Theory Course: Aesthetics – Writings and Testimonies

2, 9, 16, 23 and 30 March

13 April 2020

Mondays 19:00 – 21:30

ar.co Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual

Writings and testimonies of, and about, artists, in their varied forms – diaries, letters, lessons and reflections – allow us to explore the creative process, as well as the reflections of aesthetics and philosophy on this theme, by travelling in a non-linear way through generations, epochs and art movements (looking at instances of romanticism, modernity, modernism, postmodernism and contemporary art). Instead of becoming archival material, the writings become messages for their recipients and possible friends.

Price:
110€ + 11€ (inscription) + 2,50 (insurance)

Where & Organization:
ar.co Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual
Antigo Mercado de Xabregas, Rua Gualdim Pais, 1900-255, Lisboa
Phone: (+351) 21 880 10 10
Email: secretaria@arco.pt
Website: https://arco.pt

Photo credit: Nuno Martinho

Theory Course: Aesthetics – Experience and Experimentation

9 and 16 December 2019

6, 13, 20, 27 January 2020

Mondays 19:00 – 21:30

ar.co Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual

In the creative act, as in its reception, aesthetic experience tends to exceed the limits of perceptibility. Following in the path of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, the course will approach this fact from the point of view of an aesthetics of the virtual, where the perception of forms can be amplified through the forces that trigger, populate and express them. Establishing connections with different artistic processes, we will explore concepts such as force, becoming, event, aïon, plane of immanence and the virtual. 

Price:
110€ + 11€ (inscription) + 2,50 (insurance)

Where & Organization:
ar.co Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual
Antigo Mercado de Xabregas, Rua Gualdim Pais, 1900-255, Lisboa
Phone: (+351) 21 880 10 10
Email: secretaria@arco.pt
Website: https://arco.pt

Photo credit: Nuno Martinho

Professorship

Movement III and IV – B.A. in Theatre

30 September 2018 – 10 July 2020

Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema – Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa

The aim of the curricular unit Movement consists of developing movement perception and its expression, convoking different approaches that stem from somatic practices, contemporary dance and internal martial arts. Throughout an experimentation on the relation body-other-space-time, both the training and composition become ways of integrating tools for research and creation, and therefore developing technical and expressive skills. Deep listening of the movement of the body and imagination lead to the recognition of events and their small changes, as we continuously follow the difference of each moment.

Where & Organization:
Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema – Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa
Avenida Marquês de Pombal, 22 B
2700-571 Amadora
Phone: (+351) 214 989 400, (+351) 965 912 370, (+351) 910 510 304
Email: estc@estc.ipl.pt
Website: https://www.estc.ipl.pt/

Photo credit: Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema – Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa

Essay

Mira, Ana “Caminha a tua vida: a autobiografia como acto crítico em “Still/Here” de Bill T. Jones (1994), in: Rostos do Si: Autobiografia Confissão, Terapia, Gianfranco Ferraro / Marta Faustino / Bartholomew Ryan (eds.), Vendaval, Lisboa, 2019, pp. 291-310

This book chapter addresses the dance theatre piece Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones (1994) and the chain of reactions that it generated in the dance critical acts of Croce (1994), Stuart (1995) and Lepecki (1995). On another sphere, Foucault (1984), influenced by Kant (1784), walked in the direction of a future philosophy and its critical attitude, as the art of not being governed quite so much and developing a new practice of values.
If here is the place where one can stand in the present day, then still calls forth the many faces of the self needed to persevere, understand, survive and, eventually, cross over. For such courage, one may be asked to mirror his life story and confess what one loves, fears and wants. Collectively and, at the same time, as an autonomous being in a permanent critical attitude in relation to the present, tracing autobiographies is approached here as a way to express, govern and reinvent oneself in a myriad of faces.
“—Walk your life”, says Bill T. Jones in the workshop that led to Still/Here (1994), which is an evening-length dance theatre piece in two acts with a visual and sound score composed by interviews with people who are terminally ill. In the workshop, Jones asked those people to draw a map of their lives and to walk their stories, remembering their earliest years, their diagnosis and imagining the moment of their death. “—Once you have done it forward, try doing it backwards”, says Jones. One of the participants guides the others through the map of her life moving across the space in elaborate lines and narrating her story. The workshop held a place for autobiography, confession and therapy and it generated expressive materials for the two acts Still and Here. The dance theatre piece Still/Here (1994), by means of dance and performed by professional dancers, contemplate survival, art and life. Departing from his own life story, Jones reinscribed the body in the privileged space of who fights to understand his present and performs an embodied act in ethics, aesthetics and politics.

