The Hemispheric Institute’s website is the main portal to our project. We have a vast collection of invaluable materials related to performance and politics in the Americas, including online archives of hundreds of hours of video footage; a series of multimedia casebooks or “web cuadernos”; our online journal e-misférica; images; artist profiles; interviews; discussion forums, and more. Some of the materials are accessible to the public, and some are for institutional members only. Our Virtual Learning Environment has the capacity to include:
Every two years, the Institute hosts an Encuentro—a ten-day conference/festival—in a different site in the Americas. Fostering experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, each Encuentro brings together approximately 500 scholars, artists, activists and students to take part in a program of keynote lectures, work groups, performances, installations, roundtable discussions, exhibits, video screenings and hands-on performance workshops. Past Encuentros have taken place in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, the United States, Argentina and Colombia. The 2011 Encuentro is scheduled to take place in Canada.
One of the central goals of the Institute is to create new knowledge and to inform new ways of thinking about knowledge. The Institute hosts team-taught seminars that combine the face-to-face quality of traditional classrooms with online collaboration, enabling students throughout the Americas to communicate and work together online. The Institute also offers an annual summer course in Lima, taught by major scholars in the field, and co-taught by Peru’s foremost theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, which is open to students from member universities. Students can take the course for credit as an Independent Study at their home institution.
The Institute’s work groups are thematically based and foster sustained, interdisciplinary and collaborative research between scholars across the Americas. In 2004, the Institute’s Intangible Cultural Heritage work group was invited by UNESCO to develop its standards on social practices, rituals and festive events, as part of the implementation of the 2003 International Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. Other work groups have focused on Circulating Religiosities; Trauma, Memory and Performance; Latin American “Orients;” Afro-Amerindian Performance; Enslaved Bodies; and Carnival and Popular Fiestas in the Americas, among others. Some of these projects culminate in edited volumes, special issues of journals, or individual publications.
The Hemispheric Institute welcomes additional Institutional Members. For information and details, please contact us. Membership gives institutions access to all our online resources: course materials and teaching modules, digital archives, team-taught courses, working groups, student access to off-campus programs, registration for one faculty member and one student at the Encuentro, and many other privileges. Each member institution names one member to the Hemispheric Institute Executive Board.
We do not offer individual membership; individuals attend Encuentros by application. The Hemispheric Institute is based at New York University. It has been funded by New York University, Institutional Members, and by generous grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Housed in NYU’s Tamiment Library, the Archive of the Hemispheric Institute includes books, slides, videos, posters, drawings, and other fragile documents that have been donated by affiliated artists and scholars in order to assure their preservation for future generations. Cognizant that materials, whenever possible, should belong to the communities that produce them, the Hemispheric Institute only accepts materials that cannot be safely preserved in their communities or countries of origin. Additionally, the Hemispheric New York reference library makes available videos, rare books, newspaper articles, photographs, posters, program notes and other performance materials from throughout the Americas. These non-circulating materials are available for study by members of the Hemispheric Institute.
The Hemispheric Institute has developed two centers, one in New York City and one in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, which provide programming, access to research materials, and performance and workshop spaces, for members of the Hemispheric Institute. Hemispheric New York features special programs, such as EMERGENYC, lectures, film series, conferences, and performance workshops, some of which are exclusively for members, and some which are open to the public at large. We also have a reference library that houses rare books, journals, video viewing stations, and performance ephemera. Centro Hemisférico at FOMMA is a performance and research space developed in conjunction with Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA), a Mayan women's theater collective based in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. Featuring a state–of–the–art digital studio and a fully outfitted theater space, the center's mission is to promote, showcase and archive local performance practices and develop research, artistic creation and cultural programming with and for local, national and international communities. Centro Hemisférico presents public performances, visual arts exhibits, workshops, film screenings and other cultural activities. It also provides space for institutional members to host work group meetings, performance workshops, and academic courses.
e-misférica: Performance and Politics in the Americas, the Institute’s flagship publication, is a biannual, tri-lingual, peer-reviewed online journal that features scholarly essays, multimedia artist presentations, activist profiles, and reviews. www.emisferica.org