1. Performance and development
Esther Farmer (New York - USA)
Comunicação apresentada no Simpósio
Internacional Brasil | EUA | Canadá Teatro e
Transformação Social: Possibilidades do uso
da performance como estratégia de
intervenção na comunidade, na Universidade
Estadual de Maringá, em 9 de março de
2012.
Good morning everyone! We are so thrilled and honored to be here in this
incredibly beautiful country creating this conversation with you. There are many
different disciplines in this room, psychologists, community developers, social workers,
urban planners, theater artists, performing artists, community organizers, educators and
Iʼm sure others. That is so exciting because what binds us together is a concern for, a
passion for social change and human development. And sometimes we need to be
reminded that the world as we live in it is not divided by subject and category. We invent
these categories to make it easier to study the world, or so we think, but the world itself
is not divided in this way. We all belong together and itʼs wonderful to have so many
diverse folks with us today.
What I love about Performance is that it is a gift that never stops giving.
There is an infinity of ways to use it developmentally. From the Boal inspired Forum
Theater to community engaged theater, to dance, art and music therapy, to Occupy Wall
Street peopleʼs microphone, to performance in every day life, performance is just an
amazing gift to the human capacity and desire to transform everything!
I want to talk a little about development and performance and their
relationship. First this word development. Development is such a tricky word. All the new
hotels put up at the beautiful beaches of Rio; that is now called “development”. Some
people donʼt think that kind of development is very developmental. In many places the
word development has become a dirty word, and in some of our work with community
and theater, we have created theater to stop this kind of “development.” Dale will talk
more about this. So what do I mean by development? Well for us development is our
human capacity to grow, to change, to create. In every way: intellectually, emotionally,
physically, psychologically, as community organizers, as artists, as scientists. What
binds us together is that all of us in this room want to see people move forward to where
they want to go (and maybe to places they donʼt even think are possible to go).The work
we do starts from the premise that human beings are essentially creators and as such
we can create new thoughts, new kinds of community, new intellectual capacities, new
physical capacities, new theatre, new performances, new relationships, new emotions.
I was trained at the East Side Institute in social therapeutics, a therapeutic
approach that uses performance as a way to help people create their lives including

2. their mental health. The question for social therapists is, if we want to change the world,
or a family or a neighborhood or a relationship, people need to develop. So how do we
create environments in which it is possible for people to develop?
Now we come to performance. What does development have to do with
theater and performance? What is developmental about performance?
The famous Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said that children learn by
performing a head taller than themselves. A fascinating statement and one that changes
how we understand learning. Vygotsky said that children learn to speak for example by
babbling, (they perform as speakers) before they know what speaking is. And their
parents and care-givers create the environment with babies where they can babble;
toddlers act like speakers until they learn to actually speak! A wonderful example of
creating an environment in which children can develop. Now Vygotsky did not really talk
about performance other than this statement. Newman and Holzman added
performance. They built on Vygotskyʼs “head taller” statement and they said that all
human beings develop throughout life, by performing what we donʼt know how to do until
we learn how to do it! But we can not do this in any old environment, we have to create
environments in which it is possible to do this. One of the reasons that Performance is a
wonderful tool to create these environments is because performance is playful, it is not
so tied to the tyranny of knowledge. One of the beautiful aspects of performance is that
when we perform together we are not only ourselves, we are ourselves performing
someone or something else. Performance does not require the cognitive bias so
prevalent in Western culture. We donʼt have to know everything. The best “knowers” are
not necessarily the best performers. The “knowers” who are usually the ones to shine,
are not the ones that shine in performance. Performance is a great social equalizer.
When you create a theater ensemble, or a play, or a collective poem that kind of
creativity requires some babbling, you have to take risks when you want to be creative,
you canʼt be so afraid to make a mistake that you wonʼt try something new. How can you
discover anything without risk? An environment that allows people to take the risk to
perform differently than they normally do, that has wonderful potential for development.
And the wonderful thing is, we perform all the time. We think about
performance as if it only happens on the stage, but in fact, none of us “acts” the same
way in every situation. We perform differently with our family than with our friends, we
donʼt say the same things to our teacher that we say to our children, we talk to our
neighbors differently than we talk to strangers. We perform constantly but we donʼt
realize it. And we can choose to perform. Imagine the possibilities if we think about
performance as a choice. Here is an example: Two young people are ready to fight over
a perceived insult. It happens in poor communities all the time in NY. In a mental health
program that practices this method the social worker asks the group what are other
performances the two young people can do? They try them out, they think itʼs weird and
they learn that they donʼt have to go with their first instinct, they can perform something