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Instituto de Filosofia da Nova
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26 – 4º Piso
1069-061 Lisboa
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: https://www.ifilnova.pt

Workshop

Movement for Actors and Dancers

23, 25 and 30 October | 19:30 –  22:30
Evoé – Escola de Actores

This module consists of a research on the sensation and image in practices of the body, movement and perception, improvisation and composition, derived from the universe of contemporary dance.
Throughout the three sections of the Movement module, a series of exercises and scores is developed, in which the participants improvise, individual and collectively, immersed in the phenomenon of awareness and amplifying their capacities of perception and expression of the body in movement.
The transmission, experimentation and reflexion about the exercises and scores is done methodically – maps of the body, with the aim that each participant can integrate tools from training techniques, movement research, improvisation and composition, in the actor’s work.

Price:
65€
60€ Evoé Students and second workshop

Where & Organization:
Evoé – Escola de Actores
Rua das Canastras 40, 1100-112 Lisboa
Phone: +351 962 525 866
Email: evoe@evoe.pt
Website: http://evoe.pt/workshops/movimento-para-atores-e-bailarinos/

Lecture and Laboratory

Lecture: Nijinsky’s writings
and
Dance and Philosophy Laboratory: rhythm trajectories

6 – 7 – 8 September 2018
Centro Cultural San Martin, Sarmiento 1551, CABA
UNA Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Departamento de Artes Dramáticas, French 3614, Aula 16, CABA
Buenos Aires

JIRA
IV Jornadas Internacionales El Ritmo En Las Artes
Ritmo, poética y espacio

Symposium
Silvia Pritz (coordination), Salomé Lopes Coelho and Aníbal Zorrilla (co-organization)

Nijinsky’s writings
The oeuvre “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky” (2006) has three chapters: Life, Life and Death. The reader follows Nijinsky’s stream of consciousness throughout the descriptions of life at Saint-Moritz, his universe as a dancer, his preoccupation with humanity, his relationship with God. However, this stream of consciousness about the triviality of his life and death emerges intersected with fragments that seem to lose contact with reality or make reality appear as an illusion. In this paper I present a reading of this oeuvre through the concept of “rhythm” in the perspective of Gilles Deleuze-Félix Guattari (2004) and José Gil (2016, 2018), with the aim of tracing some lines of thought on the presence of rhythm in “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky”, by Vaslav Nijinsky (2006).

Workshop
Carla Fonseca (coordination)

Dance and philosophy laboratory: rhythm trajectories
This laboratory consists of a practice-theory research on the concept of rhythm, from a reading of the chapter “1837: of the refrain” In: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze-Félix Guattari (2003).

Where & Organization:
UNA – Universidad Nacional de las Artes
French 3614, C1425AXD Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (54.11) 4804.2352 / 9743
Email: artesdramaticas@una.edu.ar
Website: https://ritmoenlasartes.com/

Workshop

Of the archive as gesture

With Ana Bigotte Vieira, Ana Mira e Joana Braga – baldio | Estudos de Performance

UNFINISHED – Summer School
Rogério Nuno Costa (curator), Joclécio Azevedo and Ana Carvalho (coaching)

29 August 2018 | 10:00 – 18:00
Armazém 22, Vila Nova de Gaia

On most occasions, archives are considered repositories more or less secure of memory. Archives are intimately related to the narratives and to the logic that support their own existence – narratives and logic that frequently reinforce legitimation. In this sense, it is possible to understand archives in a large sense (for ex., the body as archive as some performative artistic practices do), in a common sense (for ex., the institutional archives) or the archive in general (in accord with the philosophical and epistemological tradition) as a series of practices and gestures. What is or should be archived? Why? For what? By whom? What are the political implications of creating or working with an archive? With what questions and choices is an artist confronted with, or a researcher, by working with an archive, or making one? Departing from the notion of the archive as gesture, in this workshop, we will discuss some key-texts from recent debates on the relation between archive and memory, so that we can problematize some artistic production that in the last years has been focusing on this questions – and by that redefining the way of posing those questions. Texts by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Hal Foster will be discussed in relation with studies on the performative transmission of memory by authors such as Enzo Traverso, Diana Taylor, Paul Connerton and Joseph Roach. (Text by Ana Bigotte Vieira).

