PACAP 8
2025

Forum Dança invites choreographer Meg Stuart as a curator for the 8th edition of PACAP to take place in Lisbon, 2025, who proposes her concept and project Mystery School of Choreography. For this edition, Meg Stuart has invited Ana Rocha as artistic collaborator.

Mystery School of Choreography (MyS) is an unconventional experimental studies programme for performing artists. It’s a place where fascination for the metaphysical will be intertwined with composition, choreography, and art making.

During these six months, from February to July 2025, we will work in the studio at Forum Dança, in the theatre space at Teatro do Bairro Alto, in the galleries at Culturgest, surrounded by nature and far from the Portuguese capital at O Espaço do Tempo, Montemor-o-Novo, and in São Miguel Island, Azores, in Walk&Talk Biennial. From the indoor space to the street, we will go through these residencies together for reflection and practice.

MyS will consist of encounters with artists who will share their personal cosmology, expertise, and process. Participants will approach MyS themes through moments of reflection and, above all, through collective moments of performance and dialogue. MyS proposes to create a space that is not about converting or indoctrinating, but about revealing and creating structures for the process of sharing.

How can we connect to that knowledge more precisely? By starting from a position of not-knowing. MyS seeks to cultivate the attitude of the beginner, letting go and shedding expectations. By starting from what fascinates us, we are also practicing a sense of wonder, a lucid dreaming together. We will be guided by nature, cause and effect, energetic transformation, disorientation and divination, sacred geometry, rhythmic visions and voice, alchemy, love and politics, non-locality and quantum physics, deep and inner contemplation.

MyS takes transmission of hidden knowledge and insights, which are not accessible through conventional means, as a foundation of learning and creating art through a shared exploration.

MyS will focus on questions that go beyond purely physical practices and can be explored in a collective dimension, such as:

How can we foster imagination in ourselves in correlation with our surroundings?
How can we (re)align our research processes within an interdimensional wonder?
How can we negotiate and learn from indeterminacy, non-defined corporeal spaces, and invisible realms as much as fictional futures?
How can we create a more holistic, compassionate understanding of it?
How do we share fascination?
How do we value different functions and forms, different kinds of material and research?
How do we develop and cultivate a fountain of creative collaboration with energies, seen and unseen forces?

MyS is a step towards a deeper understanding of learning, practice, and activation of knowledge that is often present in performing arts but not directly addressed. In MyS we will sketch possibilities for the future of dance and community.

PACAP 8 / MyS programme is designed as a transformative journey. At MyS, we will work together: environmentally aware, socially engaged, going through metaphysical access to transform deep learning into a political act. We will work together with the body and the voice, with critical perceptive thinking.

We are looking for experienced professional performance artists open to work in a collective art programme. Makers and dreamers who have a strong interest in the interweaving of the metaphysical and art, with a generosity of spirit, free-thinkers, open for a shared, rigorous and playful exploration of the unknown. MyS programme looks for participants who have done inner emotional work, grounded, nonconformist, sensitive to other’s processes and highly motivated. Participants are required to be flexible, passionate about improvisation, open to chance procedures and experimental structures.

During the MyS programme, be ready to let go of preconceived notions, be willing to trust a collective process and design other possible futures through an experimental, intensive, and rigorous process. Participants will have the opportunity to research and compose in various formats and settings. MyS is a six-month collaborative programme, where participants will be co-creators and collaborators with nature, forces unknown and invited artists.