Lois Holzman

To Appear in a Special Issue of Educational and Child Psychology, 2000

Abstract. Performative psychology is a relatively new approach that presents exciting
possibilities for educational innovation. Based in the belief that we collectively create
our lives through performing (simultaneously being who we are and who we are
becoming), performative psychology looks at learning and development through a
cultural lens. The fact that the human capacity to perform is vastly under-utilized, under-
valued and understudied in our culture suggests this as a fruitful area for further study
and the development of creative practices. This article presents a brief overview of key
educational and developmental concepts, including a contemporary reworking of the
method of Russian psychology Lev Vygotsky. Next, the practice of one approach within
the performative psychology movement is presented -- the performance social therapeutic
approach developed by Newman and Holzman at the East Side Institute for Short Term
Psychotherapy is illustrated through discussion of four programs carried out in
educational settings.

Introduction

From its earliest days as a discipline, psychology has taken behavior to be its subject
matter (Danziger, 1990, 1997). It’s not only psychologists and educators who have been
socialized by psychology to see behavior, but the general public (ordinary folks) as well.
We are all very good at seeing behavior; when we look at ourselves and other people,
that’s pretty much what we see. Is there a problem with that (you might be wondering
right now)? Are we missing something? Is there something else to see and respond to?
Do people do things other than behave? If so, what?

The answer, according to increasing numbers of psychologists who are
questioning the current accepted subject matter of psychology, is yes. Many of them seek
a new unit of study for understanding human life — one that is socially-culturally based
and holistic in a way that behavior isn’t. Among the many problems with behavior, for
these psychologists, is that it is premised on a conception of the human being as a self-
contained individual who exhibits particular behaviors, some of them “hard-wired” and
some of them in response to the social-cultural environment. This conception of human
beings, according to its critics, distorts who people are and what people do in a
fundamental sense: we aren’t isolated individuals separate from each other; we’re not
even separate from our environment! While we surely can be (and are, in Western
cultures) distinguished from environment, this does not mean we are separate from it.
Instead of two separate entities, these psychologists posit, there is but one, the unity
“persons-environment.” In this unity, the relationship between persons and environment
is complex and dialectical: environment “determines” us and yet we can change it
completely (changing ourselves in the process, since the “it”—the unity “persons-environment”— includes us, the changers). People are social-cultural creators and
changers, first and foremost. From this vantage point, the problem with psychology
looks like this: if psychology is the study of behavior, then what we study when we study
behavior is not human life as lived, but a distortion of it.1

Among the candidates for the subject matter of a new psychology is activity.
Although today numerous names are associated with “activity theory,” many in the fields
of education and developmental psychology are indebted to the Russian psychologist Lev
Vygotsky for how he challenged psychologists and educators of his day (the 1920s and
30s) to create a new psychology of activity (1978, 1987, 1993, 1997a, 1997b). Vygotsky
saw human growth as a cultural activity that people engage in together, rather than as the
external manifestation of an individualized, internal process. For Vygotsky, development
does not happen to us — from the inside, from the outside, or from any combination of
inside and outside. In both his research and theorizing, he presented a new methodology
for understanding human life as lived, with a particular focus on development, learning
and teaching. Key to his new methodology is the concept of dialectical unity. Let me
“define” dialectical unity by example.

Learning and Development. In Vygotsky’s time, it was widely accepted that
development is a key determinant of learning and teaching (a belief that dominates to this
day). Vygotsky was troubled by this way of conceptualizing the relationship between
development and learning; it didn’t ring true for him. It was too simple, too linear, too
causal. He reasoned that learning/instruction (in Russian, there is but one word) would
be “completely unnecessary if it merely utilized what had already matured in the developmental process, if it were not itself a source of development” (1987, p. 212).

Learning was, to him, both the source and the product of development, just as
development was both the source and the product of learning. As activity, learning and
development are inseparably intertwined and emergent, best understood together as a
whole (unity). Their relationship is dialectical, not linear or temporal (one doesn’t come
before the other) or causal (one isn’t the cause of the other).
Vygotsky wants us to see the activity, the totality, the whole, the unity, because it
is only from that vantagepoint that we can come to understand anything about process
and function. Seeing particulars, seeing parts as making up the whole—rather than
seeing the whole and the inter-relationships within it—we neither see nor understand very
much.

The Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal
development (zpd) is helpful in understanding learning and development as a dialectical
unity. To understand the zpd, you need to envision a new kind of entity. Neither process
nor product, this new entity is simultaneously both (we can write it as one word—
process-and-product or tool-and-result). Seeing process, or seeing the unity process-and-
product, is very difficult because we are socialized in Western culture to see only
products (things, objects, results). For example, we tend to see, experience and respond to
this scholarly journal as a product and not as a moment in an ongoing process (or many
processes) that includes the human history of writing, literacy, education, research, etc.,
the development and learning of each specific reader of these words, and so on. We tend
also to see, experience and respond to people as products (identities, labels) rather than as ongoing process. We see ourselves and others as “who we are” (products) and not as
simultaneously “who we are” (which includes our history of becoming who we are) and
“who we are becoming.” Yet, each one of us is, at every moment, both being and
becoming. The zpd is the ever emergent and continuously changing “distance” between
being and becoming. It is human activity that gives birth to and nurtures the zpd and,
with its creation, human learning and development. In my own work with children and
adults in educational and therapeutic settings, I have come to see the zpd as activity rather
than as a zone.

Vygotsky noted a fascinating feature of the zpd, one that until recently has been
all but ignored by educators and psychologists. In zpd-like environments — that is, ones
in which learning and development are jointly created by people’s activity — what
happens is that we do things we don’t yet know how to do, we go beyond ourselves. This
capacity of people to do things in advance of themselves, Vygotsky discovered, is the
essence of human growth. Children learn and develop, he said, by “performing a head
taller than they are” (Vygostky, 1978, p. 102).

One of his most wonderful illustrations is the learning-development of language.
Vygotsky vividly described how babies transform from babblers to speakers of a
language through performing. The language-learning zpd is an environment that supports
the baby to speak when it doesn’t know how to, that is, to perform as a speaker.
Vygotsky observed that children become speakers of language through the performance
of conversations that they and their caregivers create. The babbling baby’s rudimentary
speech is a creative imitation of the more developed speaker’s speech. At the same time, the more developed speakers complete the baby and immediately accept her/him into the
community of speakers. They neither give very young children a grammar book and
dictionary to study, nor reprimand and correct them. Instead, they relate to them as
capable of far more than they could possibly do; they relate to them as speakers, feelers,
thinkers and makers of meaning. This is what makes it possible for very young children
to do what they are not yet capable of. In this way, we can say that they are performing
beyond themselves as speakers. When they are playing with language in this way in the
language-learning zpd, babies are simultaneously performing—becoming—themselves.
Performing is a way of taking "who we are" and creating something new—in this case, a
new speaker—through incorporating "the other."

Vygotsky’s message is profound: performing is how we learn and develop. It is
through performing—doing what is beyond us—that when we are very young we learn to
do the varied things we don't know how to do. But what happens, as we perform our way
into cultural and societal adaptation, is that we also perform our way out of continuous
development. A lot of what we have learned (through performing) becomes routinized
and rigidified into behavior. (In educational settings in particular, we are too often
related to as “who we are” and rarely encouraged and supported to creatively perform
beyond ourselves, to do what we don’t know how to do so that we can continuously
create who we are becoming.) We become so skilled at acting out roles that we no longer
keep creating new performances of ourselves. We develop an identity as "this kind of
person"—someone who does certain things (and does them in certain ways) and feels certain ways. Anything other than that, most of us think—as we forget that we are also
who we are becoming—would not be "true" to "who we are."

Creating environments for children and adults to perform can reinitiate growth.
Participating in creating the performance “stage” and performing on it is how we can go
beyond ourselves to create new experiences, new skills, new intellectual capacities, new
relationships, new interests, new emotions, new hopes, new goals—which is, after all,
what learning and developing are all about.

