Independent political blogger Nancy Hanks of The Hankster and NYC Independence Party chief organizer Cathy Stewart will host a New York City breakfast of coffee, bagels and political conversation – and a preview of raw video footage of Performing the World attendees answering the question: What does democracy mean to you? …in your life, in your city, your country, in the world? Video will be used in a new documentary “Performers of the World, Unite!” (working title.)
The workshop is called
Blogging and Slogging:
Performing Grassroots Democracy
in America and Around the World
(Performers of the World, Unite!)
If you are attending the conference, please join us!
WHAT IS PERFORMING THE WORLD?
This description from Broadway World: September 30th through October 3rd, 350 artists, activists, young people, educators, scholars, practitioners and business people from 31 countries, all who use performance in their work as a new way of relating to, transforming and understanding the world, will gather at the All Stars Project headquarters at 543 West 42nd Street for the Performing the World Conference; Can Performance Change the World? The All Stars Project and the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy are co-sponsors of the conference.
One hundred presentations over the three-day conference will showcase work being done with performance in the fields of health, wellness, education, mental health and theatre.
Plenary session panelists include: Patch Adams, Founder and Director, Gesundhiet Institute; Andrew Burton, Founder and Artistic Director, Street Spirits, British Columbia; Lois Holzman, Co-Founder and Director, East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy; Woodie King, Jr., Founder and Producing Director, New Federal Theatre; Fernanda Liberali, Catholic University of Sao Paulo and SIAC – Simposio Acao Cidad; and Judith Malina, Co-Founder and Artistic Director, The Living Theatre and moderater Dan Friedman, artistic director of the Castillo Theatre. A second plenary session on “The Performance of Blackness” will be facilitated by Dr. Lenora Fulani, co-founder, All Stars Project.
Workshop leaders include Huizhu Sun, President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy; Eva Brenner, artistic director of Projekt Theater Studio in Vienna, Austria; Dan Baron Cohen, an advisor to the Secretary of Cultural Citzenship in the Brazilian Ministry of Culture; Miguel Cortez, director of the Fred Newman Social Therapy Center in Juarez, Mexico; Jim Mangia, president and CEO of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Los Angeles, CA; and Shahid Nadeen, Pakistan’s leading playwright and director and founder and playwright in residence for Ajoka Theatre.
Letters of welcome for Performing the World have been received from New York Governor David Patterson; Osmar V. Chohfi, Consul General of Brazil in New York; Daniel Sullivan, Consul General of Canada; Philippe Lalliot, Consul General of France; Felix Augustin, Consul General of the Republic of Haiti; and Asaf Shariv, Consul General of Israel.
Provocateur/ pundit/ organizer Nancy Hanks is a long-time activist in the independent political movement who’s done it all: petitioning to put independent candidates on the ballot from New York to Texas and points east, west, north and south; fundraising for the independent think tank, the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), and its online counterpart, IndependentVoting.org; running as an independent for New York City Council from Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough; serving as the current Treasurer of the Queens County Committee of the Independence Party of New York (of the IP NYC Organizations); conducting research for the Neo-Independent, a magazine that addresses the concerns of independent voters.