Where & Organizatio:
Armazém 22
Kale | Armazém22
Rua de Guilherme Braga, nº 22-60
4400-178 Vila Nova de Gaia
Phone: 915 509 149
Email: info@armazem22.pt
Website: http://www.armazem22.pt/Events/detail/1021?label=unfinished-escola-de-verao

Essay

Walking the air, remembering the earth

Mira, Ana. Walking the Air, Remembering the Earth (Caminhar o Ar, Lembrar a Terra), an essay on the dance work “Sacrum – Efabulations on intensive maps” by Sara Anjo [Project financed by República Portuguesa-Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes], Lisboa, 2018 
Full-text: http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/a69b4b_2019402adee847a590482ed252870f3b.pdf

Dance work & Artist:
Sacrum
Choreography: Sara Anjo
Creation and Performance: Flora Detraz, Madalena Palmeirim e Sara Anjo
Sound Design: Artur Pispalhas e Madalena Palmeirim
Live Music: Madalena Palmeirim
Light Design: Artur Pispalhas
Set Design: Daniel Melim
Costumes: Sara Anjo
Project financed by República Portuguesa-Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes
Website: http://saraanjoo.wixsite.com/saraanjo/mapas-intensivos

Photo credits: Laís Pereira

Laboratory

Dance and Philosophy Laboratory:
The presence of stillness in the formation of the image

26 July 2018 | 19:00 – 22:00
27 July 2018 | 19:00 – 22:00
28 July 2018 | 10:30/13:30 – 14:30/17:30
Fórum Dança

We will begin by studying the chapter “1730 – Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible” of the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2003). During the reading of selected excerpts of this chapter, we will study the concepts of becoming, affect, multiplicity, plane of consistency, speed and slow, movement and stillness, longitude and latitude of the body, Chronos e Aiôn. This study will be related to other selected excerpts from the book “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinksy”, by Vaslav Nijinsky (1953), together with archives and testimonies of his dance. We will try to think about the presence of stillness in the formation of the image in both the dance and writing of Nijinsky. After that, we will develop movement and perception research on the theme of this laboratory – the presence of stillness in the formation of the image –, and from corporeal sensations. We will broaden the space and time of certain images that were formed and speak to us more intensely, through improvisation and composition exercises. At a later stage, we will address the free associations that emerged throughout the study and practice developed previously and we will observe them objectively through drawing, dialoguing and writing. Last, we will gather to reflect upon the relation between the study of the philosophical concepts and the movement and perception research, improvisation and composition experimented so far and the formation of the artistic image in the tension between movement and stillness. This laboratory is addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Dance and Philosophy.

Price:
60 Euros
45 Euros (students, professors, researchers and artists)

Where, Organization and Registration:
Fórum Dança
Travessa do Calado, 26 B, 1170/070  Lisboa
Phone: 21 342 89 85 | 925 103 596
Email: forumdanca@forumdanca.pt
Website: http://www.forumdanca.pt/

Photo credits:
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1910 – 1911).Nijinsky, Vaslav Retrieved fromhttp://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-5291-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (left)
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1910 – 1911).Nijinsky, Vaslav Retrieved fromhttp://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-5292-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (right)

Lecture

Nijinsky’s life life death

International Conference
“Art of Living /Art of Dying: Philosophical and Literary Perspectives”,
IFILNOVA | Culturelab, Questions of Subjectivity: Philosophy and Literature (org.)

21 June 2018 | 09:30 – 19:00
22 June 2018 | 10:00 – 19:00
Room Multiusos 3, 4th Floor, I&D Building
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities  – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Nijinsky’s “Diary” is made of three chapters: Life, Life, Death (2004). As a reader, I could follow his stream of consciousness throughout the descriptions of his life at Saint-Moritz, his universe as a dancer, his preoccupations with humanity, his relationship with God until I stumbled in an image that seemed to suspend the current of everyday life: blood in the snow. Nijinsky writes that he is in front of an abyss where he can fall. Then, he describes a walk he took during which it seemed to him that there was blood in the snow, so he ran following its trail. It seemed to him that a man had been killed, but that he was alive, so Nijinsky ran in another direction and saw a large blood stain. This paper is intended to reflect philosophically upon Nijinsky’s “Diary” as a prolonged exacerbation of life and anticipation of death as a means to create an “unlocatable place both in space and especially in time” where images emerge (Lepecki, 2000). I will address Nijinsky’s haunting stillness in dance as a suspension of a sequence of gestures and, in his writings, of words. In “the full migratory flight towards the “land of madness” that Nijinsky’s diary encompasses, according to Uno (2012), I will try to understand his process of “disruption of the space, time and identity of the subject” (Gil, 2016). Last, and recalling “One Manifesto Less” (Deleuze, 2008), Nijinsky’s operation of bringing language to a minimum will unravel the potency of an image.

