All Power To The Developing!

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 a...

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 Un...

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,...

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 co...

“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 lea...

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, du...

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 lib...

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 impossib...

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.  ...

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!, ...

For over 25 years, Angela Coleman, the author, most recently, of The Art of Chilling Out for Women and the founder of the Sisterhood Agenda, an international network active in 36 countries, has been working to support and empower women and girls.  In this discussion with host Desire Wandan, Coleman focuses on PARKS (Positively Affirming Reality & Knowledge in Sisterhood) Holistic Housing, through which she hopes t...

Albert Marqués is a skilled jazz musician from Barcelona, Spain, a public-school music teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and a creative social justice activist.  In this episode, he and host Desire Wandan focus on his program “Amplifying Voices” which brings musicians together with victims of state violence to create platforms for them to tell their stories to the wider world.  “Amplifying Voices” has worked with, among ...

The San Diego, California-based Imagine Brave Spaces does just that—imagine brave spaces.  This performance activist organization, founded in 2021, uses play, performance, theatre, and other arts to help children, young people, and adults create spaces and engage in activities through which, in the words of Co-founder and Director of Programs Catherine Hanna Schrock, they can, “see what is not yet there, to picture the possibilitie...

Katie BEE (aka Kate McGlynn) is a remarkable human being who has lived her life saying “yes” and then figuring it out.  She has been a teen peer counselor, taught improv, laughter yoga and meditation.  She worked for 12 years as a street performer in Europe, as a circus performer all over the world, and as a performance-inspired community organizer in Detroit and other cities. 

Larry Kirwan, the creative force behind Black 47, the Irish American political rock band, which for 25 years brought its energetic, joyous hybrid of rock and roll and Irish traditional music to the world, joins co-hosts Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman for an expansive conversation about his life, his creative evolution and the politic that informs them both. 

In addition to leading Black 47, Kirwan is the author of 21 plays, 3 novel...

In this episode of All Power To The Developing, host Desire Wandan sits down with Silvio Dos Reis, a maestro of capoeira and a dedicated teaching artist at the Union Cultural Center in Seattle. Silvio shares his journey of embracing capoeira not just as a martial art but as a powerful tool for community building, cultural expression, and personal transformation.

Together, Desire and Silvio dive deep into the roots of capoeira, expl...

Toiya Taylor, the Executive Director and Founder of Speak With Purpose (SWP), tells her story and the story of SWP, which is bringing the power of public speaking to students in Seattle and beyond to challenge prevailing narratives, uplift their cultures and communities, forge self-authored identities, and become forces for change. To Taylor and the educational innovators she has trained, public speaking is “not a powerpoint, it is...

Malia Gilbert-Neal, the executive director of ArtWell, grew up in Philadelphia and has been creating community empowerment organizations her entire adult life. In conversation with host Desire Wandan, she shares her life story and the work of ArtWell, founded in 2000 in response to chronic community violence in Philly.  Today ArtWell partners with over 400 organizations to bring arts-related activities to schools, libraries, and he...

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 t...