On January 13th, during the ISPA Congress (International Society for the Performing Arts) in New York, Bogotá was selected as the official host for the 2014 ISPA Congress. This event is considered to be one of the most important international performing arts events which unites more than 350 experts in the field.

The International Society for the Performing Arts is a non-profit network made up of public and private organizations, as well as individual performing arts experts (theatre, dance, classical music, pop musics, interdisciplinary creations), who come together with the common objective of diffusing their disciplines, studying the impact of culture on society, and to determine how artistic creations can help to create a better world.

Some of its members include the world’s most reputable organizations who promote the movement of performing arts, including theaters, independent artists, managers, cultural public policy makers, foundations, advisers, and symphony orchestra conductors, among many others.

ISPA holds two annual events. The first one always takes place in the organization’s headquarters, New York, in January. The second event takes place in June and is hosted by cities that have a significant potential in the performing arts like Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna, London, Toronto, Sidney, Hong Kong, Mexico City and Sao Paolo, which have all had the privilege of hosting this important event. Now, it’s Bogotá’s turn.

Why Bogotá?

Since the beginning of 2011, the Bogotá Convention Bureau, the Secretaría de Cultura, Recreación y Deporte, the Dirección Distrital de Relaciones Internacionales, Invest in Bogotá, the Instituto Distrital de las Artes, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá and Proexport Colombia have been working together on an application to host the ISPA Congress in 2014.

In 2012, the Congress will be held in Seoul and it will be held in Poland in 2013.

In order to determine if Bogotá met the Congress’s requirements, the Bogotá Convention Bureau, with support from Proexport, hosted David Baile, ISPA’s Executive Director, and Anthony Sargent, General Director of The Sage Geteshead, a center for music and musical discovery, and his delegates, last September, during their one week visit to learn about Bogotá’s culture and performing arts.

Important public and private figures including Clara López, Bogotá’s ex-mayoress, Mariana Garcés, Minister of Culture, Catalina Ramírez, Secretary of Culture, and Ana Martha de Pizarro, Director of the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro, also participated in the week long visit.

What they took home was the image of an emerging metropolis where culture and performing arts play an important role in the city’s agenda. The ISPA delegates realized that Latin America has a lot to offer in this field, and that Bogotá has a lot to offer the world.