As part of Seminar 2, practitioners based in Northern Ireland were invited to consider the assumptions that are brought to intercultural projects and how these become challenged or reinforced in practice. They were also asked to consider the challenges and opportunities for intercultural exchange that emerge in practice. What ideologies are we seeking to reaffirm? What are we seeking to challenge? How is this playing out in the ways that we have now come to ‘manage’ arts and culture?
Artistic Director of Terra Nova, Andrea Montgomery discussed how and why Terra Nova’s work focuses on the intercultural. Terra Nova is Northern Ireland’s only professional inter- cultural theatre company. Their mission is “to make excellent theatre where different cultures meet, people explore and the world is changed”. To enable this to happen they develop productions in collaboration with like-minded local, national and international theatre companies, artists, venues and communities. They have worked on artistic and social projects across Northern Ireland and in Hong Kong, Macau, Iran, France, England, the Republic of Ireland and Canada.