All Power To The Developing!

All Stars Project CEO Gabrielle L. Kurlander and Dallas City Leader Antoine Joyce join Lois Holzman for a wide-ranging conversation about the All Stars’ latest bridge-building initiative, Operation Conversation—how it came into being; how it works to help adults from different backgrounds, cultures and belief systems perform conversation, discover each other, and explore the constraints of identit...

Mauricio T. Salgado  (Artists Striving to End Poverty & New York University professor of Arts and Applied Theatre — has shaped a myriad of powerful social justice initiatives. In this intimate conversation with Castillo Theatre Artistic Director (Emeritus) Dan Friedman, Salgado, born in the US to proudly subversive Colombians and raised in the migrant camps of South Florida, recounts how dance, st...

John Opdycke, democracy activist and president of Open Primaries, talks to ESI faculty Jan Wootten about how he sees the dawning of a new day in American politics: millions are on the move, demanding a meaningful role in shaping policy and institutions. "Yeah, it's also a mess. The professional political class won't lead; the American dream of progress is dying. But our people are fighters. They'r...

What if young people ruled the world? What would that world look like? Applied Theatre educator and ESI Associate Alex Sutherland talks to Dan Friedman about a performatory, whole-body, arts-based approach she and colleagues have developed at the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education in Cape Town that helps young social activists find their social and political voice.  http://www.tshisimani.org...

Can improv make it harder to hate?...make it easier to be (and create) with others in all our diversity? Communications professor and improv aficionado  Don Waisanen  -- author of  Improv for Democracy  -- talks (and has some fun) with fellow performance activist Marian Rich, to show how improv can help us find our voice, unlock the politics of gridlock, and make us better citizens of the world. h...

Robyn Stratton-Berkessel works with groups large and small — non-profit and corporate — to grow supportive, relationships and build with all that's working well. In this lively chat with Performance of a Lifetime’s Maureen Kelly, Robyn introduces an Appreciative Inquiry approach to helping groups "grow their positivity,” as producers of all that “we want to see in the world."   https://positivitys...

Raquell Holmes is a Harvard-trained cell biologist, computational scientist and social activist. Founder of ImprovScience  and  Cultivating Ensembles  in STEM Education, Raquell is recognized for her organizing prowess in bringing improvisation, performance and social therapeutics to fellow scientists and educators. In this intimate conversation with Dan Friedman, she recounts her innovative appro...

There is a remarkable development project for young people happening in Africa’s most populous nation. Rita Ezenwa-Okoro the Founder and Chief Visionary of Street Project Foundation in Nigeria, shares her work of building environments where young people can use the creative arts to foster their own development—and that of their nation and world.  As Rita Ezenwa-Okoro often tells the youth she work...

What if young people weren’t required to go to school? What if we could invent other ways for them to learn and grow that worked just as well, or better? Meet Ken Danford, former middle school teacher, who in 1996, frustrated by the coerciveness of traditional classroom environments, founded the North Star in Sunderland, Massachusetts. There he invited teenagers to self-direct their learning exper...

Dr. Jennifer Carson, Director, Dementia Engagement, School of Community Health, Univ. of Nevada, Reno; Eileen Moncoeur, Exec. Director,  Sabal Foundation , and social therapist; and Claire Molyneux, senior lecturer in Music Therapy, Anglia Ruskin Univ., UK, are on the front lines of reimagining dementia. Rejecting the biomedical “tragedy narrative,” they have embraced a playful, performatory, soci...

When the pandemic hit and tens of millions were forced into lock-down, improvisers, clowns and performance activists of all stripes stepped up to address the crisis. They organized the Global Play Brigade to bring (therapeutic) play, via Zoom and WhatsApp, into communities around the world. The Brigade now involves 160 performance activists from 50 countries — and still counting! This intimate con...

Institute co-founder and director Lois Holzman reads her talk, 'The Performance Movement: The Obvious and Outrageous Way Out of the Epistemological Fly Bottle' — presented to the "Alive in the Anthropocene” virtual conference in January 2021. Curious about the fly bottle? Listen and find out what it means! ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. T...

Gloria Strickland, S.V.P. and Chief Youth and Community Development Officer of the All Stars Project, Inc., shares her decades of work helping young people from poor communities of color exercise their creative muscles in all kinds of life situations to generate their own development and exercise power—and how the All Stars kept it going during the pandemic.  Hosted by Carrie Lobman.  https://www....

Makiko “Mako” Kishi — educator, professor, international aid worker and performance activist -- has worked in Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Cambodia, Vietnam, Australia, Central America and her native Japan with refugee communities and special-needs students to build stages for development. Mako shares her passion for creating learning environments in which everyone -- even the most “needy” — are r...

There’s a growing movement afoot in higher education, shaking the canons of traditional pedagogy. Meet play revolutionaries Carrie Lobman, associate professor, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers Univ., and ESI’s Leader of Education and Research, and Tony Perone, asst. training professor of educational psychology at the Univ. of Washington, Tacoma, who share their pioneering efforts to bring dev...

Long-time community organizers and performance activists, Allen Cox, Thecla Farrell and Sheryl Williams, share how performing with New York City’s Castillo Theatre — on-stage and off — impacted their activism and development. Hosted by Jessie Fields, MD.   ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts...

Ishita Sanyal, the founder of Turning Point, in Kolkata, India discusses her work with people shunned and outcast because of their mental illness, work which demonstrates that psychosis need not mean the end of development.  Hosted by Dr. Lois Holzman. www.turningpoint.org.in https://www.facebook.com/isanyal ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute....

Chantelle Burley and Brian Mullin, co-founders of the All Stars London, share their work with young people from London's poorest boroughs, encouraging them to perform their way to new possibilities they never imagined possible.  Hosted by Dr. Carrie Lobman. http://www.allstarslondon.org/ ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a c...

Five participants with Developing Across Borders—Lea Cikos, Mariamalia Cob, Juan David Garzon, Steven Hart, and Morgane Masterman—hailing from five different countries, share how their Zoom-enabled weekly social therapeutic conversations help sustain their activism and develop their social and emotional skills. Hosted by Dr. Lois Holzman. https://eastsideinstitute.org/developing-across-borders/ --...

Murray Dabby, founder of the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy and co-founder of both The Couples College and Curtain Up, Anxiety Down, discusses his forty years of bringing play and improvisation to emotional growth and development.  Hosted by Janet Wootten. http://www.atlantasocialtherapy.com www.curtainupanxietydown.com ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East...