Children’s Theatre Festival, Hungary

22 June 2009

This year’s festival programme carried the messages of world famous drama teacher Cecily O’Neill and IDEA President Dan Baron Cohen.

"I would like to send my best wishes and congratulations to everyone involved in the Weöres Sándor Children’s Theatre Festival. When I encounter groups of young people who have come together through a love of theatre, whether as part of a huge national event like yourselves, or in a small local gathering, I am always impressed and inspired by the energy, enthusiasm and talent they display, and by the commitment and hard work of the adults who collaborate with them. I know that you will all have grown in many ways through participating in this wonderful Festival. As well as giving you the opportunity to display your abilities, the power of theatre will have helped you to develop your skills, judgement and understanding. Many of you will have formed lasting friendships. As you explore the multiple perspectives that theatre offers, you will have learned that there are many different ways to see the world and to celebrate it. Theatre helps us to learn about ourselves, to discover how much we share with others and to affirm our common humanity."
Cecily O’Neill

Dear Participants of Weöres Sándor Children’s Theatre Festival

I am delighted to be able to send a few words of greeting from the edge of the Brazilian Amazon, knowing that hundreds of you will be getting together to share your passion for theatre this weekend.

As the president of an international organization, I am privileged to know a little about how other young people who share your passion are using theatre around the world. I am sending you a few photos to help you imagine how different their lives and situations of learning are.

The one dimension that I am sure you all share is the pleasure of using theatre to dramatize the most important questions in your life. These add up to the most important questions of our time!

- In China, they dramatize their fear about global warming.

- In Africa, they dramatize their concern about drinking water.

- In Latin America, they dramatize the rising rate of suicide and their fear that the world’s time has run out.

- And in Europe, they dramatize their passivity in the face of so much information about violence, specially the violence of education based on competition for jobs.

As President of IDEA, I have had the privilege to work with other arts educators within these organizations and to witness mature creative pedagogies capable of responding to the new challenges of our age. In every corner of the world, I have visited schools, colleges and cultural centres which are already generating new performances of solidarity and cooperation, drawing on decades of experiment, research and collaboration. Industrial waste is being creatively recycled into musical instruments and epic sculptures of vision. Rows of desks are being placed against walls to transform classrooms of complicity, competition and alienation into performances of community and innovation; and drama pedagogues, theatre artists and university departments of performing arts are working with teachers, police officers, prisoners and communities of special needs to nurture confidence, human rights, networks of cooperation and the intercultural sensitivities needed in our digital and plurinational societies.

Drama and theatre educators in the 90 countries that make up the present IDEA community understand that a safe place to play can nurture, heal and transform the imagination and enable children, young people and adults to practice new identities and worlds. A paradigm of education based on artistic languages is coinciding with an emerging global consensus that we need to change the world’s performance before it is too late.

There is a consensus among us that the artistic languages need to be fully integrated into education to nurture the multiple intelligences and capacity to live in a permanently-changing, technologically-driven, information-rich world, we are all too aware that in many ‘developed societies’ the arts in education are being replaced by laptops and ‘basic skills’, and that in every region of the world, most parents and teachers still think of the arts and creative industries as elitist luxuries or just irrelevant to their lives.

You are participating in a festival which is part of the world momentum for urgent change and the campaign to place the arts, particularly theatre and drama, at the heart of all learning and teaching, inside and outside schools, as a human right for all. Please send us photos and a few words about your experience. And I hope to see some of you in Brazil, for the next world congress, here in the Amazon, in July 2010!

On behalf of all the members of IDEA, I wish you a brilliant festival that will enrich your lives and make a contribution to a more human future.

Dan Baron Cohen
President of IDEA
Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education

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