About Ponte em Cena
A partnership between a São Paulo cultural organisation and a Dutch design studio, in the year Brazil and the Netherlands complete 200 years of diplomatic relations.
How it started
Cultural exchange projects tend to end in a performance: one side shows its culture, the other watches, everyone applauds and goes home. Ponte em Cena was designed against that format.
The question organising the project is a different one. What happens when the two traditions stop performing for each other and work on the same problem together? Brazil brings Teatro do Oprimido (Theatre of the Oppressed), which puts bodies into a situation and tests alternatives. The Netherlands brings a school of design that structures listening and names what is at stake. Neither one alone gets to where the two together arrive.
The proposal was submitted in April 2026 to the Cultural Connections 2026 call of the Embassy and the Consulate-General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Brazil, and approved on 7 May 2026. The call supports cultural projects that bring the two countries closer in the year the diplomatic relationship turns 200.
For Ponte em Cena, that support means three workshops through 2026 and Dutch institutional participation in the activities. (in)PULSO is the applicant organisation; Regen Studio is responsible for production and for the Dutch methodological layer. Delivery runs from April to December 2026.
Who makes it
Two organisations, one on each side, with distinct responsibilities and shared authorship.
(in)PULSO — Comunicação Viva · Brazilian lead
A cultural organisation based in São Paulo since 2022 (inpulso.art.br), directed by Isaac Medeiros. An actor, theatre teacher and communication specialist with more than a decade in theatre pedagogy, Isaac works from Theatre of the Oppressed to design immersive experiences in which performance becomes an instrument of dialogue, empathy and collective exploration. His practice runs across the cultural sector, education and the corporate world, always positioning participants not as an audience but as co-creators.
Regen Studio · Dutch lead
A design and innovation studio (regenstudio.world) run by Yvo Hunink, a design thinking specialist with experience in participatory decision-making: methods that put diverse groups into structured dialogue to co-create shared solutions. During his university years in the Netherlands he volunteered running student theatre companies, an experience that still shapes how he sees theatricality as a language of collective change.
200 years
In 2026 diplomatic relations between Brazil and the Netherlands complete two centuries. An anniversary like that usually produces ceremony. Ponte em Cena would rather treat it as a question: after two hundred years, what do the two countries still not know about each other, and what can they build together that neither would build alone?
That is why the third workshop tries to leave the anniversary with an agenda rather than a speech.
Authorship and reuse
The methodology is co-authored by the two organisations and published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence: it may be reused and adapted for non-commercial purposes, with attribution and under the same licence. The intention is for the method to outlive the project that funded it.
The support of the Consulate-General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in São Paulo is acknowledged in all materials. The content of the workshops and publications is the responsibility of the producing organisations.