3. else. Another example: All the kids want to perform on the stage. And so at another
project in New York called the Allstars Project that practices this method we say to
young people if you can perform on the stage, you can perform in your life. I can say
something mean to my partner or my friend and then two seconds later I can say, let me
do that over. No matter what our problem is as people, whether it be disease, or
pathology or terrible conditions, we can perform something different.
Dale and I do a combination of community engaged theater and performance
in every day life. Let me give you an example of how conceptualizing community
development as performance can transform the environment. I managed several
housing projects in NY in poor neighborhoods. These communities had populations of
about 5000 people. In one project, there was a lot of violence due to competition of rival
gangs over drugs. I saw my job as kind of a theater director asking the question, what is
the environment we need to create so that the community can do something new? That
is the work of community development. Putting people together in new ways to have
new kinds of conversations. Cypress Hills (the name of the housing project) needed a
new script, a new performance. Looking at it this way, allowed me to see things I could
not see as a manager. As a manager Iʼm thinking of collecting the rent. If Iʼm thinking
about creating new community performances, Iʼm thinking of bringing people together
who would not normally be together, to see what we could create. This is a very
complex story that took about 2 years so please forgive me, that in the interest of time
Iʼm going to obviously oversimplify it.
There were many deaths in this community due to the drug trade. There were
young people going in and out of prison all the time. I encouraged the tenant leader
whose son was one of those killed, to talk to the kids coming out of prison. What did
they think of all the deaths? Turns out they hated it. This was not a conversation ever
had before in this community. These were the “bad guys”. The tenant leader asked them
what they wanted to do about it. They said they would talk to some people and get back
to her. This was a very new performance for the community. Including people that were
never included before. Ultimately this resulted in a truce between the gangs that the
adult tenant leaders brokered with the youth gangs that lasted several years and
reduced crime very significantly. The newspapers reported a 100% drop in the murder
rate as well as a 56% reduction in all other crimes. We were able to build on the end of
the violence to create all kinds of new programs including a volunteer program of police
fixing kids bikes for races against drugs. The first bike race we organized, the police
stayed till midnight to fix every kids bike, parts donated from a bike company we
organized. The line of kids waiting was 10 blocks long. Some kids had two wheels and
the cops made them a bike. This was the first time there was any positive interaction
between the police and young people. Everyone was moved. It was a new script. It
changed the environment in significant ways. The community developed.
In this example we did not create a play. But the creation of art, of theater
requires a new way of seeing and in this case, the seeing community development as

4. performance changed everything. It was significant because this was a very traditional
semi-government institution and as you all know, when you work for a government
bureaucracy it is not easy to be creative. I was lucky enough to retire early from this
agency so now I get to do what I love without all the constraints.
Another example: I work for a group called Plays for Living. We perform plays
on hot topics, such as bullying, diversity, homophobia, growing older, domestic violence
and so on and then we have conversations about the performances. Last year we
worked with 25 senior centers and they created and put on plays about their community.
In one center, which was mostly Asian and African American, the two groups went to the
same center every day but they did not interact. In the process of creating a play about
traffic safety in their neighborhood which included the history of jazz in the community,
the relationship between the two groups transformed. The Asian seniors could barely
speak English but they struggled to learn the lines in the play and sing the songs to pay
homage to the African American jazz artists who lived in that neighborhood. This was
surprising to the African American seniors. And so their relationship grew. They did not
talk about their issues with each other, they had no encounter about the tensions
between them, they created something together that changed their relationship. In this
work with seniors we had several issues with seniors remembering their lines. Some of
them had Alzeimers. It was interesting that when we dropped the line and allowed them
to do a gesture they did not forget that. Again the non reliance on cognition.
Thank you so much. There are so many examples of performance and
development and we are so lucky to be here to learn from each other.
If time and there are many psychologists:
If we look at mental health from the perspective of human development, we
are less concerned with the fixing of disease and more concerned with helping people
grow emotionally. That is certainly in line with the new welcome positive psychology
approaches however, most people in the US particularly poor people, have only had
exposure to the deficit and/or medical model of mental health, which emphasizes the
diagnosis and treatment of pathology. In this model, people with mental health issues
are dependent, sick and in need of “fixing.” For many years social work in the US has
been undergoing a paradigm shift from deficit/ pathology to positive, asset-based
principles, but it is a long, slow process, and most practitioners in the US still operate
out of the deficit model.
In my opinion Psychology in the US has been fixated on the diagnosis of
pathology. One extreme example has been the overuse of the diagnosis ADHD. It is
only a little exaggeration to say that almost every child who canʼt sit still has been given
this diagnosis accompanied by the drug Ritalin (which is “speed”). The overuse of this
drug has become so outrageous that even the person who came up with the diagnosis
has complained about itʼs overuse. This is one extreme example but it contributes to the
lack of trust that many people have with psychology. Psychology in the US has a
credibility problem. The issue is not medication or not, sometimes medication is

5. necessary and can be helpful. The issue is whatʼs developmental for the patient? There
are millions of people on psychotropic drugs including millions on Ritalin and there is no
conversation about getting them off. Are drugs used to maintain the person or is there a
place to go thatʼs growthful? The DSM (diagnostic manual) that is used in the US lays
out a finite number of emotions, all the emotions that supposedly exist. There are the
good ones and the bad ones, and the “sick ones” that are used to get insurance
reimbursement but there is nothing that is becoming, that is emerging. Is it possible to
have different emotions or to create emotions that are not listed in the DSM? I think so.