Real Time LAB

Since Real Time Composition (RTC) began being systematised at the end of the 1990s, João Fiadeiro has been developing strategies to share this tool in an advanced and immersive way, beyond the occasional workshop.

This is a course that gives access to the multiple layers of this practice over the course of its duration, from the different angles and scales that make it up, and with balanced and interconnected doses of thought, experimentation and action.

A course where CTR is understood as a “field of study”, and which manages to reduce the distance between territories that are normally split between theory and practice; the fictional and the documentary; or observation and action.

A course where the appropriation of its tools and concepts happens intuitively and empirically, and where their application responds to the needs of each situation, circumstance and use.

We’ve had powerful and intense examples of this sharing in the past – from the “Case Studies” in the 2000s; AND_Lab in the early 2010s and, more recently, PACAP 5 here at Forum Dança in 2021. But these courses always had a parallel “agenda” – artistic creation, scientific research or the discipline of improvisation sensu lato – whereas CTR was always studied in relation to other ends and never as a “means”, a “between”, a “process”.

And it’s no coincidence that this happened. It’s not easy to set up a transmission platform to teach/share a practice that, to all intents and purposes, “serves no purpose”. Or rather, it serves “nothing”, the idea of “nothing”, here understood not as “absence” or “emptiness”, but as something still open, as potential, without having been contaminated and conditioned by a closed meaning or a label.

But this time, taking advantage of the framework of a CTR Study Centre like TECER, with the perspective of continuity that Forum Dança provides, and the fact that my most direct peers – Márcia Lança, Carolina Campos, Daniel Pizamiglio or Cláudia Dias – already have their own body of work in the research, transmission and application of CTR, we feel ready to dive into this void.

TEMPO REAL LAB will last 12 weeks (from 30 September to 20 December 2024) and will consist of 4 modules of 3 weeks each. Each module consists of a week dedicated to experimenting with one of the performative devices that synthesise Real-Time Composition and two weeks dedicated to studying the backbone of the tool (from its cardinal axis, premises, and principles) and a “focus experiment” of Real-Time Composition.

The very desire to draw up a timetable and a kind of “curriculum” is, at first glance, contrary to the nature of the practice of Real-Time Composition, which is to not to be domesticated and which, in its core modus operandi, inhabits the imponderable and the indeterminate. On the other hand, we also know that the rituals and protocols resulting from frameworks such as “course”, “laboratory” or even “school” are nothing more than generic references that attract people to a place. Once together, it is the people who decide what they are actually doing there. All things going well, the power structures associated with these terms will be deactivated, becoming mere pretexts that have mobilised us towards a meeting point. This encounter is the necessary condition for exchange and sharing, the ultimate goal of a transmission and research project.

Synthesis-Devices
The synthesis-devices that we will explore are the result of practices developed over the years of CTR’s research and reflect concerns such as: the relationship between performativity and the presence of the spectator, restriction and task as enhancers of environments of performative freedom, the relationship between word and action, the transit between affects, enunciations and their manifestations. These are concerns that synthesise the principles and premises that underpin his practice, especially those in which there is a displacement of the spatio-temporal perception of the event, of the synaesthetic type, where the senses cross, collide and overlap. Towards the start of the course, participants will be given details of each of the devices to be explored.

In the first week of each module, through the synthesis devices, we will have the chance to inhabit the CTR experience even before we begin to peel back the various layers that make it up. This action seems absolutely necessary to destabilise the “think first and do later” tendency so present in our Cartesian habits of access to knowledge. In this way, we want to “protect ourselves from ourselves” by reversing the order of the factors, placing ourselves first inside the experience in order to then study its echoes and aftershocks. As the course progresses, even this inversion will be subverted and access to the experience will take place without a clear distinction between practice and theory, in an attempt to blur and abolish the hierarchical boundaries between doing and thinking.

At the end of each week, the study of these devices will have a public presentation (four in total). This will allow us to study a central aspect of this practice: the influence of external observation on the way we present (and represent) ourselves. These presentations will also function as ways of “publishing” the experience (in the sense of leaving a public mark), thus producing discourse and creating an archive, one of TECER’s programme axes.

Backbone
During the mornings, the meeting point will be with João Fiadeiro and his collaborators, in order to study and experiment with Real-Time Composition from its cardinal axis, its premises and structuring principles, both from the point of view of its concepts and the tools that support it. This period will focus more on how the “machine” works and less on its applicability. If we think of a biological analogy, the CTR will be studied here as if it were a “stem cell”, still undifferentiated, which could become a “specialised” cell (muscle, blood or brain) at any moment.

Focus experiment
In the afternoon, the focus will shift to different forms of experimentation and application of this tool, based on the appropriation made over the years by artists such as Márcia Lança, Carolina Campos, Daniel Pizamiglio and Cláudia Dias, who have worked/are working intensively with João Fiadeiro and who have developed their own approaches to this tool. These sessions will allow participants to access different voices within Real-Time Composition, reinforcing the idea that, while it is a rigorous methodology with precise principles and premises, it is also open and permeable to the unique sensibility of those who incorporate it (both those who transmit it and those who receive it).

For this reason, the “study areas” designed for these sessions will be a direct consequence of the interests, imaginations and experiences of each artist who will guide the sessions. Depending on who is sharing it, and the angle from which it is approached, we will simultaneously be faced with repetition (of technique) and difference (of approach). This diagonal and oblique quality is part of the structure of this proposal and transmitting it through a multiple experience is the logical consequence of the way it operates.

A more detailed programme of individual intentions by each artist facilitating the sessions will be shared closer to the course.

We are looking for experienced professional artists, linked to performance and contemporary dance, who identify with a transversal, hybrid and oblique position of artistic thought-making. It is important that they already have a consistent body of work of reflection and experimentation, even if they are still at the beginning of their careers, in order to establish themselves as a collective of peers, available for a generous and reciprocal exchange of equals.

Even when a safe place of research is created, sustained by a work ethic based on principles of care and mutual respect, the practice of improvisation and performance, by definition, can take performers to places of intense sharing, often vulnerable, where doubt and error have a prominent place. We are therefore looking for profiles of participants who are emotionally mature enough to cope with situations of experimentation that shake them up, even if only a little.