New Collaboration with Colombian Peace & Performance Activists Brings Holzman & Friedman to Bogotá

Institute director Lois Holzman and Dan Friedman, artistic director of the Castillo Theatre and a member of the ESI faculty, are in Bogotá, Colombia this week at the invitation of new friend and performatory-comrade-in-arms Antanas Mockus, to share the work of the Institute's development community at the biennial International Conference on Citizenship Culture. 

The conference, sponsored by Mockus' organization Corpovisionarios por Colombia, comes just two weeks after Colombian voters narrowly rejected a hard-won peace accord that would have ended five decades of civil war. The theme of the conference is, The Role of Culture in Controlling Violence. Mockus is the former president of National University of Colombia and two-term mayor of Bogotá. He attended Performing the World 2016 in New York City in September, where he participated in a conversation with Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org, about "Peace, Performance and People's Power." 

In addition to Holzman, Friedman and Mockus, the conference will include non-profit leaders, academics, and performance activists who will address the role that performance, culture and forgiveness can play in creating new roads to peace in the organizing efforts ahead. Among them will be Carlos Lopez, the founder of the Colombia's Laughing League and a leader of  Magicians Without Borders . He will talk about bringing young people from the slums of Bogotá who he has trained as magicians to Performing the World 2016 and the impact it has had on them. While in New York, the young Colombian magicians also did a magic show at The Pit Theater.