All Power To The Developing!

Ep.49 Through Play You Find the Kid in You

La Transplanisphère, based in Paris, France, has been doing cutting-edge political theatre for two decades bringing artists, students, and “ordinary people” together to explore the political and cultural challenges facing Europe as it becomes more diverse.  In residence, since 2018, at the Lycée Albert Schweitzer in Le Raincy, a working-class suburb of Paris, La Transplanisphére has, among many other things, developed methods for teachers who want to use play and performance to explore political issues and the challenges of cross-cultural dialogue with their students. In this episode, Bruno Freyssinet, founder and artistic director of La Transplanisphère, shares the theatre’s history and discusses how, “through play you find the kid in you, you find the openness, the lightness which has the power to totally change your relationship with the ‘Other.’” This episode is hosted by Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman.
https://latransplanisphere.com/https://www.instagram.com/latransplanisphere/https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruno-freyssinet-55200062/

Ep.48 Reviled, Mocked, Ignored

Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman co-host this episode with guest Ramsey Kanaan, publisher of PM Press, the most impactful publisher and distributor of anarchist, Marxist, and radical literature in the United States. The conversation touches on the history of anarchism (“reviled, mocked, ignored”) Kanaan’s own embrace of radical politics at the age of 13, his years touring Europe with the punk band, Political Asylum, his founding of AK Press in the UK and PM Press in the USA, the general crisis in publishing, and how PM has been able to survive and thrive in a hostile political and economic environment. “It is important,” Kanaan emphasizes, “to build structures and institutions to control the means of production and distribution of our ideas.”
www.pmpress.org
https://www.tiktok.com/@pmpress
https://twitter.com/PMPressOrg
https://www.instagram.com/pmpress
https://www.facebook.com/pm.press/
https://www.youtube.com/user/PMPress

Ep.47 Dancing Toward Better Futures for the Planet

Dr. Jame McCray, grew up in Brooklyn, “hanging out with the ants and caterpillars on my block.”  Today she is the Managing Director of the Alliance for Watershed Education at the National Wildlife Federation, a member of the Board of Directors of Black Marine Science, and the founder and leader of Ecotonic Movement, an organization that facilitates conversation about climate change with people from all walks of life through dance and movement. Join her in discussion with host Desire Wandan about the possibilities that open when science and the arts meet.   “Tree branches and leaves dance in the wind. Water trickles across the rocks, the rhythm of the waves of the ocean, all of that is movement,” she points out, “and dance can help us to envision better
 https://www.ecotonicmovement.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jame-mccray/

Ep.46 “Land for People, Not for Profit” How Unhoused People in Cape Town Turned an Abandoned Hospital into a Community

Cissie Gool House was an abandoned hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, empty and decaying for 40 years, when homeless activists snuck past security on the night of March 27, 2017, and began an occupation that, seven years later, has transformed it into a vibrant self-governing community of 1,000 formerly homeless, evicted, and displaced people. Two leaders of Cissie Gool House, Karen Hendricks and Fagmeedah Ling, join host Desire Wandan to discuss how the residents themselves renovated the building, set up working committees to deal with elder, youth, maintenance and security issues, and expanded their occupation into a movement that now convenes “Peoples’ Assemblies” to teach others about tenants’ rights, fights evictions, monitors the housing courts, and agitates for enforcement of South Africa’s constitution, which declares that, “everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.”
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4iG4wYQeu0&t=12s
This 6-minute clip explains the occupation and features Karen
 
This is the website link to Reclaim The City: https://reclaimthecity.org.za/
 
An NPR article about the three occupations part of Reclaim the City.
https://news.wjct.org/2022-12-24/inside-south-africas-hijacked-buildings-all-we-want-is-a-place-to-call-home
 

Ep.45 Homeless World Cup

The Homeless World Cup, founded in 2003, today brings unhoused people together in 70 countries to connect through the universal language of football, each year culminating in a World Cup tournament in a different city.  Founder and leader Mel Young, and formerly homeless player turned referee Sarah Frohwein talk with host Desire Wanden about why and how the Homeless World Cup was born, spread across the planet, and is bringing dignity and community to those without a home. “How on earth have we created a system that leaves millions of people living on the streets?” asks Young. “It’s crazy.  We don’t have to have it.  We sent men to the moon, we invented the internet, and we can fix it.  The aim of the Homeless World Cup is not to exist because there will be no homelessness.”
 www.homelessworldcup.org

