The time has come at last and everyone at St. Julian’s is proud and excited to be hosting the 2005 middle school ISTA festival.  I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all the international school teachers, students, high school associates, ISTA staff members and local workshop leaders to the school and, of course, to Portugal.

This weekend is evidently an opportunity to share experiences and make connections with people from different countries and cultures.  We are also aiming, through the festival, to make links across the art forms and explore the potential of art, technology, dance and music to contribute to live performance.

The festival’s theme, Odysseys and Oddities, reflects the journey you have come on to arrive here, but also the journey we hope will occur over the four days of the festival.  Theatre is and should be a way of discovering things about yourself and others and a means to explore and create.  ISTA festivals are intense and focused experiences and this one will be no different.  It is an opportunity to learn new skills and experiment with areas of the art form that you may be unfamiliar with, so I urge all participants to give themselves over fully to the process and be willing to travel a little this weekend and maybe even take a few wrong turns in order to arrive somewhere new.

The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are suddenly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one.

Peter Brook

I hope you enjoy your time in Portugal and that your journey is a happy and fruitful one.

Joanne Scott

Festival co-ordinator