Call for Proposals

To submit your proposal, click here.

 PERFORMING THE WORLD 2014

October 10-12, 2014 | New York City

Announcement and Call For Proposals

How Shall We Become?

The eighth Performing the World (PTW) conference will be held in New York City, October 10-12, 2014. As the performance movement grows worldwide — both within and across geographical, cultural and professional borders — PTW aims to make the most of the creative potential of this growing diversity. International, cross disciplinary, conversational, experiential, and practical-critical, PTW 2014 will provide an opportunity for practitioners, scholars and activists to share and showcase their work in order to create something new together. If you practice and/or study performance as a means of individual, community and world transformation (or want to), then PTW 2014 is for you.

Our theme for 2014, “How Shall We Become?”, is on the one hand reminiscent of the American civil rights movement anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” A beautiful and powerful musical statement of resistance and determination to stay strong in the face of opposition to change, the song not only inspired activists in the U.S., but was embraced and adopted by social movements around the world.

“How Shall We Become?” also responds to the historical moment we live in. With revolution and counterrevolution raging in the Middle East, seemingly endless war laying waste to much of central Africa, economic collapse and stagnation in southern Europe, paralyzing political polarization in the U.S., increasing poverty combined with growing disparities in opportunity everywhere, and millions of people moving around the globe seeking a better life, “How are we becoming?” has become the cutting-edge question.

“How Shall We Become?” looks forward to the attitude and practice of performance — if we are to overcome, we must become. What and how we become is, of course, unknowable. But it is performable.

The shaping of “what” we become — in the arenas of culture, politics, economics, education, medicine, interpersonal relations, and daily life-as-lived — lies in the “how.” How we have always done it, including how we’ve done revolutionary change, is clearly not working. That is where the creative power of performance becomes evident, in the ongoing creation of new ways of relating, new ways of learning, new ways of seeing and feeling, new kinds of institutions — new possibilities of all sorts.

Performance around the world has been brought into daily life by performers of all occupations, who have stepped onto the stage in theatres and village squares, urban streets and dirt roads, classrooms and community centers, doctors’ offices, science labs, therapy rooms and board rooms. And people are discovering, through performance, how “we shall become” — as they create it.

Performing the World 2014 welcomes proposals that relate to this theme from a variety of perspectives, practices, disciplines and settings. The form for submitting a proposal can be found here. Proposals are due February 15, 2014.

Conference Fees

before June 30, 2014:    $225 (US)

after July 1, 2014:          $295 (US)

Conveners:

All Stars Project, Inc.

Gabrielle L. Kurlander, President & CEO