All Power To The Developing!

Ep.67 “We Can Heal Only in Community...” featuring Hector Aristizabal

Hector Aristizabal—one of the pioneers of performance activism—was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, when it was the most dangerous city in the world, and his country was suffering through a bloody fifty-year civil war. Educated as both a psychologist and a theatre artist, as a young man, he was arrested and tortured by the military and later forced to flee into exile in the U.S., where he worked as a therapist, primarily with the marginalized and traumatized. In 2000, Aristizabal founded ImaginAction, an international network of artists and facilitators using performance and imagination as tools for social justice and community healing. It has worked with communities across the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
 
When the torture at Abu Ghraib, Iraq was exposed, he created Nightwinds, in which he reenacts his arrest and torture.  His performance then flows into a participatory workshop in which the audience, turned participants/performers, engage the traumas in their lives and communities. Aristizabal has brought Nightwinds to 50 countries, including many war zones from Afghanistan to Rwanda, Northern Ireland to Palestine, Ukraine to India. As he puts it, “We can heal only in community. We can’t heal on our own.” 
 
The civil war in Colombia ended in 2017 and after 28 years in exile, Aristizabal returned home to use performance to help ex-combatants on both sides of the war and their victims find “the medicine in the wound.”  He founded Re-conectando which creates healing rituals and brings participants deep into the forest—“the womb of Mother Nature,” as he puts it—to reconnect with life, human and other-than-human.  In this beautiful conversation with host Desire Wandan, Aristizabal shares his life story, focusing on his current work on social healing in Colombia.
www.reconectando.org
www.Dreamingaction.com
www.Imaginaction.org

EP.66 No Guacamole for Immigrant Haters

Performer, Playwright, Poet, Painter, and Photographer Jose Tama Torres began his passionate work as a political artist on the stage he built onto the back of his taco truck.  Born in Ecuador, raised in Washington Heights in New York City and based for decades in New Orléans, he currently tours the United States with his very funny, very angry and very powerful docu-performances pieces—Aliens, Immigrants and Other Evil Doers and United States of Amnesia: Dare to Remember—which are based on hundreds of interviews with “undocumented” immigrants living and working in the U.S.A. Join Tama-Torres as he takes host Desire Wandan (and all of us) on a righteous rant and militant meander through the mess we find ourselves in. To order one of his famous “No Guacamole for Immigrant Haters” tee-shirts, click here: https://torrestama.com/index.html

EP. 65 Do Identities Limit Us? Gender, Labels, and Freedom

In this conversation,  Aurelie Harp talks with Lois Holtzman, co-founder of the Eastside Institute, about how gender, race, and other identities can both liberate and constrain us.
They examine identity politics, feminism, and the limits of binary thinking, and discuss how performance, play, and relational practices can open possibilities for more inclusive, collective futures. If you would like to see this interview in video form, as well as the rest of Aurelie Harp and Womanity's work 
 
Womanity's YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@womanityproject6740
Womanity's Website: https://www.wemanitycoaching.com/

Ep.64 Sustainability: Building With the Community Not For It

Wycliffe Barsa is the co-founder and CEO of Kosi Africa, an ambassador for the Global Play Brigade, and a graduate of the East Side Institute’s flagship program, the International Class.  Here he shares his journey from living on the streets as a child to his work today promoting and transforming education in Kenya, and, in the process, developing young leaders as visionaries who will return to their communities to help them generate new possibilities. 
 
What makes Kosi different from most non-profits is, Barasa says, is sustainability. Instead of relying on outside money, when Kosi approaches a school, it does a Resource Audit, asking the school what sort of resources do you have and how can we work with you, the parents and the larger community, using those resources, to together solve these problems?  “We’re not there to help the community; we’re there to work with the community,” he explains.  Pointing out that in English “Kosi” means “Go” or “Keep Moving,” Barasa continues, “Development is how the whole community comes together to move and grow and create power.”
https://kosiafrica.org/

Ep.63 “Co-Dreaming Theatre: Anthony Moseley and Collaboraction”

“Live theatre is a way to co-dream,” says Anthony Moseley, Chief Programming Officer and Artistic Director of Chicago’s Collaboraction theatre.  “It can connect us at a really deep level that allows us to drop seeds of new emotions and new possibilities.”  Moseley joins host Desire Wandan to discuss his artistic and political journey and the role that the multi-racial, multi-cultural theatre that he leads plays in not only bringing theatre to, but creating theatre with, the poor communities of Chicago.
 
