Highlights

Performing Arts Advanced Programme

Curated by Miguel Pereira and Nuno Lucas

From 7th of February 2024 to 23rd of July 2024

APPLICATIONS CLOSED

Until 31st of July 2023 | Extension of applications until September 10

Introduction

We consider that having time for studying is a privileged moment that allows us to experimentat and reflect upon artistic practises. Our intent is that this experience creates a space for sharing, learning, meeting and research, beeing a possibilty for new connections and creating new ties.

In this programme we intend to plunge into some core principles that guide our artistical pratice: working on performativity skills and stage presence, the urgency and discipline in the act of artistic creation, the relationship between entertainment and reflection, composition and dramaturgy as central axes in the construction of a work and the crossing between different artistic disciplines. We will be present throughout the duration of the all programme and at the same time we will count with the cumplicity of a wide range of artists, that have influenced our paths, and who will contribute with new perspectives and that will enrich this experience.

The focus of the programme is in the process and in the encounters that it can create, with a view to creating a space where artistic relationships expand and influence our identity. To promote a creative experience in an expanded period of time that allows each person to consolidate their needs and discover new impulses that will feed each future artistic project. Without undermining the importance of (a) public performances and the sharing of one’s work, as an inherent and necessary gesture of artistic practice, we want to nurture a space of reflection and experimentation, to reconsider the way we see what we do and how we do it.

Collaboration is one of the fundamental foundations of our work, as such we also intend to propose different forms of artistic collaboration, defying the need for the individual signature in favour of the place of the “other”. The one that challenges us, confronts and compels us to look at things from a different point of view. We will also promote the circularity of roles inside of an artistical process by consciously beeing able to play different roles in it (dramaturg, assistant, performer, producer, etc).

A programme that lasts six months is inevitably a compact format. We believe that this will be a countainer of possibilities that will reveal some of them during the duration of the course, but as well to create a resonance that goes beyond that time. Sometimes experiences are not immediately digested and because of that our priority is to create a community of action and thinking, one that defies the finite time that this programme allows.

Outline

• Introduction: Forum Dança, Lisbon – 3 days
• Residency: O Espaço do Tempo, Montemor-o-novo – 1 week
• First block: Workshops and seminars with artists* – 4 weeks
• First Research Period: 2 weeks
• Second block: Workshops and seminars with artists* – 4 weeks
• Second research period: 2 weeks
• “Descampado”: Undefined terrain – 1 week
• Third Block: Workshops and seminars with artists* – 3 weeks
• Third research period: – 4 weeks
• Occupation: A moment to share and showcase work at TBA – Teatro do Bairro Alto and other spaces TBC – 2 weeks.

*Artists: Eleonora Fabião, João Fiadeiro, Jonathan Burrows, Joris Lacoste, Leticia Skrycky & Santiago Rodriguez Tricot, Loïc Touzé, Luara Raio & Acauã Shereya El_Bandide, Marcelo Evelin, Mark Tompkins (to be confirmed), Marlene Monteiro Freitas (to be confirmed), Pedro Paiva e Vera Mantero.

The programme begins with the participants’ welcoming at Forum Dança to introduce the cultural associations and spaces in Lisbon.

Afterwards there will be a weeklong residency at O Espaço do Tempo, in Montemor-o-Novo, to deepen the participants’ connection and solidify the group. Here, the participants will show each other their work and begin taking part in joint exercises, sharing experiences and motivation.

Once back in Lisbon, we will enter into an outline that alternates between approximately four weeks of workshops and seminars, followed by two weeks dedicated to research. We believe that this time dedicated to research not only helps digest and internalise the experiences that the participants have during the preceding workshops and seminars, but also acts as a space in which to explore and create from any questions that come up either during, or that may have come up before, the programme.

At the midpoint of the programme, we come to a point that we call DESCAMPADO: a period of time in which nothing is defined. A chance to go off course; the chance to create new, spontaneous work and connections. This idea of an open terrain filled with opportunity to explore is central to this moment in the course.

Before we get to the moment where we celebrate this whole experience, what we call the OCCUPATION, we still have four more weeks of research. During those four weeks, not only will we welcome several guests who make up the training programme as well as new accomplices, and we encourage the group to invite external people to the training.