Performative Psychology

We have now reached the subject “proper” of this essay—the potential of performance
and ways that the new performative psychology can serve as a powerful educational
intervention. Performative psychology is based in an understanding of human life as
primarily performative, that is, we collectively create our lives through performing
(simultaneously being who we are and who we are becoming). Psychologists,
psychotherapists and educators who practice and promote performative psychology, such
as myself, believe that the human capacity to perform is vastly under-utilized, under-
valued and understudied in our culture.2

In the remainder of this essay, I will try to show performative psychology at work.
I will draw upon my own experience and illustrate a few of the performative psychology
projects I have been involved with in my capacity as director of educational programs at
the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy. (The Institute is a research and training center for human development and community. Headquartered in New York
City, it has ties to sister centers in other US cities and collaborates with organizations in
other countries.) The Institute’s particular performative psychology specialty is
performance social therapy, a therapeutic and educational practice that supports adults
and children to actively shape environments in which they can creatively perform both
who they are and who they are becoming (see Holzman, 1999b; Newman and Holzman,
1996; 1997). The Institute designs and implements programs for children, youth and
adults in family, school, after school and community settings and provides training and
consultation in our approach to other organizations.3 Below I briefly describe a few of
these programs.

Programs in Educational Settings

Performance social therapy—which we refer to as performatory developmental learning
in our educational projects—enhances students learning by creating opportunities for
them to perform as learners (and readers, writers, speakers, scientists, mathematicians,
artists, historians, and so on).

Among the numerous benefits of performance as pedagogy is that it suspends
truth and truth telling, and the shame and blame associated so often with “getting it
wrong.” When a five-year-old girl says, “I’m the Daddy and you’re the baby” in pretend
play with her eight-year-old sister, there is no presumption of truth or falsity. When a character in a play utters the line, “My name is Cinderella” no one questions its truth-
value. (No audience member gets up and says, “No, you’re not! You’re my daughter!”)

When children are very young we encourage their imagination and care little if
their creativity clashes with reality or what we take to be true. Indeed, babies and
toddlers manage quite well without being held accountable for the truth— without even
any awareness of it. Their learning and developing happen at a fantastic rate as they
participate in creating life activities with their families and caregivers in an environment
that is, to a large extent, performatory and, thereby, unconstrained by truth-referentiality.
The three-year-old who draws a Mommy with green hair floating next to a yellow sun
that is half her size is applauded for his drawing, but by the time he is ten, the child will
get little praise for drawing unrealistically. This is not an argument against
representational art or perspective; it is a concern is with how we adapt children to a
culture that places such a high premium on truth telling, facts, reality and “being right.”.
For the truth-telling game is played in such a way that we lose sight (and typically never
teach children) that it is a game, a way of speaking, a form of life, a performance. In the
process, performing, improvising, creatively imitating and doing what you don’t know
how to do become de-valued.

Performing School

As noted earlier, Vygotsky has shown us that successful learning takes place in early
childhood when there is a zpd—a performatory environment in which young children and
their caretakers jointly create conversations, essentially through language play.
We approached the creation of a primary school with this in mind. We wanted to create a
school in which similar kinds of improvisational conversations could occur (e.g., science
conversations, math conversations, and so on). To us, that meant the learning
environment had to be playful and performatory. We knew this would be a great
challenge because of how unplayful and unperformatory schools in the US tend to be.
Beyond kindergarten, play (including pretend play, the unself-conscious performance that
dominates in early childhood) is discouraged and even disallowed. Schools not only
replicate the broad cultural dichotomy “work/play”(“stop playing around and get down to
work”); they also reinforce it organizationally and discursively with their own
educational dichotomy “learning/playing.” For example, in most schools a specific time
is set aside for play (and this only in the early grades; by junior high and high school play
time has been replaced by study hall and physical education classes). We speak of doing
“school work,” not “school play;” we “play house” but we don’t “play reading.” In these
ways, children are socialized very early on to associate playing with free time, fun and
frivolity, and learning with work, what is important and what is real. (Adults do this as
well. If you are a teacher or parent, listen to yourself over the course of a day and hear
how you talk to your students or children about school, work, play and learning.)
The Institute’s longest-running educational project was the Barbara Taylor
School, a primary school for children ages 4-14, which served as a laboratory for the development of a Vygotskian activity-based pedagogical approach from 1984-1996. In its
early years, the school’s innovation was in its content more than its structure; as in many
schools, children were separated into three age groups, but emotional and social
development were as important as intellectual growth. In the later years, the school was
transformed into a performance space (both physically and conceptually) and the student
body, teachers and other adults became a multi-age, multi-skill ensemble cast and crew.
Children spent their days creating life scenes, aided by adults who functioned more as
theatre directors and reorganizers of conversation than teachers in the traditional sense.
To the extent that there was a curriculum, it was jointly created each day by the students
and adults through improvisational performance. To the extent that developmental
learning occurred, it was created simultaneously with performance. I have written
extensively about the history and practice of the Barbara Taylor School (see Holzman,
1995, 1997b, Strickland and Holzman, 1985; and especially Schools for Growth, 1997a).
Here I present a vignette from our extensive notes.