Where:
Room Multiusos 3, 4th Floor, I&D Building
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26
1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.culturelab.ifilnova.pt/events/art-of-living-art-of-dying

Lecture

Sensible geographies, a study on the body and dance in the experience of the city

29 MAY 2018 | 15:00 – 18:00
Sala Multiusos 2 – Edifício ID – piso 4
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

The notion of “undercommons” is elaborated by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), as the space and time that is always here, in reality and fantasy, and where we are part of the movement of things — We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. That one may cohabit in the space of the “undercommons”, no longer as an abandoned space, will have to be considered that what is broken will remain broken and it can never be repaired. Then, we reach in the direction of the other and place searching for a conexion, cultivating the included and excluded in the space and time of the regimes of surveillance. Therefore, in that vigilant space and time, just in the refusal of its normativity, start coexisting movements of dissonance, noise, flutter, disorientation, fugitivity, hapticality, dispossession; which can be shaped performatively. For Deleuze, a “milieu” is made of “qualities, substances, powers, and events”, a “trajectory” merges with the subjectivity of the milieu itself and of those who travel through that milieu and a “map” (of the trajectory) traces the journey and what one journeys through in a dynamic cartography (2000). In the coalescence between real and imaginary we propose to reflect upon the enormous praxis of precice gestures in the experience of the city revealed by the following performance works: Early Works by Trisha Brown (1966-1979), The Geography Trilogy by Ralph Lemon (1997-2007) and Acções by Eleonora Fabião (2008-), for example: smashing vinyl records and burying them in the courtyard, building a spaceship with recycled materials, walking down the side of a building, going down the street hand in hand and off balance, or making a rainbow with fluorescence lights in the middle of the night.
By convoking the notions of “undercommons” (Stefano Harney e Fred Moten, 2013), “milieu”, “trajectory” and “map” (Gilles Deleuze, 2000), in relation with the performance works mentioned above, we will try to think on the emergence of sensible geographies, capable of reinventing the experience of the city, its livingness and images.

Where:
Sala Multiusos 2 – Edifício ID – piso 4
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26
1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ifilnova.pt/events/leituras-criticas-sobre-a-experiencia-da-cidade-8

Photo credits:
Ação Fortalezense #5: jarros, Eleonora Fabião
Bienal Internacional de Dança do Ceará de Par em Par, Fortaleza 2010
Foto: Victor Furtado

Laboratory

Dance and Philosophy Laboratory: rhythm trajectories

SATURDAYS | 10:00 – 13:00 and 14:00 – 18:00
Dance Studio, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista

• 24 February 2018
• 24 March 2018
• 28 April 2018
• 20 October 2018
• 17 November 2018
• 15 December 2018

“Je veux écrire un peu en vers, mais ma pensée est ailleurs. Je veux décrire mes promenades” (“Cahiers”, Nijinski, 2000) This laboratory consists of an embodied practice of dance and philosophy, which main theme is rhythm trajectories. The laboratory aims at generating a field of thought in motion, as Massumi would say, through the acts of reading, dialoguing, writing and dancing collectively. The main sources of this laboratory are selected texts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and José Gil, and dance archives and documentation on/by the russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinski. Throughout the sessions we will be tracing philosophical concepts, inventing dance scores than can be reenacted through movement research, improvisation and composition, and still harvesting to transpose this work into forms of expression in dance, philosophy and writing. The Laboratory is addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Dance and Philosophy.

