Overview

UPDATED MAY 2005 Download the congress program (requires free Acrobat reader)

STATEMENT FROM THE CONGRESS:
ISPA Urges World's Leaders to Support the Arts

NOTE: This event has come and gone. Thanks to all who made it such a great success! We'll leave these pages up as an archive. Be sure to view Ken Fischer's photos from the event, as well as our own photo album on-line.

On a landmark site on the south bank of one of Britain's most legendary waterways, the River Tyne, sits the first ever Norman Foster building for the performing arts. Foster's architectural practice is admired worldwide for its groundbreaking designs -- the renewed Reichstag in Berlin, the ''erotic gherkin'' Swiss Re building in London and Hong Kong's airport and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank among them. The team that designed The Sage Gateshead worked in close partnership with the artists and their management who will administer the $130 million building and all of its programme. This has created a building exceptionally responsive to the needs of its artists and programme, ensuring that The Sage Gateshead is one of the most fertile symbols of the cultural and economic renaissance of this characterful regional centre of northern England.

The two centres of Gateshead and Newcastle facing each other across the Tyne offer a rich diversity of performing arts venues: from the extravagant elegance of its 19th century Matcham theatre, The Theatre Royal (where the Royal Shakespeare Company is now in its 28th year of annual residency) to the new writing excellence of Live Theatre; The Sage Gateshead, and (now in active development) the regional centre for dance, Dance City and a European Centre for the Performing Arts. Meanwhile Gateshead's BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (our neighbour on Gateshead Quays) opened in June 2002 to wide acclaim, welcoming over 1m visitors in its first year.

All the city's main venues are within a few minutes reach of The Sage Gateshead, and the June 2005 Congress will give delegates the opportunity to visit them all with sessions held in or visits planned to many of them. Northumbria (the most northerly corner of England) also boasts some of the country's most ravishingly beautiful landscapes and architecture, including two of UNESCO's world heritage sites: the 10th Century Durham Cathedral, and the Roman Hadrian's Wall completed in AD139.

Changing Lives
The Sage Gateshead is designed to house an exceptional equity and fluidity between the performance participation and education programme. As the principal host to the ISPA International Congress 2005, it offers the perfect venue to explore new performing arts practices and a dynamic quest into the changing relationships between the public and the performing arts. The congress invites delegates from all over the world to share their experiences, their visions for the future and their questions and answers, exploring issues which could change their working lives and ways in which the performing arts can change the lives of communities. More than three days of debate, informal networking, performances, participatory workshops, and celebration of the power of the performing arts to change lives.

CANCELLATION POLICY

• Registrations cancelled before April 15, 2005 will be refunded, subject to a $50 administration deduction.
• Registrations cancelled after April 15, 2005 (but before June 8, 2005) will be refunded 50%.
• Registrations cancelled after June 8, 2005 will not qualify for any refund.

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International Society for the Performing Arts Foundation
305 7th Ave., 5th Floor
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USA
tel 212.206.8490
fax 212.206.8603
info@ispa.org
http://www.ispa.org/