The students and learning directors were having lunch. Charles, a new
student just beginning his third week at the school, begins taunting Alice
for being stupid. Both children are eight years old, he has just discovered.
Charles had been in a gifted program in a public school and prided himself
on being very smart. He was constantly getting into fights with other
children, was identified as a problem student, and was routinely sent home
from school. For these reasons, his mother decided to place him in the Barbara Taylor School; she thought he needed a more therapeutic
environment where he would be supported to grow emotionally and
socially.
The scene began when Charles loudly and incredulously
proclaimed, “You don’t know how to spell ‘cat’! I don’t believe you’re in
third grade!” Learning director Len said to the group, “I need some help.
Charles is playing the Competitive Game and it’s turning into the Nasty
Game.” When I came over, Charles was continuing to “marvel” at the fact
that Alice could not spell ‘cat.’ He kept asking, “Why can’t she spell
‘cat’?” Alice was sinking lower in her seat, her head bowed. Len and some
of the students attempted to change what was going on. They asked
Charles why it mattered so much to him, why he was being nasty, and if
he wanted to do something about it. A twelve-year-old boy said matter of
factly, “No one taught her to spell; that’s why she can’t.” I told Charles I
thought his question was a good one and that I had another good one—
“How come you can spell ‘cat’?” Charles said, “My mother taught me.”
Several of us pursued this: “How did she do it?” Charles said that his
mother told him to watch the game shows on TV and he did; that’s how he
learned to spell.
During these conversational exchanges, Alice’s brother Kevin
whispered to her, “C-A-T” and she began to say repeatedly, “Cat--c-a-t.”
Charles shouted at Kevin, “Don’t tell her! That’s cheating.” One of the students excitedly said, “She’s learning it right now!” We asked Alice if
she wanted to learn how to spell; she said she did. We asked Charles and
the others if they thought Alice might be able to learn by watching game
shows; they said yes. During the next ten minutes an animated discussion
took place on how to organize game show-spelling performances both at
the school and for Alice at home. By the time lunch was over, it was
decided that Charles and Len would be the co-producers and directors of
the performances and four students had signed up to be the writers. Over
the course of the next several days, the game show-spelling performance
became an integrated activity of the school. On one day, Charles spent
over an hour making a schedule of all the shows he thought Alice should
watch. The writers spent time putting together flash cards to be used on
the game show. Different students would come along and add a word or
two throughout the course of the day. (Holzman, 1997, pp. 124-125)

As director of the Barbara Taylor School at the time, I was less concerned with whether
Alice would learn to spell than with Alice and others learning that spelling is learnable —
that is, that it is a performance. It seems to me that learning that you are a learner is key
to developmental learning. While it was long ago pointed out (for example, by Bateson,
1972) that learning how to learn is a component of learning anything, learning how to
learn is not the whole story. In learning something, young children are learning not just
two things but three: the particular thing learned; how to learn; and that they are learners/that learning is something human beings do (Holzman and Newman, 1987). It is
this third “kind” of learning that traditional schooling, with its emphasis on acquisitional,
knowledge-based learning, leaves out. But without it, learning becomes separated from
and often replaces developing. The relational activity at the lunch table just described is
the process of creating a zpd that makes it possible (but, of course, not inevitable) for
developmental learning to occur, in part through the reintroduction of this performatory
element of the activity of learning.

This vignette is meant to illustrate some of the important characteristics of
performatory developmental learning. First, it is activity-centered. The task is to
continuously shape and reshape the unity persons-environment into a zpd where learning-
development might occur. The adults are trying to shape the group activity (the creating
of the zpd) rather than control behavior. Second, the group activity was improvisational.
The process of coming up with the idea for a collective game show-spelling performance
was a reshaping of some of the elements in the existing acquisitional knowledge-
dominated environment to create possible learning. Third, Charles’ nastiness was not
related to as a behavior problem, but as a way of talking (a line in a play, a language
game) that needed to be dealt with. No one tried to stop Charles from making fun of
Alice as an end in itself; the group worked to reshape what he was giving—his question,
competitiveness and abuse (and curiosity, perhaps)—into something potentially
developmental for the school as a whole. What was created, among other things, was a
new language or conversational game (we could call it the Curiosity Game or the How
Do You Learn To Spell Game). Asking Charles how come he could spell and how he learned to do so was, as I see it, a bit of practical philosophizing. It changed the focus
from knowing to learning, from product to process, from fixed mental states and
identities and labels to relational possibilities. Spelling is one of the infinite
performances of which human beings are capable. Alice could perform as a speller
(create who she is by being who she is becoming); Charles could relate to her as a speller
rather than as “a dummy.” These new possibilities come into being simultaneously with
language activity, the making of new meanings, the performance of conversation. And,
for the moment, no one was playing the Nasty Game.

