Committee Meeting Minutes: June 14, 2006

American Theatre Critics Association
International Committee

Meeting Minutes

Prince-of-Wales Hotel
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, June 14, 2006, 12:30 PM EST

In attendance:

Jonathan Abarbanel
Kerri Allen
Ira Bilowit
Bruce Burgun
Marie Kilker
Glenn Loney
Rita Faye Smith
Philip Stephenson

Committee membership is ostensibly at 18, but consensus is that only active members should remain on the rolls. Nina DaVinci-Nichols officially resigned from the committee on June 14, 2006.

Committee vice chair Kerri Allen opened the meeting at 12:30.

2006 IATC Young Critics Seminars

• There is currently one person slated to apply to each. (Korea, Lithuania, France.) Kerri noted that application process has been informal and has drafted and distributed an official application form. Jonathan indicated that FATCA is the body that applicants should approach for future travel funding.

World Conference in Seoul

• ATCA may send three delegates. Deadline to confirm U.S. delegation was May 30. Kerri Allen is the only ATCA delegate attending the conference. Jonathan suggests the vice chair should be the official voting person rather than the Executive Committee (ExCom) Chair and that this distinction be stressed to the committee at-large and to the membership in general.
• General consensus is that anyone interested may submit an academic paper to the Congress. The committee needs to confirm if one party may present a paper on behalf of another. Suitable themes must be related to “Theatricality and Criticism in the U.S.” The conference title is “The End of Criticism.”

Yahoo! Group

• There is some resistance/concern spurred by unfamiliarity with the concept, but Kerri stresses its ease of use and the possibility of being equally informed nationally and internationally as an organization, as well as link directly to the main ATCA website.
• The general consensus is that we could use the Yahoo! Group to organize a roundtable/ referendum initiative to justify the importance of having international involvement, which hasn’t been as integrated in ATCA as in parallel organizations abroad. This could lead to a panel at the next ATCA conference, perhaps this winter, with the intention increasing general membership awareness of matters international.

New Business

• Jonathan brings up new business asking how we can better work to have advocacy for international awareness, integration, and hopefully a World Congress. He notes that alternative funding for such a Congress might be obtained from national agencies (like the NEA) and individual arts-friendly foundations (Heinz, Ford, etc.) An informal vote is taken and the committee is excited and receptive to a U.S.-hosted IATC World Congress.

The next meeting of the international committee will take place later in the week in Stratford. Date, time and place TBA.

The meeting was adjourned at 1:35 pm.