East Side Institute

East Side Institute An international center for the study of social therapeutics and performance activism — bringing h

09/18/2026

Feeling stuck in love, family, career, or health?

In this video, Lea Cikos + Elyse Mendel talk about why you can’t do it alone—and what becomes possible when you build community, go slower, and create new tools for new moves.

Join their 5-week workshop: Don’t Know How to Build Your Life? Nobody Does!
A guide to building Life Teams—supportive partnerships that help you transform what feels stuck.

🗓 Sundays, Oct 25 – Nov 22 | On Zoom
👉 Register: https://ow.ly/hTC650ZOz0I

What if evaluation could be more than collecting numbers and reporting results?Join Veronica Smith, founder of data2insi...
09/11/2026

What if evaluation could be more than collecting numbers and reporting results?

Join Veronica Smith, founder of data2insight, on September 27 for a free interactive workshop and explore a playful, collaborative approach to making meaning from data.

Discover how organizations, activists, artists, and community leaders can engage people in turning data into insight—strengthening programs, deepening learning, and telling a more compelling story about the work they’re creating together.

Free registration — https://ow.ly/c4pb50ZKARN

09/09/2026

Don’t Know How to Build Your Life? Nobody Does!

Elyse Mendel + Lea Cikos invite you to build Life Teams—support for getting unstuck around health, relationships, work, friendship (and more).

We’ll play with improv skills and Social Therapeutic tools to:
• ask for help (and offer it)
• “deprivatize” what you’re dealing with
• build community you can actually lean on

🗓 Sundays, October 25–Novemeber 22
🕥 10:30 AM–12:00 PM ET (US)
🎥 Watch the invite + join us.

👉 Register: https://ow.ly/8Sja50ZKAFS

Growing older comes with challenges — and opportunities.Join Helen Abel and Nicola Pauling for a playful, creative explo...
09/03/2026

Growing older comes with challenges — and opportunities.

Join Helen Abel and Nicola Pauling for a playful, creative exploration of what it means to grow older in ways that bring joy, connection, and possibility.

Together, we’ll reimagine ageing beyond stigma and fear, and explore new ways of responding to physical changes, illness, giving and receiving care, and honoring our right to lifelong development.

🌱 About the Group Leaders:
Helen Abel (California) is a life performance coach and longtime social therapeutic practitioner. She’s a founding member of Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice and has spent years helping people create new performances of ageing.

Nicola Pauling (Aotearoa/New Zealand) is a development specialist who brings improvisation, acting, and directing into everyday life. Her work supports older adults to explore, play, and continuously develop—without scripts, roles, or audiences.

✨ Open to anyone interested in shifting the experience of aging from one of tragedy to one of growth.

👉 https://ow.ly/mspS50ZI8OZ

🌍 Performing the World Is Evolving!Since 2020, we’ve had several incredible Performing the World (PTW) gatherings—four d...
09/02/2026

🌍 Performing the World Is Evolving!

Since 2020, we’ve had several incredible Performing the World (PTW) gatherings—four days packed with workshops, performances, conversations, panels, storytelling, play, and people from around the world creating and discovering together.

This year, we’re doing something a little different.

Instead of bringing everything together over four days, we’re carrying the spirit of Performing the World throughout the year!

✨ PERFORMING THE WORLD COMMUNITY PRESENTS

Performing the World Community Presents are workshops, panels, conversations, storytelling circles, performances, and other events inspired by PTW’s performative spirit and playful approach to transforming the world.

They might be a one-time happening or a series of related events. They might be virtual, in-person, or hybrid. Most importantly, people and organizations within the PTW community create and initiate them.

Through PTW Community Presents, these events can connect with our global network and, when possible, receive various forms of production support.

🤝 PERFORMING THE WORLD CO-SPONSORSHIP

We’re also inviting members of the PTW community to bring events they’re already creating into relationship with Performing the World.

If you or your organization is organizing a public event, class, webinar, forum, performance, fundraiser, gathering, or other activity, you can seek PTW Co-Sponsorship.

Co-sponsored events can use the Performing the World logo in their promotion and at the event itself. When possible, PTW will also help spread the word about the event throughout our global network.

🌎 So, what does all of this mean?

It means Performing the World doesn’t have to happen only once a year.

PTW can happen year-round, in communities around the world.

It can be a workshop in New York, a performance across the globe, an online conversation connecting people from different countries, a storytelling circle, a class, or something completely new that we haven’t imagined yet.

The future of Performing the World is bright indeed. We’re excited about this next chapter and about discovering what the PTW community will create together.

We hope you’re excited too! 🌍✨

When people from different cultures with widely divergent experiences come together to tell stories, some beautiful thin...
08/28/2026

When people from different cultures with widely divergent experiences come together to tell stories, some beautiful things can emerge...

A free Zoom-enabled storytelling circle with people from all over the globe, led by Gwen Johnson Gwen Johnson of the Letcher County Culture Hub (Kentucky) and Dan Friedman of the East Side Institute.

Thursday, September 17
10:00 am (Eastern U.S.)
Enrollment is limited.

For more information and to register contact Dan Friedman at [email protected]

Join Melissa Meyer and Desire Wandan for a 6-week dive into Lois Holzman’s "The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with...
08/21/2026

Join Melissa Meyer and Desire Wandan for a 6-week dive into Lois Holzman’s "The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World." Through selected chapters and group dialogue, participants will explore how the belief that knowing is required for growth can limit creativity, risk-taking, and our capacity to create something new. Together, the group will explore “non-knowing growing” and learn about key influences, including developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. No prior familiarity is needed. Sept 8 - Oct 13.

Sign up 👉 https://ow.ly/BiPv50ZuJMx

08/18/2026

What if the ruling ideas don’t just shape what we think—but become embedded in how we move, speak, react, and relate?

In Part 3, Dan Friedman turns to Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus: the deeply ingrained habits and ways of being that carry the values of a culture, often without our even being aware of them.

Bourdieu called the body “a memory”—a place where culture gets reproduced without needing to be explained or consciously chosen.

So what happens when the world we want to change is also living through us?

This short video is Part 3 of a three-part excerpt from one of Dan’s lectures in his annual East Side Institute class, Crawling From the Wreckage, held in July 2026.

Dan leaves us with the question: What can we do about that?

08/17/2026

If ruling ideas become our “common sense,” how do we begin to challenge them?

In Part 2, Dan Friedman turns to Antonio Gramsci, who asked why oppressed people so often reinforce the very systems that dominate them. Gramsci’s answer was hegemony: the slow process by which a ruling culture’s values, assumptions, and ways of seeing come to feel natural, universal, and simply “the way things are.”

But Gramsci also pointed toward another possibility: building new cultural, intellectual, and social environments where different ways of seeing, thinking, relating, and creating can emerge.

This short video is Part 2 of a three-part excerpt from one of Dan’s lectures in his annual East Side Institute class, Crawling From the Wreckage, held in July 2026.

Watch—and consider: How can we create a new cultural “common sense”?

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