plato Cultural they lead students and teachers in creating fictional worlds in which the children become “SOS Agents” from the future tasked with helping to save the environment. The months-long performance is one in which nothing is taught in...

Nuyorican M.C., poet, and hip-hop educator Intikana shares his development as an artist, activist, and educator. He traces his journey through the economic poverty and cultural richness of the Bronx, the challenges of commercial co-optation, and bringing his revolutionary hip-hop educational techniques to young people in kindergartens, foster homes, and youth prisons.  In this wide-ranging convers...

The ASSIM (Like This) Institute in Florianopolis, Brazil is dedicated to bringing therapy free or at affordable rates to those who need it the most—the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.  Not only does ASSIM bring therapy to the people, it also provides poor people with free therapeutic training  that allows them to lead groups in their own communities.  ASSIM’s therapists and clients engag...

In this time of political, ecological and emotional crisis, Developing Across Borders has emerged as a Zoom-enabled support network for activists and others around the world.  This month "All Power to the Developing" would like to draw your attention to "Border Crossers Build Their Culture."   This episode is even more relevant now than when it was first released on January 15, 2021.   It features...

Darryl Heller, lifelong progressive political activist, shares his journey from grassroots organizing in Boston and New York to becoming a labor historian, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at  Indiana University, and director of the South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center.  “I don’t think we can realize our full humanity if we're not developing,” he tells host Desire Wandan.  “People’s" p...

Join host Desire Wandan in a conversation with Rivka Eckert—theatre maker, activist, and educator—about her creative work with homeless youth and police officers in Arizona and with prisoners, correctional officers, and community members in the prisons of upstate New York. Eckert, a professor in the Theatre and Dance Department at the State University of New York at Potsdam, believes that communit...

Steven Licardi spent most of his childhood and adolescence, in his words, “in-and-out of psych wards.”  He emerged from our oppressive and brutal “mental health” system with his flame of creativity burning brightly. He now shares that creativity with his clients as a social worker, social therapist and innovative poet and artist. In this fascinating, delightfully surprising and moving conversation...

Playworlds are a performatory approach to early childhood education that brings children and teachers together to create an imaginary world where they can all develop emotionally, cognitively, and socially.  Dr. Beth Ferholt of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is one of the world’s leading practitioners and theorists of the Playworld approach. Here she co...

This special episode, originally released by  Laugh Box , the podcast of the  Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor , brings humorists Katy Bee and Jim Bob Williams together with East Side Institute director  Dr. Lois Holzman to talk, joke, and giggle about the importance of humor, fun and happiness in human development.  Guaranteed to raise some serious questions and quite a few smiles. -...

Based in Mexico City, Lorena Elizondo is a free-lance consultant and feminist activist who works with corporations, NGOs and community groups, using play, improvisation and performance to explore conflict and structural barriers. “Play is efficient — it may not be fast — but through play, far more voices can be heard,” she says about the power of play to spark organizational change. "Playfulness i...

Ralph Casanova, aka King Up Rock—hip hop dance pioneer, international teacher, and a community organizer with deep roots in his neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn—shares his life, art, and love for his community with host Desire Wandan.  His father was a noted conga player, his mother an expert salsa dancer and Casanova was playing drums and piano at neighborhood parties by the age of five.  As he...

In 2022 the conflicted and shifting relationships between Taiwan, China, and the United States have gained worldwide attention.  Within that global frame, this intimate political conversation between East Side Institute co-founder and director Lois Holzman and Taiwanese social worker, activist, and political organizer Peiyu Kuo takes on a special significance.  As a young psychiatric social worker...

Founded in 1996, Performance of a Lifetime (POAL)  has pioneered bringing play and improvisation into corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies.  Working with clients as diverse as the Bank of America and the United States Olympic Committee, Jet Blue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, POAL has invited organizational leaders to develop by playing, philosophizing and supporting...

Meet East Side Institute Associate, Nicola Pauling, whose Wellington, New Zealand-based Voice Arts builds community through play and performance. Most recently, bringing performance workshops into nursing and retirement homes for the elderly, Voice Arts takes theatre games and exercises used by actors to prepare for the stage and adapts them — “seeking the outcome of joy, laughter, emotional and s...

Dementia, for most of us, is associated with stigma, fear and dehumanization.  What if, instead of approaching it as a dreaded medical disease that we had to fight, we collaborated with it and found ways to help those diagnosed—along with those around them—to continue to be creative and grow?  That’s exactly what John Killick has been doing for thirty years, bringing poetry and other creative arts...

Can music be developmental?  Probably not.  However, the creation of music—particularly when done in ensemble through improvisation—most certainly can.   Ursel Schlicht , an innovative music maker based in Kassel, Germany, shares her approaches to creating music across political and cultural borders. Her “Sonic Exchange” program is an international crucible of musical experimentation that for year...

Continue the exploration of “Let’s Talk About It,” the daily social therapeutic drop-in group led by Barbara Silverman at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, NYC between 1994 and 2009.  Join early participants in the program— Chris Allen, Marcus Barton, Patricia Bendidi, Fabiola Desmont, Kepriece Lindsay, and Desire Wandan, along with the program’s founder Barbara Silverman—as they recall how th...

What does social therapeutics look and feel like on-the-ground?  How does it develop throughout a person’s life? Join a group of young adults— Darnelle Cadet, Chauncey Espada, David Pierre-Louis, and Desire Wandan—all of whom grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn and participated in “Let’s Talk About It,” a daily social therapeutic drop-in group at Erasmus Hall High School led by the ESI’s Barbara Silverm...

Meet Spiritchild—creative rapper, innovative educator, radical organizer—as he shares his work with young people on our streets and in our prisons from the U.S. to Europe, from Africa to Southeast Asia.  Spirtchild describes himself as a “revolutionary freedom artist conducting the energy and frequency of the people.”  He works to foster creative environments in which music and art open up convers...

Meet ActionPlay, a bold and brave performing arts program empowering young people on the autism spectrum. Carrie Lobman talks to founder Aaron Feinstein and his creative collaborators, Jackson Tucker-Meyer and Edison Weinstein, about the wondrous ActionPlay zone where neurodiverse ensembles (mentored and cheered on by their friends, family and professional theatre and film supporters) sing, dance...

Meet Ben Fink and Tiffany Turner— virtuoso community organizers mining the rich heritage of communities from the coalfields of East Kentucky and the ash pits of Alabama, to the sidewalk stoops of Baltimore and Milwaukee — and helping working class Americans tell their stories of hard work, love and abandonment. Their Performing Our Future empowerment coalition (spearheaded by the famed Roadside Th...