The OCUPATION, which will take place in Teatro do Bairro Alto, is a moment for sharing far more than a showcase of the group’s final presentations. It’s a free space, open to all possible formats; from classes given by the group’s participants, conferences and demonstrations, the sharing of ideas, demonstrations of work both finished and unfinished, as well as proposing experiences to the public, etc.

A partnership with the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin (Paris, France) provides the possibility of creating an extension of PACAP 7 in October 2024 for the duration of CAMPING. This experience which lasts one week, is a place to encounter different artistic fields (prop design, visual arts, dance, theatre, etc) and from different parts of the world. Furthermore, it also allows, on the one hand, to come into contact with different types of approach, taking part in workshops, conferences, attending shows, and on the other, to be a platform for showcasing work and meetings that will provide new partnerships and future collaborations.

NOTE: All travel, lodging and food expenses associated with CAMPING are the participant’s own responsibility.

Top image credits: Miguel Pereira © Fernanda Ruiz | Nuno Lucas © Rita França.

Performing Arts Advanced Programme

Curated by Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz

From February 16 to July 30, 2023

APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED

Open until June 20, 2022

Presentation

In each epoch there are voices coming from the future that demand urgent and necessary changes in the present. The voices that reach us today from the future seem to suffer from that almost mute hoarseness of someone who, for years, repeats the same thing to exhaustion. Despite the countless declinations and formulations, more or less prosaic and poetic, that message from the future comes in a question as simple as this: “if you already know what needs to be done, why don’t you do it?” And it is not the apparent aphonia that makes these voices inaudible, but the voluntary effort to minimize, ignore or postpone them. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, comes to a synthesis that seems to us linked to the root of this deafness “…practical consent and simulated ignorance, (…) makes us live with ideas that, if we actually felt them, should transform our whole lives.” This contradiction between ideas and practice is a fertile place of artistic questioning for what it reveals of the futility of the barriers between the desire for transformation and action or the difficulty of some communities in letting go of the “bone” of privilege, not only over other communities, but over nature itself.

Alongside the unpredictability of what is to come, the obsolescence of some of the tools of thought and action that characterize our society, the voices that announce it, the resistance to hear them, there is a future to be imagined and to which we are already contributing actively or passively. PACAP is one of these places of imagination and experimentation where the circumstances of the world are in dialogue with the specificities and subjectivities of each artist and, therefore, a special place for the debate of our contradictions. The work of each artist communicates more or less directly with the multiple temporalities that constitute reality, influencing and absorbing it, being part of it and sometimes distancing themselves to create parallel worlds that guarantee a critical perspective on what goes on around us. In the curious balance between the particular and the universal, we see how the approach to what is most singular and specific in each artist has the capacity, not infrequently, to affect more people than those who are part of their usual circle. And in these successive affections we contribute to the diversity of imaginaries about the body, identity and relationships.

The PACAP, as a provisional community, is also a place for the composition of relationships between each participant, for the articulation between the individual and the collective, for experimentation with other interaction dynamics that overlap with those of privilege and power, such as care, generosity, attention, collaboration.

The PACAP calls for intensity simply because it is a long-term community. This awareness of the end gives the added energy and urgency needed to spark unusual relationships and excesses that escape control but are indispensable to the imagination. We can use this energy of being together to provoke either a re-centering or a slight shift in our ways of thinking/doing.

For all this, we know that beyond the incredible group of artists we invite to be with us, what makes the PACAP experience unique is the constellation of participants that will integrate this Program. We would like, therefore, to invite 16 people with the desire and the pleasure of experimentation, to imagine with us multiple futures through projects whose starting points can be a simple quality of movement, an urgent and current concept, a banal idea, an intuition to name, an object out of place, or any other thing that provokes the necessary restlessness to create.

Structure

PACAP 6 is structured in five moments:

• Moment 1 – Temporary community, from 16 February to 10 March;
• Moment 2 – Laboratories, meetings and conversations, from March 13 to May 19;
• Moment 3 – Research and Creation, from May 22 to July 2;
• Moment 4 – Public Presentation, from the 3rd to the 23rd of July;
• Moment 5 – Reflection/feedback, production and finishing, from the 24th to the 29th of July.

Access the tabs to find out more information about each of these moments that make up the program’s structure.

Top banner image credit © Joana Linda