Montreal, November 10, 2006 — The IETM’s secretariat, based in Brussels, and the organizers of IETM Montreal 2007 are delighted to confirm that the next plenary meeting will he held in Montreal this spring. The IETM, which stood for Informal European Theatre Meeting, is now called the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. The gathering will happen at the same time as Festival TransAmériques; thus, the 550 expected IETM delegates from some 40 forty countries will have a chance to discover the works of Quebec and Canadian companies presented at the Festival. Exceptionally, and for the first time, the IETM event will take place outside Europe.

The membership of the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, in the majority European, includes over twenty organizations from Quebec and Canada. Although this network is familiar to many professionals in the milieu, IETM MONTREAL 2007 will be an occasion for North-American artists and cultural workers to become more familiar with it. It brings together artists, performance companies, programmers (theatres and festivals), as well as representatives of resource centres, networking organizations, associations and government bodies - all of whom are actively involved in and committed to cultural development.

The main theme chosen is Cultural Warming, seen as a vector of the changes — desirable or feared — which already affect our practices and are transforming our immediate environment. It will be explored both in its positive aspects, which relate to the intense ferment of artistic activity in the world today and the possibilities provided by the new technologies, and in some of its worrying aspects, like the commercialization of culture and the looming threat to cultural diversity. It will be a rare opportunity to debate the major issues of concern in the milieu, to develop new alliances, and to take the pulse of culture as it is conceived and created in the here and now.

The organizing committee of IETM MONTREAL 2007 will take advantage of the IETM Mobile.Home meeting in Helsinki (November 9-12) and of CINARS in Montreal (November 14-18) to give advance notice of the event. The committee urges the professional performing arts milieu in Quebec and Canada to mobilize to make the event a hot and memorable success, in a convivial atmosphere amidst the explosion of joy that characterizes so well the arrival of spring in Montreal!

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