Congreso Mundial de IDEA : 1992-2010
Fifteen years ago, IDEA launched its founding world congress in Porto, Portugal. Since then, thousands of drama and theatre education teachers, grassroots activists, scholars and artists from across the world have met at six world congresses to exchange and celebrate workshop techniques, case studies, pedagogical theories, new curricula and performances, united by a deep respect for difference and a shared vision: to develop our creative, empathetic and analytical intelligences through drama, theatre and education to nurture a just and peaceful world.
Following Porto in 1992, IDEA's world congress moved to Brisbane, Australia (1995), in the southern hemisphere, fulfilling a constitutional commitment to alternate hemispheres every two-three years. Its programme was similarly an ambitious mixture of workshops, seminars, keynotes and late-night bar discussions with dedicated ‘familiar strangers’ from more than seventy countries and improvising dialogues that become lasting friendships and collaborations. This widening global community met again and again – in Kisumu, Kenya (1998), Bergen, Norway (2001) and Ottawa, Canada (2004) – and most recently, in Hong Kong (SAR), China (2007).
Each congress includes an IDEA General Council Meeting which elects a new team of officers to implement the will of its members to take IDEA's vision forward. In Canada, 2004, IDEA's members resolved to transform our congress-centred organisation into a more inclusive project-driven IDEA, concerned in particular with young people and the development of a culture of mutual solidarity to ensure the participation of practitioners from every continent and social context. These decisions reflected the needs of a world searching for a new paradigm of creative education and cooperation.
In Hong Kong, more than 1200 people from more than 50 countries participated in a 6th congress which experimented with 'dialogic' keynotes, onstage roundtables and a world workshop for young actors and directors who gave their own keynote. After three years of making and testing new policy for Young IDEA, IDEA Projects and Solidarity, inter-regional collaborations, this new website, the co-creation and coordination of the World Alliance for Arts Education and its first World Creativity Summit, the General Council opted to consolidate. To professionalise, prioritise communication, fundraise to develop sustainable pojects, expand its research and advocacy, and to develop IDEA Regions.
The 7th IDEA World Congress takes place in Belem in northern Brazil, the metropolitan capital on the banks of the Amazon, in July 2010. You can read more in IDEA 2010.