PACAP

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

Performing Arts Advanced Programme

Curated by João Fiadeiro

in collaboration with Márcia Lança, Carolina Campos and Daniel Pizamiglio.

from September 13th, 2021, to July 30th, 2022

Introduction

PACAP 5’s programming will aim to provide a diverse and non linear approach towards artistic research, employing as reference the study and experimentation of improvisation through Real Time Composition (bloc I); collaborative practices starting from a shared question (bloc II); and practices of individual research for each participant (bloc III). Depending on their interests and availability, participants will be able to opt for a 3, 6 or 9 month course. In order to do the second and third blocs participants must attend the previous ones. The number of participants will decrease as the course progresses: 24 in the first bloc, 16 in the second and 8 in the third and final one, thereby establishing different intensities and ways of involvement with the different research practices of decision, collaboration and creation proposed within the course.

João Fiadeiro and some members of the Atelier RE.AL Collective (Márcia Lança, Carolina Campos and Daniel Pizamiglio) will be present during the entire duration of the course in order to replicate the laboratorial practice that has always characterized our activity. This aims to produce a sense of continuity between blocs and create the condition to deepen the research experience, which would be difficult to implement if the course were structured around a more fragmented and punctual participation of external guests. Regardless, running parallel to a more constant relationship with the Atelier RE.AL Collective we will invite artists and researchers to direct occasional workshops associated with the subjects being explored in each bloc. With these invitations we aim to create a critical distance with regards to our practice, to tune in to other ways of thinking-doing artistic research and generate some breathing room between the cycles.

Proposal

Facing the current global crisis, and as much for the stunning speed with which the hegemonic world tries to return to “normal” as for the monumental uncertainty that we keep experiencing, it is urgent to be more careful of our surroundings, more aware of details and more sensible to differences. It is very clear today that the systems’ sustainability and resilience does not result from our capacity to answer but from our ability to question. Specifically, our ability to frame the question. That is why a question like “not-knowing together” is so important. It acknowledges that it is not about knowledge or consumption. It is about savoring, questioning and imagining the world. Together.

Throughout the course we’ll aim to keep pressure “on the wound” implied by that question, repeating from different angles in different scales with different intensities and resisting the temptation to answer it. So that different formulations arise, different ways of being emerge, different positions present themselves. Somewhere, within all those differences, the “common” will appear. And when that happens we must be present to welcome it. Maybe that is our only responsibility: to show up when the present summons us.

To understand events from this perspective (to face not-knowing as the only thing we have) is what motivates us in designing this course as a durational practice of being in the now. We are confident that it is here, in this gap opened in time, faced with the impossibility of proceeding, that the real possibilities of action are found. Because if it is true that interruption can immobilize us (through the suspension of our expectations), it can also be an unique opportunity to deactivate the habit of letting ourselves be taken in by the frenetic economy of attention the regimes of organizing and controlling desire submit us to. The personal and collective experience that results from the suspension of knowledge is, in this perspective, a key element in our political, civic and artistic bearings.

It is in that gap – between the moment we collide with what affects us and the moment we relate to its possible manifestations – that the act of imagining, of disarranging and rearranging our perceptions, may take place. That exploration does not seek to stop movement nor to focus on it to the point of objectification. To explore the gap does not mean to propose an experience of contemplation or passiveness and even less to prioritize an embodiment of deep ennui as a space of creation. What this approach proposes is to exercise our abilities to move perception towards the periphery of the event, towards the infinitesimal relations that go through us and that can even contradict themselves. What this approach proposes is to find movement within pause. Time within time. The experience of coming to halt and taking notice.

“Notice” in portuguese means “reparar”. And “reparar” can be understood as re-parar (to stop again), to restore, to notice. Those three meanings, when activated simultaneously, are extremely powerful. This gesture of coming to a halt and taking notice (of pausing, of consideration and of paying attention) is but an exercise of commitment to the present that, subsequently, creates the conditions for the development of a sense of responsibility towards our surroundings and towards each other. / Curatorial Team

Curated by João dos Santos Martins

From January to July 2020

Thinking a study plan is always a conflict between the ideal and the possible, between a certain imposition of a way of seeing and being in the world, and the creation of conditions to originate other worlds. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, education is of no use but to respond and to rid ourselves of the “suicidal aggressiveness of collective selfishness”. This program is no more than that. Focused on experimentation, it will seek to challenge the paradigms of contemporary dance and choreography through the activation of a critical and discursive positioning, although always committed to these practices. But this program is mainly thought of as a protected time and place to encourage all participants to develop and analyze their artistic practice in a collective environment, intellectual and artistically stimulating.