Performing English

In 1998, we followed an English as a Second Language (ESL) class in an urban New
York City high school. The teacher, a Master’s level ESL teacher who is also an actor,
had had some training in performatory developmental learning. We were interested to
see how this approach worked in a traditional setting and to learn something about the
process by which the class developed as a positive environment for the learning of
English. Observations and audio- and video-recordings were made weekly, meetings with
the teacher were held periodically and, near the end of the semester, a student focus
group was held. At the students’ request, it was followed by a performance they created
to illustrate and expand on topics that emerged in the focus group. 4

When performance is used in classrooms, it is typically as an instrumental tool to
facilitate the learning of some particular content or skill. Even if improvisational, performance rarely grows from the entirety of the classroom culture (Pineau, 1994). In
performatory developmental learning, however, it is the activity of performance that
takes center stage. The goal is to create a performatory environment. In this ESL
classroom, the attempt was made to use everything that goes on in a classroom (for
example, one student’s bad attitude, another’s reading skills, the teacher’s experience, the
topic of the day’s lesson, the text, etc.) as a potential growth activity. The students and
teacher worked together in an improvisational manner to continuously shape and reshape
the environment into a “learning-development stage” upon which the students could
perform beyond themselves as speakers, readers and writers of English. In other words,
they had two simultaneous performance tasks: creating the stage and performing on it.
Analysis of the observational data suggest that the teacher’s method was
effective in three related areas: environment building; English language practice;
and classroom ambiance. What the teacher did helped her and her students create a
positive learning environment, as summarized below:

The teacher introduced theatrical discourse to the classroom (e.g., “Let’s see how we
perform together as a class right now;” “That was an interesting performance;” “Would
you like to perform that scene over again?”). As performance and performance language
became a regular part of the classroom activity, students began to direct each other—and
scenes always ended with a round of applause. These newly created classroom rituals
were important in integrating performance into every aspect of the class. They also were
key to creating the new culture of the classroom, a culture that was performatory rather
than information and knowledge based.5 Two illustrations follow.

In this first vignette, a student’s disruptive behavior was transformed through
improvisational performance into a new scene in the ongoing class play. Early in the
semester a fight broke out between two students. Ivan was late for class and Mary went to
the locked door to let him in. Before she got to the door Ivan began calling her names
and Mary decided not to open it. The teacher intervened and let Ivan in. He was furious and continued screaming nasty remarks at Mary. Under the teacher’s direction, Ivan’s
disruptive behavior became an occasion for an improvisational performance that
contributed to the ongoing process of creating a new culture of the classroom.

Teacher - [speaking to Ivan] Well, maybe we need to do your
performance again. Do you want to go out and do it over?
Ivan - No!
Michael - This is baby stuff.
Teacher - Why do you think that, Michael?
Michael - This is the kind of stuff you do when you are a kid, name
calling and stuff.
[Ivan and Mary continue with the name calling across the room at one
another]
Teacher - Yeah, let’s do it over [never losing her humor or cool]. I think
you should do it over and do it differently. [To class] Can you think of
different ways that he could come in again?
Ivan - No one cares, let’s get to work, we are disturbing everyone’s work.
Students - We care about the way you act, do it over, yeah, do it over.
Michael - He could be a bum.
Ivan - I’m not doing it. Can someone play me?
[No one volunteer to play Ivan. Ivan gets annoyed and says that they
should all start their work and forget about it.]
Teacher - OK, I will play Ivan.
Ivan - You have to do it the same way that I did..
Teacher - I think it should be different.
Students - Yeah, you should do it as a bum.
[Ivan keeps shouting at Mary and mouthing off during this discussion.
The teacher goes out, she knocks on door obnoxiously. Mary doesn’t let
her in at first. Finally, she does and the teacher, performing as Ivan,
saunters in and begins yelling at Mary. She walks around room touching
and annoying everyone. Her performance is very exaggerated and funny;
the whole class is laughing]
Teacher - Was that a bum?
Class - No, that was Ivan.
Ivan - [laughing] That was me.
Teacher - [winks at him] Was that you?
Ivan – Yeah.
Teacher - Let’s see how we perform together as a class right now, let’s
move on.