Price:
45 euros (single session), 140 euros (4 sessions, 35 euros each), 240 (8 sessions, 30 euros each)

Where:
Dance studio
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Phone: (+351) 218 172 600
Email: pologaivotasboavista@cm-lisboa.pt
Website: http://www.cm-lisboa.pt/en/polo-cultural-gaivotas-boavista

Organization:
Ana Mira
Email: anasfmira@gmail.com
Website: ana-mira.com

Support:  , baldio | Estudos de Performance

Photo credits: Susana Ventura

Lecture

Cartografias #0

17 FEBRUARY 2018 | 18:00
Fórum Dança

Ezequiel Santos (curator)
Ana Mira, Hugo Calhim Cristovão & Joana von Mayer Trindade (guests)

“A proposal that aims to build and present maps of possibility to contemporary dance. Movement and its thought will be the nucleus and the pretext to articulate a program that includes performances, choreographic encounters, and debates.
We will start by presenting two visions of the possible relation of dance to philosophy: that of the researcher Ana Mira, with a reflection on the dancing body from the philosophical notions of sensitive and primitive affection, and that of Hugo Calhim Cristovão and Joana von Mayer Trindade who will talk about the choreographic project “Of the insatiability of the case or at the same time a miracle”; presenting us the resulting publication.
Between visibility and experimentation, this is the line on which we intend to continue Cartographies on its route #1 in October 2018: a dance that is wondering and attentive to the world, and that reacts to other ecologies besides the stage” (Ezequiel Santos, 2018).

Where & Organization:
Fórum Dança
Travessa do Calado, 26 B, 1170/070  Lisboa
Phone: 21 342 89 85 | 925 103 596
Email: forumdanca@forumdanca.pt
Website: http://www.forumdanca.pt/cartografias/index.html

Book launch & Essay

Several authors, Bodied Spaces: crossed discourses between body and space, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (ed. coord.), Teatro Municipal do Porto and Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Porto, 2018

20 JANUARY 2018 | 15:30
Café Rivoli, Teatro Municipal do Porto

Mira, Ana, “Contours of inexistence: a reading of the choreographic piece I Am Here, by João Fiadeiro (2003)”, Chapter Choreography and Philosophy, in: Bodied Spaces: crossed discourses between body and space, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (ed. coord.), Teatro Municipal do Porto and Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Porto, 2018

His own body was now as if detached from him, becoming ever more estranged, as transparent and bright as he had seen Claude’s and as he now saw Aia’s, who would come down from the carpeted mansion into Cluny’s old naked wood floor. His thinking, isolated, figured: a place like this, both abbey and museum, doubly contemplative, is a place of strong passions, of bodies seeking the image, of spirits seeking to satisfy their desire. Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, 2005

In the short story O Unicórnio [The Unicorn], featured in Contos da Imagem [Image Short Stories], by Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (2005), the museum visitor stood in front of the 15th century tapestry with the lady and the white unicorn for three days and three nights without the guards noticing his incarceration. In the wall of the museum, writes the author, Claude de la Viste held the mirror with the image of the unicorn, which was kneeling and laid its legs in her lap. The image of the unicorn stayed in the mirror even when Claude, transparent, moved it away from the animal. The visitor contemplated them from the museum bench. On the wall, they didn’t seem to care he was there: “Could Aia bring the mirror down here for a second?” the visitor asked Claude (Brandão 2005: 15). And Aia came down from the tapestry on the wall and into the museum’s wood floor. Claude wouldn’t take her eyes off the unicorn. The visitor was handed the mirror of the images, and in Fiama’s view, if the image stayed in the mirror even after it was moved away from the unicorn, then the world had no explanation. Just as well. Man withdraws from himself to emerge in contours of inexistence. Invisible in the dark and motionless in the light, man escapes toward space and immateriality. I Am Here is a place in which man, assimilated to space, is reflected in the double images that reflect him, mutually haunting each other. Thus, arise other constellations of images that are almost unnoticeable – the contours of inexistence – as forms of existence. Perhaps the body wouldn’t end “suddenly at our feet, at our hands”. It wouldn’t end there, with “nothing beyond” as “a slope of a cliff over the ocean”, in the words of Helena Almeida, whose photographic work influenced the choreographic piece I Am Here, by João Fiadeiro (2003), on which I elaborate in this dance and philosophy essay.

