Opening remarks for the 1st Hemispheric Institute Encuentro : Diana Taylor, Zeca Ligiéro, Luis Peirano, and Javier Serna.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics held its first Encuentro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2-15, 2000. Participants included artists, scholars, graduate students, and activists. This eclectic and culturally diverse group, from countries throughout the Americas, captured the spirit of Encuentros: to provide a forum that encourages an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between performance and politics from diverse cultural perspectives. This is a video documentation of the opening remarks by Zeca Ligiéro, Diana Taylor, Luis Peirano, and Javier Serna, who introduce the general theme of the first Encuentro, 'Performance and Politics in the Americas,' as well as future events.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multilingual and interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. Working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression and politics, the organization explores embodied practice - performance - as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity. Anchored in its geographical focus on the Americas (thus 'hemispheric') and in three working languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese), the Institute's goal is to promote vibrant interactions and collaborations at the level of scholarship, art practice and pedagogy among practitioners interested in the relationship between performance and politics in the hemisphere.