From a behavioral point of view, a response to the fight between Ivan and Mary might
have been to remove Ivan from the class and send him to the principal’s office for being
disruptive. Then, the teacher could continue with her lesson. From an
activity/performance point of view, the teacher leads the class in creating a
performatory/developmental learning environment in which they can try out different
parts. She works to keep Ivan in the class and build with what he offers (in improv
language, a “bad offer”). She functions more as a theatre director than as a traditional
teacher. Students are challenged to take collective responsibility for their classroom and
each other by using their creativity to respond in new ways to “old” situations. They
begin to relate to what Ivan is doing as a performance and redirect it; in this process, they
create new ways of relating to Ivan and themselves. 6 They have the valuable experience
of doing “the scene” over again.

In the second vignette a reading lesson becomes enlivened through performance.
In this ESL class, textbook lessons were often treated as scripts. This particular lesson
utilized a story written by a Native American.

Teacher - We will be reading a story written by a Native American. What
do their voices sound like?
Michael - [imitates a bad movie version] GO – NOW.
Teacher – Oh, because they’re learning English like you guys.
Michael – No, they talk slow “ You —- GO—-HERE—- NOW”
[The class begins to laugh. They are enjoying Michael’s performance and
several want to try speaking and reading like Native Americans]
Jenny - I want to read now.
Teacher - Can you read like a Native American girl?
[Jenny tries a slow and deliberate voice like Michael’s. Everyone laughs
as she does this voice. They are having a great time]
Teacher - Does anyone else want to try?

Andre - Yes [He reads next in a very funny voice and everyone laughs at
his imitation]
Teacher - Anyone else?
Desiree - But the story is over.
Teacher - We can start from the top.
[ Now everyone wants to read]
Teacher - Two sentences each so everyone can read.
[A girl does it and all of the girls giggle at her performance. They are
having a lot of fun with this. People are all whispering along trying out
their best Native American voices. Jesus wants to go next but gets shy and
laughs and says he will wait. Then Andre wants to read. He does an
exaggerated, very deep voice. The teacher says in a very deep voice
matching his, “GOOD!, “EXCELLENT.” Now Jesus wants to do it finally.
The voices get funnier and funnier. Everyone gives a round of applause]

The students wanted to read and were disappointed when the bell finally rang. No longer
just reading the words off the page; they were making and playing with meaning. From a
developmental perspective, these young people were being supported to go beyond
themselves as readers. Performing helped them break out of their usual roles; in their
performances as “Native American English speakers” they were moving around their
identities as non-English speakers.

A final point of interest is that here and at other times students laughed at each
other, yet no one seemed to mind or take it personally. The laughter seemed directed at
the performances, not at the individual students. Often it seemed as if the laughter
enticed them to go further — to speak louder and more clearly. High school students in
ESL classes are usually reluctant to speak up for fear of being made fun of. In this ESL
classroom, an environment had been created in which students were supportive of each
other’s performances and encouraged each other to take risks and play with language.
As these students, under the teacher’s direction, continuously created the
performatory environment, they were freed from their prescribed roles—that of non-English speakers—to play with language and thereby change their relationship to it.
They were able to break out of the identity of non-knowers and become learners. Trained
in performative psychology, the teacher was able to see activity and performance — and
not just linguistic behavior. Seeing performance is transformative of teaching practices:
“Seeing the teaching and learning process as performance potentially allows one to see
and create new things, including performatory pedagogy” (Holzman, 1997, p. 128).

The teacher’s ability to relate to all classroom activity as performance allowed the
students to learn how to learn and to take collective and individual responsibility for their
classroom as a “learning and performance laboratory.” They no longer felt they needed
to sound good or learn grammar before speaking, they just spoke. In the process, they
got to sound better and to learn grammar. Whether as their parents or grandparents,
Native Americans or early pioneers, teachers or themselves, they were speaking,
listening, reading and writing in English. Through performing, they began the long
process of creating their life-long development as navigators and creators of the English
language.