Collaboraction, under Moseley's leadership, has devised hundreds of plays with young people and adults from Chicago’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, plays that have been performed in parks and community centers across the city and cheered on by tens of thousands of audience members.  Most of its performances are followed by a “crucial conversation” where the audience members engage with the issues raised by the play.  Since the pandemic, Collaboraction has produced 150 digital pieces and the film adaptation of its play, Trail in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award.  Collaboraction is about to open its new cultural center “The House of Belonging” in Chicago’s Humbolt Park neighborhood.
“The company itself is a collaboration,” says Moseley, “a never-ending devised piece of theatre.”

Ep.62 Turning Spaces of Trauma into Spaces of Power

Kathleen J. Guillaume-Delemar, President and CEO of the Center for Community Progress shares the work of the Center in helping communities across the country transform vacant lots and abandoned buildings into community parks, food co-ops, dignified affordable housing, and other vibrant examples of mutual aid and grassroots community power.  Guillaume-Delemar, a first-generation Haitian-American who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, during the crack epidemic, when vacant lots in her neighborhood were gathering places of desperation and despair.  Describing herself as a “compassionate revolutionary” and an “unapologetic thorn in the side of society,” she is now leading efforts from Flint, Michigan, to Lafayette, Louisiana, to transform urban ruins into centers of community power and hope.
Kathleen's  upcoming event is the National Land Bank Network Summit on September 8-9 in Detroit. Please click the link for more information. https://communityprogress.org/nlbn-summit-2025/
sign up for newsletter! https://communityprogress.org/newsletter-signup/
 

Ep. 61 Myth Breaking, Bridge Building: The Art of Akim Funk Buddha

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, host Desire Wandan sits down with genre-defying performance artist Akim Funk Buddha for an exploration of creativity, culture, and transformation. From beatboxing and Mongolian throat singing to reimagining the Japanese tea ceremony, Akim shares how he uses art as a bridge across traditions, identities, and generations. This is a conversation about movement, myth-breaking, and the liberating power of performance.
https://www.funkbuddha.net/

Ep.60 Bringing Magic to the Forgotten Places of the World

Magicians Without Borders has brought free magic shows to 40 countries and approximately a million people, and it provides free three-to-four-year education programs in magic to thousands of young people in “the forgotten places of the world.”  Carlos Lopez, a leader of Magicians Without Borders, unpacks the developmental power of magic when it is taught to young people in impoverished communities. “If your situation seems impossible,” he says. “If you see and experience wonder, it might awaken hope that the impossible can become possible.” Chatting with host Desire Wandan, Lopez shares his journey from a privileged life in Bogota, Colombia, to teaching magic in slums and refugee camps worldwide. In the process, he has, in his words, helped to create “social tissue that is weaving lives together that were not supposed to be intertwined.”
Website: https://www.magicianswithoutborders.com/ https://www.carloslopez.co/
Instagram: @carloshlopez @magicianswithoutborders

Ep.59 What Are We Making Together?

Host Desire Wandan talks with Abbie VanMeter, Executive Director of Collaborative Innovation for the Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute, and Don Waisanen, Professor at Baruch College, CUNY Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Their conversation focuses on Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)—a communication theory and a lived practice—which approaches human communication as how we together create meaning.  “CMM and social therapeutics have a shared understanding of human beings as builders of the social world,” says VanMeter. This conversation provides a concise and clear introduction to this important social constructionist approach to interpersonal communication, and its potential impact on our weary and wounded world stuck in age-old communication traps.
Everything CMMi: https://linktr.ee/cmminstitute
Everything SLST: https://linktr.ee/storieslivedstoriestoldpodcast
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigail-vanmeter/
Direct to Podcast: https://cmminstitute.substack.com/s/podcast OR https://www.storieslivedstoriestold.com/podcast
Newsletter sign up: https://don-waisanen.kit.com/ 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/donwaisanen/
@DonWaisanen (on both Instagram and X)
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/donwaisanen.bsky.social 

Ep.58 Let’s Learn: A Free International Learning-Teaching Community

Dr. Omar H. Ali, the Dean of Lloyd International Honors College, Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and a Research Associate in the Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro sits down with host Desire Wandan to discuss the importance of play, performance and improvisation to teaching and learning. They focus on the innovative online global educational community Let’s Learn!, a joint project of Lloyd Honors College and the East Side Institute. Dr. Ali also shares his personal journey from a community organizer to world renowned historian and college dean—remaining a play revolutionary throughout.