Essay

“Primitive affective, a study on the potency of the body that dances through the perspective of Nietzsche according to Deleuze”

Mira, A., “Afectivo primitivo, um estudo sobre a potência do corpo que dança a partir de Nietzsche segundo Deleuze”, In: Da insaciabilidade do caso ou ao mesmo tempo um milagre, Nuisis Zobop – Associação Cultural de Criação, Investigação e Formação no Domínio das Artes Performativas e Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto: Grupo de Investigação Raízes e Horizontes da Filosofia e da Cultural em Portugal (eds.), Porto, 2017, pp.71-74
Full-text: http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/15708.pdf

Organization:
Nuisis Zobop – Associação Cultural de Criação, Investigação e Formação no Domínio das Artes Performativas
E-mail: nuisiszobop@gmail.com
Website: http://www.nuisiszobop.com/
Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto
Phone: (00.351) 22 607 71 80
E-mail: ifilosofia@letras.up.pt
Website: ifilosofia.up.pt

Round Table

Cities of Amadeo – International Cycle of Round Tables

30 SEPTEMBER 2017 | 11:00 – 18:00
Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto

Maria Celeste Natário (organization)
Mariana Pinto dos Santos, Ana Mira, Cláudia Marisa, Hugo Calhim Cristovão, Maria Celeste Natário, Luísa Malato, Marta Soares, José Carlos Seabra Pereira, Renato Epifânio, Rui Lopo, João Oliveira Duarte (guests)

My participation in this round table brings to light the notion of translation amongst different art genres and philosophy; for example in the book “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, written by Gustave Flaubert, with drawings by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and a philosophical essay by Maria Filomena Molder, coord. Manuel Rosa /Assírio & Alvim, Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2006.

Professorship

Body and creative processes and Choreographic research – B.A. in Performing Arts

2017 – 2018 B.A. in Performing Arts, ESTAL – Escola Superior de Tecnologias e Artes de Lisboa

Practices and studies of the body and contemporary dance; experiential anatomy and physiology; movement and perception; gesture, its emergence and sustainability; the methods and its authors; choreographic composition; archive and documentation.

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible (theoretical)

The dance and philosophy laboratory: testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible seeks to practice theory through movement meditations (influenced by Chi Kung) and philosophical investigations around the themes “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible”. We begin a talk, read a text, open the axial coordinates and the earth line in the body. We breathe and listen, till where was the text heard? We write in a spiral, instead of straight lines. We talk again, this time with our eyes closed. We stand still like a tree, we feel the warmth of energy passing through the body and air. We take the place of the other to think of a philosophical concept. A book will always be revisited: “Treino e(m) Poema” (“Practice and/in Poem”), by Kazuo Ohno (2016), together with an analysis of some collected texts on the experience of “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible”: Caillois (1935), Lévi-Strauss (1958), Chatwin (1988), Lepecki (2015, conferência online), Abram (2007), Gil (2010, 2016), Deleuze (2000, 2004), amongst others. We make questions, what does the experience of “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible” bring to dance, philosophy and life?

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: a geography of the sensible

MONDAY 17 JULY 2017 – FRIDAY 21 JULY 2017 | 17:00 – 19:00

CEM SUMMER I, c.e.m. – centro em movimento, Lisboa

How to make of dance a map of attentive listening of the body? How to write the body and its path taken? The theme of this laboratory – a geography of the sensible – is approached by an embodied practice of dance and philosophy, which relies upon an investigation in practices of the body, contemporary dance, chi kung and philosophy. Departing from philosophical texts of Gilles Deleuze and José Gil, the philosophy and cultural ecology of David Abram and the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and Bruce Chatwin, the laboratory seeks to foster meanings for a geography of the sensible through the acts of reading, understanding, dancing, dialoguing and writing. The laboratory readings will be given beforehand. During the laboratory selected excerpts of those readings are studied and, still in auscultation, an experimentation of the body takes place through scores that aim to reenact the life of the concepts apprehended. In the meantime, through a geography of the sensible, paths are built where body and environment are bewildered in danced gestures, words and writings.

Upcoming laboratory: 7, 8, 9 September Dance and philosophy laboratory: Testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible, baldio | Estudos de Performance, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – CML, Lisbon.

Photo credits: Carolina Figueiredo

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: in the darkness of the gesture

THURSDAY 8 JUNE 2017 | 19:30 – 22:00

FRIDAY 9 JUNE 2017 | 19:30 – 22:00

SATURDAY 10 JUNE 2017 | 9H30 – 13:00

Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – Lisboa (dance studio)

This laboratory will focus on a practice of dancing in the dark, or in a weak light, and of reading and reflecting upon selected texts by Deleuze, Gil, Massumi, Pelbart, Lepecki, Caillois e Abram. Approaching the themes of dark and light, visible and invisible, potency and a certain relation with the sensible, space and time, the laboratory deepens an embodied practice in dance and philosophy. This work is informed by acute research into movement perception, contemporary dance, chi kung and philosophy. The practice of dancing in the dark, or in a weak light, consists of movement improvisations, which scores have been drawn from a reading of those texts. The laboratory reserves a space for, individual and collective, reflection and writing on the readings and improvisations previously held.