Ep.44 Performing Peace in the Wake of War

In this episode, Peter Harris, one of Israel’s major innovators of community-based theatre, shares the experiences and insights of fifty years of creating performances with marginalized communities.  With the war raging in Gaza, he also talks about his work over the last decade in the Theatre Studies Department at the Western Galilee Academic College bringing Arab and Jewish students into “the aesthetic space where memory and imagination can come together,” and painful but developmental dialogue becomes possible through performance. 
 
https://www.facebook.com/peter.harris.94849410
 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG8pl5_zhxyg_hTVzqVM4Kg

Ep.43 Revolutionizing Relationships: Murray Dabby & Carrie Sackett on Social Therapeutic Coaching

In this episode of All Power To The Developing, Host Desire Wandan sits down with Murray Dabby and Carrie Sackett, the authors of "Social Therapeutic Coaching: A Practical Guide to Group and Couples Work." Our conversation dives into the heart of their upcoming book, exploring the innovative approaches and transformative methods they use for group and couples coaching. Carrie Sackett, known for her expertise in coaching dynamics and group facilitation, elaborates on the practical applications of their methods in everyday scenarios. Murray Dabby, with his extensive experience in counseling and group therapy, shares his insights on how social therapeutic coaching can bridge the gap between traditional therapy and modern coaching techniques.
http://www.atlantasocialtherapy.com/murray-dabby.html
https://www.zpdcoaching.com/

Ep.42 Building Play Ensembles to Change the World

In 2020 with the pandemic ravishing Brazil and the country’s president doing nothing to combat it, a group of progressive Brazilian educators, led by Dr. Fernanda Liberali, of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and an East Side Institute Associate, found a way to move forward through play.  Inspired by the Global Play Brigade, which was (and is) bringing play and performance out around the world through Zoom, they organized the Brincadas, which have taken play into the schools and streets of São Paulo.  In this episode, a group of Brincadas share how play gave them a way to breathe during a suffocating moment and to go beyond traditional education to, “play with serious injustice. We’re not teaching, we’re building ensembles for social change and play is the means for building the ensemble."
This episode features the voices of Bianca Sgai, Franco Medeiros, Barbara ManjaDaniela B. Pioli Pellossi, Fernanda Liberali,Joyce Dias,Luciana Kool Modesto-SarraMarina Daniela Tiso,Thiago Lázaro,Sandra Borges Viviane Carrijo.
https://www.instagram.com/projeto.brincadas/
 
https://www.youtube.com/c/ProjetoBrincadas

Ep.41 Co-Creating Our World

On the 30th Anniversary of the Taos Institute, co-founder Kenneth Gergen shares the birth of social constructionism, its challenge to the assumptions of modernism, and the impact it has had both in and beyond the academy.  During this wide-ranging conversation with host Desire Wandan, Gergen discusses the practices, such as appreciative inquiry and narrative therapy, that social constructionism has helped to inspire, along with its decades-long interface and mutual influence with social therapeutics.  In this time of intense mistrust and partisanship, he looks to relationality as a way forward, pointing out, “We don’t have to agree on everything in order to create a wonderful world together.”
https://www.taosinstitute.net/

Ep.40 Performing Environmental Education

Francine Kilemann and Marcia Donadel are bringing their experience with site-specific, immersive theatre to elementary school education in Brazil.  Through Plato Cultural they lead students and teachers in creating fictional worlds in which the children become “SOS Agents” from the future tasked with helping to save the environment. The months-long performance is one in which nothing is taught in the traditional sense of the word.  Instead, the students learn through the experience of performing.  “Once we enter this fictional world,” says Kilemann, “we can ask ‘What if?’ and a range of possibilities emerge that we wouldn’t have if we had limited ourselves to the ‘facts.’”  Hosted by Desire Wandan.