In this program classes are not distinguished between ‘technical’, ‘research’ or other. We assume that there can be no distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge and that it is this division that induces an alienation in the work itself. The program is based solely on the proposals of the artists and speakers who will spend time with the participants, enhancing common experiences of questioning and transformation. The invited speakers share the need to demystify the body/head, action/thought, practice/theory dichotomies, seeking to articulate discourse and practice as integral parts and members of ways of making and thinking, and not as opposite poles.

We believe in the practice of dance as a support for artistic practice that is in permanent dialogue with other supports and with the genealogies of the history of art in general. We will seek a dialogue with these various ‘supports’ and with the agents who practice them, through visits to local artists’ studios and partnerships with surrounding structures and institutions who establish bridges with the local artistic context. And as art making is always in dialogue with its ways of apprehension, the program is continually reinforced with visits to exhibitions, film screening, going to shows and conferences of agents from various domains.

We believe that part of the artistic labor is necessarily self-taught. In this sense, we will privilege the cultivation of a space for sharing, collaboration and group work in order to build common knowledge and experiences that encourage participants to deepen their practices, individually or collectively. During the duration of the program, studios will be available so that participants can develop their work whose processes will be shared over six months. At the end of the cycle all participants should publicly present their work, articulating thus, as Rancière says, “the ways of doing, their corresponding forms of visibility and the possible ways of thinking their relations”. / João dos Santos Martins 

Bio

João dos Santos Martins (Santarém, 1989) is an artist working through dance and choreography. He began his dance studies at the Higher School of Dance, in Lisbon, and at P.A.R.T.S., in Brussels, and completed his choreographic studies between exerce, in Montpellier, and the Institute for Applied Theater Studies, in Giessen.

Since 2008, he articulates his practice between producing work and collaborating as a dancer with other artists such as Ana Rita Teodoro, Eszter Salamon, Moriah Evans and Xavier Le Roy. His work is characterized by a diversity of apparatuses that invest in the production of conflicts between the subject who dances and the danced object. His pieces are usually developed in collaboration with other artists such as in Anthroposcenes (2017) with Rita Natálio and Pedro Neves Marques, and Where is the Coat? (2018) with Cyriaque Villemaux and Ana Jotta.

Since 2017 he has expanded his practice to other parallel formats. He curated the cycle New—Old Dance in Santarém, with performances, workshops, conversations and exhibitions; created alongside Ana Bigotte Vieira a device for a collective historicity of dance in Portugal – For a Timeline to Be — and founded a journal — Coreia — dedicated to the discourse produced by works and artists, in close relationship to dance.

Confirmed artists and speakers

Ana Jotta (PT), Ana Pi (BR), Ana Rita Teodoro (PT), Antonia Baehr (DE), Christine de Smedt (BE), Christophe Wavelet (FR), Chrysa Parkinson (US/SE), Eszter Salamon (HU), Fred Moten (US), Joana Sá (PT), João Fiadeiro (PT), Latifa Laâbissi (FR), Moriah Evans (US), Paula Caspão (PT), Pedro Barateiro (PT), Rita Natálio (PT), Scarlet Yu (HK), Vera Mantero (PT), Xavier le Roy (FR).

Participants

Alina Ruiz Folini (AR), Aline Combe (FR), Bianca Zueneli (IT), Emily Barasch (US), Isadora Alves (PT), Isis Andreatta (BR), Julián Pacomio (ES), Laura Ríos (CU), Laure Fleitz (FR), Leire Aranberri (ES), Maria Abrantes (PT), Marina Silva / Dubia (BR), Natália Mendonça (BR), Randy Reyes (US/GT), Sara Vieira Marques (PT), Suiá Ferlauto (BR).

Showings

• Cycle of presentations in Lisbon, scheduled to take place in July 2020, as part of a programming cycle at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

PACAP4 Activities