PACAP 5
2021/2022

• Forum Dança (Lisbon)
• Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-o-Novo, Alentejo)
• TBA – Teatro do Bairro Alto (Lisbon)
• Estúdios Vítor Córdon (Lisbon)

The course is aimed at dancers, choreographers, performers and other artists whose practices relate to performance, body and movement. Applicants should position themselves as peers and not students and see artistic creation as a space of research through art, meaning a platform for the exploration of processes of correlation, collaboration and decision in an environment that does not distinguish between theory and practice and promotes permeability between subjects, thereby regarding the work of art as a consequence of a process and not as its end.

Note

1. The language of the course will be English and Portuguese, depending on who is guiding the session and the needs of each moment.
2. Scholarships will be awarded to 3 participants, after acceptance in the program, who can ensure simultaneous translation for small groups. The scholarship consists of a reduction of 50% of the total fee.

The submission of applications is done solely and exclusively through the form available below. Applications will be accepted in Portuguese or English, and must include:

• Motivation letter or motivation video where the applicant addresses the reasons why he or she is applying. (1 A4 page maximum in pdf format or a 3 min video maximum – in the case of sending a video, you must submit a link where it can be viewed)
• Curriculum vitae with picture and biography (2 A4 pages maximum in pdf format)
• Link to Portfolio focusing on the applicants work with texts, images and links to video documentation (10 A4 maximum in pdf format)
• Contact information of two individuals with whom the applicant has had a relationship (professor, curator, programmer, collaborator, etc.) and that can provide an external perspective of the applicant’s profile.
• Clear indication of the blocs that the applicant intends to attend (I, I+II or I+II+III). It is only possible to attend the second or third bloc having attended the previous blocs.

! WARNING !
We ask that you do not send, with your applications, links to your work in the form of file download. Links should only be available for viewing files online.
We only accept your CV and your cover letter as a downloadable file, everything else must be freely accessible and online.

Note

1. Individual on-line interviews will be scheduled with the direction of Forum Dança on a date to be defined.

Notes

1. Tuition fees must be paid until the 30th of the previous month. The first payment must be made until 30 August 2021.
2. If the course is paid in full until 30 August 2021 a 10% discount will apply.
3. Scholarships will be awarded to 3 participants, after acceptance in the program, who can ensure simultaneous translation for small groups. The scholarship consists of a reduction of 50% of the total fee.

Monday to Friday from 10 am to 5 pm.

The proposal for this bloc will be to immerse ourselves (intensively and extensively), in ways of researching, experimenting and applying Real Time Composition (Composição em Tempo Real), a (theoretical) practice and a (practical) theory that positions itself as a field (as in a place, a territory) with the sole purpose of welcoming the forces at play in each instant in what we conventionally designate as “present”. From Real Time Composition’s perspective, inside this present time is simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. A non-linear time, experienced as a Möbius strip where interior and exterior, before and after, form and force, merge and confound.

Before any presentations or introductions, the course’s first week will begin with a collective performance involving the 24 participants entitled “O que fazer daqui para trás” (loosely translatable as “What to do from here on backwards”), in its expanded version. This is how we’ll present ourselves: through action and through the traces our positions leave behind. Only in the second week will the group have the time to get to know each other better and share their individual paths.

Throughout the duration of the bloc João Fiadeiro will be accompanied by Márcia Lança and Daniel Pizamiglio (with 15 and 10 years’ experience in Real Time Composition, respectively). We will also have the continuous presence of “text-worker” Romain/Emma Bigé, a French trans*feminist philosopher and dancer with whom João Fiadeiro has collaborated many times (namely as co-curator of the show “Draftings Interior Techniques”, on Steve Paxton’s work and legacy). Romain/Emma will organize weekly seminars that place Real Time Composition’s experimental practices in relation with (in her own words) “dance’s capacity for celebrating wryd and rare forms of tenderness between humans & other critters of Terra. She will offer Textual Practices, including: Sexy Library (because reading is sexy), Blind Book Club, Conceptual Speed Dating and other Marvels to think with texts and bypass the cortex”. The choreographer and improviser Lisa Nelson will also be present, running a two week workshop focusing on her “Tuning Scores” research. Among João Fiadeiro’s peers that deal with ways of  think-operate decision and performance, Lisa is the one with whom he has the most affinities and an enormous respect. Her presence will serve not only to share with the participants the absolutely singular practice of this american artist, but also to  put in relation two composition and improvisation tools that share an enormous amount of questions and research topics.

This bloc will culminate with two weeks dedicated to the study, experimentation and reenactment of the performance EXISTENCE (EXISTÊNCIA), taking place at Lisbon’s Teatro do Bairro Alto (a PACAP 5 strategic partner and co-producer). EXISTENCE premiered in 2002 at Paris’ Centre Pompidou and was João Fiadeiro’s only project where Real Time Composition took place in a public setting, placing performers and audience in a space of radical engagement with the present and with the idea of know-knowing together. The EXISTENCE experience was structural in the systematization and processing of Real Time Composition as a tool and deeply influenced dozens of choreographers, performers and artists that went through that project. The visual artist Walter Lauterer and the musician Arnold Noid (that respectively handled the real time composition of space and sound in the original project) will be in Lisbon for the public presentations with the course’s participants.

In this second bloc (now reduced to 16 participants) we want the group to keep working with the issue of collaborative processes, but this time from a common questioning standpoint (an approach positioned between the “absence of a previous question” explored in the first bloc and the existence of an “individual question” to be explored in the third bloc).