After School Performance Groups

“Performing helps if you’re shy, it helps you look someone in the eye and
talk to them in a strong voice. It helped John this way. You can do all
kinds of things you might not think you can when you’re performing.”
(Mother of 10-year-old participant in Growing Up Performed)

The developmental nature of performance can be used effectively in dealing with specific
social-psychological issues that young people face. Examples from my own work are two programs we were asked to design, one for teen pregnancy prevention and another
for children who had been sexually abused. A most important element of these programs
is that they were open to all children — girls and boys, pregnant or not, in the case of
teen pregnancy, and girls and boys, identified as sexually abused or not, in the case of
abuse. We believe that working with heterogeneous groups is critical to the success of
performance groups and, consequently, no group is ever identified, isolated and worked
with by itself. An equally important characteristic of these programs is that they did not
focus on the “presenting problems” of pregnancy or abuse. We felt confident (and were
proved correct) that such issues would come up in the children’s performances of their
lives.

Both programs were voluntary after school programs. “Pregnant Productions”
(teen pregnancy prevention) took place in neighborhoods with high teen pregnancy rates
in the NY metropolitan area. Participants were drawn locally and they came to an
institutional location (a school or community center) with which they already had a
relationship. “Growing Up Performed” (sexual abuse) was held in a performance
school/space in Soho; children came from all over the city to what was, in effect, a
sophisticated, adult environment that was new to them.

Pregnant Productions was organized as a production company. Under the
direction of two performance social therapy specialists, the pre-teen and teen participants
not only created skits out of their life experiences, they also produced and promoted
public showings in their communities. Many, but by no means all, of their skits dealt
with hard and painful issues in their lives (including pregnancy). The challenging task of building an ensemble—coordinating your actions with those of others, deciding what and
how to perform and respond to another, etc.— provided the young people with nearly
continuous opportunities to make choices. It was this aspect of performance that we
believed would be most helpful to these teens and pre-teens: learning to make choices is a
critically important life skill that takes on heightened significance as young people face
questions of sex, sexuality and pregnancy.

Growing Up Performed was designed to intervene on the stigma typically
associated with abuse. It was comprised of children ages 6-12, at least half of whom self-
identified as being abused or were referred because they were abused. While the impact
of abuse varies from person to person (some young people experience extreme emotional
pain and trauma as a result of abuse; others do not), abuse touches everyone and everyone
can learn to deal with it in more growthful ways. We believed that performing their lives
would support all the children to develop socially and emotionally in ways that would
help them when faced with abusive situations. Children came together twice weekly to
learn the language and activities of the theatre, as they learned to perform their lives on
stage. Two performance professionals and a school social worker (all with varying
degrees of training in performance social therapy) directed the groups. Video was
incorporated into the program for reviewing scenes and teaching directing. Parents were
encouraged to drop in and participate in the program as well. As with Pregnant
Productions, the children produced a public performance of their creative efforts.

Performance groups such as these are highly effective environment for social and
emotional “growth spurts.” While detailed analysis and discussion of these programs is beyond the scope of this article, I can summarize briefly what we have learned from
conducting these groups.

Performing requires a greater level of cooperation, creativity and self-exposure
compared to most other activities available to young children in typical institutional
contexts.
Among the many ways young people have been found to develop by participating in
performance activities are the following:

1. Increasing self-confidence, stemming from the satisfaction and gratification of
successfully creating something with others;
2. Appreciating the relevance of and gaining respect for their own and others’
life experiences;
3. Expanding the boundaries of their world and their repertoire of responses;
4. Breaking old behavior patterns and being open to new possibilities;
5. Learning the value of slowing down and self-reflection;
6. Realizing you can make mistakes and have another chance to do it different
and maybe better;
7. Speaking your mind and allowing others to do the same.

I hope the stories I have told here have made it possible to see activity—if only
fleetingly—and thus open the reader to entertaining the possibility of a psychology with a
new subject matter. Nothing more than a glimpse can be expected from my descriptions
(I think that is the nature of descriptions). To me, the implications of performative
psychology for education are enormous. Even more important, I believe that performance, as a method and as a form of life, can help us to restructure and rebuild how
it is that we are together.

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