Making Magic with Strangers: Tools for Exercising Collective Power

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT ONLY, HELD IN LONDON, UK. Additionally, while this is a free workshop, we ask that you consider making a contribution to support the Institute's ongoing work.

In a moment of fear, polarization and uncertainty, it can be tempting to search for the right answer, defend what we know, or find a way to fix the mess. This workshop offers another possibility: making with the mess.

Drawing on social therapeutics, performance activism, play and embodied practice, we will create and experiment together. We’ll explore what happens when we loosen our hold on who we think we are, what we think we know and what we think is possible. 

Over the past four decades the East Side Institute and its international community has led a practice in which play, performance and philosophizing breaks through social barriers, unleashes imaginations, and opens doors to new possibilities.

Join us for this half-day workshop and discover our human capacity to exercise our collective power

Leader Biographies

Carrie Lobman, EdD is a sociocultural scholar and play movement leader. She is a professor in the department of Learning and Teaching at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University and the Leader of Education and Research at the East Side Institute and. She facilitates the Institute's "Play, Development and Social Justice" webinar series and co-leads the International Class, its flagship program. Her research focuses on the relationship between play, performance, learning and development for people of all ages and backgrounds. She serves as a mentor to emerging performance activists around the world and is an advisor to and former national board member of the All Stars Project, a leader in afterschool development. Carrie is the author or editor of three books Unscripted Learning: Using Improvisation across the K-8 Curriculum, Big Ideas and Revolutionary Activity: Selected Essays, Talks and Articles by Lois Holzman and Performance and Play: Play and Culture Series, Volume 11 and dozens of articles.  Carrie received her master’s degree from the City University of New York and her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. 

Chris Helm, MA brings the joy and developmental possibilities of philosophizing to people from all walks of life. As a core faculty member of the Institute’s International Class, Chris makes philosophizing accessible, practical, and powerful—regardless of participants’ previous experience with philosophy. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Marx, Vygotsky, social therapy founder Fred Newman, and contemporary thinkers, she invites people to play with language, challenge conventional ways of knowing, and create new ways of seeing and being in the world. Chris worked closely with Newman in his Developmental Philosophy Group and later co-led the group for more than a decade. Since 2021, she has traveled across the globe with Carrie Lobman to collaborate with Institute colleagues to share social therapeutic methodology and support communities to play with it and create new practices that are at once local and global. Chris holds graduate degrees in Anthropology and Education and Applied Anthropology from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Elena Boukouvala, PhD is a Developmental Psychologist, Dramatherapist (MA), Counsellor of Young People (MA), performance activist and artist. Since 2004, she has been working as a therapist and consultant in schools, mental health hospitals, addiction centres, elderly homes, refugee camps and community settings in Greece, the UK, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Germany, Hungary, Lebanon, Algeria and the USA. Since 2016, she has been co-creating artistic exhibitions and performance events in refugee camps and public spaces. She is the founder and director of the Play Perform Learn Grow (PPLG) conference. Her PhD and Postdoc research focused on lived experiences of migration journeys and the creation of new communities through art. She has taught participatory methods at various universities, including Canterbury, Goethe, Aristotle and the Open University. She is a graduate of the International Class of the East Side Institute and its Social Therapy Training and Dramatherapy faculty. She is currently based in Athens and works as a therapist, teacher and trainer online and in person internationally.