This is an issue that has occupied João Fiadeiro’s practice since the 1990’s and that in a certain way was the reason why a tool like Real Time Composition began being developed. At the time the ambition was to develop a common language that enabled a shared experimentation field but without letting that language restrict us (condemn us) into following a previously established direction (usually dictated by the author). But at the same time we weren’t interested in developing an exclusively horizontal experience because we knew that simply removing the author from the equation wouldn’t stop the power structures, now implicit, from taking hold of the narrative.

What we found is that there is a colossal difference in the way this “diagonal strategy” of addressing collaboration is applied if we are facing the perspective of an individual decision (as when improvising or even in solo work) or that of an collective decision (as it happens in group projects). While at the individual level the “matter of the affect” can remain in the shadow, protected from light and labeling (and afford the luxury of only revealing itself at the end), at the collective level if the affect (what moves and connects us) is not shared at the beginning of the collaborative process then group dynamics can easily fall into conflictual or submissive modes of relation. What we strive for is the creation of conditions for relations based on “reciprocal” approaches to be formed and, along the way, to deactivate binary logics where one either tries to convince someone else of its opinion or subjugates itself to theirs.  A reciprocal relationship implies that we share “the affect” and the forces at play at the moment of our encounter (by definition vulnerable, incomplete and fragile). It implies that we listen and pay attention to the (weak) signals that the event is sending us. In one sentence: implies accepting that we do not know (together).

How to identify, circumscribe and share a collective affect in a way that we can then work the relation and the encounter? And how is it possible to create a shared vital force that allows the finished work to translate an unrest which is transversal to everyone and not a patchwork of tendencies, desires and disperse questioning?

These questions will be the starting point for the research in the second bloc. They will be placed and managed mainly by the voices (and the bodies) of those that have experienced first-hand the tension between authorship, authority, authorization and autonomy: the performers and co-creators of the group works. This research period will then be exclusively mediated by Márcia Lança and Carolina Campos with the occasional presence of João Fiadeiro. Not only did Márcia and Carolina had central roles in the creation of the RE.AL’s group pieces but, in recent years, they have been working together in co-authorship on different projects where these questions occupy a prominent place.

The results of the research developed in this bloc will also be presented at Teatro do Bairro Alto, in a format and configuration to be defined.

In parallel to this continuous research, instigated and mediated by Márcia and Carolina  (but developed in a self-organized manner by the course’s participants), we will have the participation of some invited collectives that will function as “case studies” by sharing their practices, experiences and questions regarding collaborative creation. Firstly we will welcome João dos Santos Martins with the project  Companhia (Company), created in a collective manner in 2018 (by the same group that created the “Projecto continuado” in 2015). The project focuses on the term “company”, simultaneously referring to the idea of a dance company, the company of other people and the notion of collective and interdependency that exists in the community experience. Secondly we’ll have the Hormigonera project – meaning concrete mixer in english  -, a collaborative creation practice that researches dramaturgical processes and alternative modes of collaboration. It is driven by a group of Uruguayan artists working in the languages of space, matter, light and sound to invoke performative action with the aim of giving a voice to “poor” and “marginal” materials and putting themselves, as artists, in service of their agency. Lastly, we will have the catalan collective Orquestina de Pigmeos, that operates between performance, sound and cinema, working mostly in site-specific environments in close proximity with local communities. Finally in this bloc we’ll also have the participation of David-Alexandre Guéniot, director of the publishing company GHOST, who will develop a project with the participants that will culminate in an artist(s) book produced in a collective manner.

Having arrived at this stage of the course, now with 8 participants, the focus will switch to the individual research of each participant. João Fiadeiro, Carolina Campos and Daniel Pizamiglio will mainly function as facilitators of the research process so the participants can   use the tools previously  labored and experimented in the  first and second blocs and transfer them towards their individual research.  The final presentation – that will once again take place at Teatro do Bairro Alto –  may take the form of a work in progress, a prototype or even a “work” as long as  the focus will not be on the product but in the process. What we are interested in questioning and identifying are the adequate ways of presentation so that the potency encompassed in the initial question can be translated in such a way that there is a correlation between the artist’s initial affect and the action made public.

This public dimension of the sharing process is fundamental so that the “other” stops being idealized and there is the recognition that a gesture is only really concluded when it is received by a third party. It is often in this moment of “collision” with  the other that we realize clearly if what we said-did was exactly what we wanted to do-make. it rarely is. But what matters, especially in a training- and researching frame, is the recognition of that difficulty so that, from there, we can fail again. “Fail better”, as Beckett puts it.

During the bloc we will be visited by five artists – La Ribot, Gustavo Sumpta, Mette Edvardesen, Eleonora Fabião and the duo Luara Learth / Acauã Elbandido – who will share with the group the way they “failed” to get to the research place where they are. These are artists that share similar assertions in the relation they develop with the artistic gesture, mainly in what concerns their work ethics and radical commitment with the present time. They also have in common a critical positioning towards their disciplines, not letting themselves be captured by any type of artificial and manipulative labeling.  Despite these contact points we made sure of having contrasting artists, on a formal, geographical and generational level.

Our expectation is that access to their ways of operating will impart on the participants this simple equation: even if the ways leading up to the construction of a work (gesture, action) will always be multiple, it will invariably be as a result of the collision (and relation) between our strengths  and our vulnerabilities (between poetry and savagery), that something vital and urgent can emerge.