Upcoming laboratories: 17 – 21 July Dance and philosophy laboratory: Of a geography of the sensible, CEM – Centro em Movimento, Lisbon 7, 8, 9 September Dance and philosophy laboratory: Testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible, baldio | Estudos de Performance, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – CML, Lisbon.

Price: 35 euros
Where & Organization:
baldio | Estudos de Performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: anasfmira@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support: 

Encounter

Tracing Dance (an encounter about maps and scores)

11 MARCH 2017 |16H

Porta33, Funchal – Madeira

Sara Anjo with Ana Mira

This encounter will have as a point of departure the presentation of a map, which reports to dance practices, developed throughout Sara Anjo’s participation in the MA Das Choreography, at Das Graduate School, in Amsterdam. The map contains a compilation of texts, images e scores that sustained and supported the research developed during that MA (2014-2016). After, the audience will be invited to participate in an exercise of perception of the body and to register it through drawing and writing, working operative concepts for a sustained analysis and experience in the performing practices.

Where & Organization :
Porta33
Rua do Quebra Costas 33, 9000-034-Funchal, Ilha da Madeira
Phone: +351291743038
Email: porta33@porta33.com
Website: http://www.porta33.com/

Debate – Encounter

Of the insatiability in the case or at the same time a miracle

10 FEBRUARY 2017 |14:30 – 17H

Escola Superior Artística do Porto 3º Andar

Hugo Calhim Cristovão and Joana Von Mayer Trindade (artists, curators)
Eduarda Neves, Cláudia Marisa, Cláudia Galhós, Ana Mira, Celeste Natário, Maria Manuela Brito Martins, Mário Correia, Paulo Costa (guests)

Where:
Escola Superior Artística do Porto – Largo São Domingos 80, 4050-545 Porto

Organization:
Nuisis Zobop – Cultural Association of Creation, Research and Formation in Performing Arts
Website: http://nuisiszobop.com/

Essay

Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)

Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Vol 8 Issue 2, December 2016

The article ‘Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)’, consists of an approach to a dance and philosophy practice, through the lens of analysis of Gil’s philosophy, and aims at reflecting upon the notion of danced gesture and its formation through a change of scale from a macroscopic to a microscopic level of the corporeal phenomena. The embodied practice in dance and philosophy exposed in this article features a translation of sensations and images of dance experience into verbal language – sensorial document – followed by a philosophical analysis of the procedures that led to the formation of danced gesture and its transcription. This research was developed from dance collaboration with choreographer and visual artist Rosemary Butcher, in the context of the piece After Kaprow: The Silent Room (2012).

Keywords
embodied practice,danced gesture,sensorial document,change of scale,relation,force

Mira, A. (2016), ‘Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 8:2, pp. 177-86, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.8.2.177_

Where:
C-Dare Centre for Dance Research – Coventry University
Institute for Creative Enterprise, Parkside, Coventry CV1 2NE

Organization:
C-Dare Centre for Dance Research
Coventry University (UK)
Phone: +44 (0) 24 7615 8301
Website: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=22972/

Lecture

Walk your life: tracing autobiographies in Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones (1994

schedule (t.b.a.), Galeria Fernando Pessoa – Centro Nacional de Cultura

Faces of the Self: Autobiography, Confession, Therapy 

II Anual Conference of AELab IFILNOVA

24th to 25th November 2016 Lisbon

Bartholomew Ryan, Gianfranco Ferraro, Marta Faustino, Ana Falcato (Organisers)

This paper addresses the dance theatre piece Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones (1994) and the chain of reactions that it generated in the dance critical acts of Croce (1994), Stuart (1995) and Lepecki (1995). On another sphere, Foucault (1997) and Butler (2002)—influenced by Kant (1784)—, walked in the direction of a future philosophy and its critical attitude, as the art of not being governed quite so much and developing a new practice of values.

If here is the place where one can stand in the present day, then still calls for the many faces of the self needed to persevere, understand, survive and, eventually, cross over. For such courage, one may be asked to mirror his life story and confess what one loves, fears and wants. Collectively and, at the same time, as an autonomous being in a permanent critical attitude in relation to the present, tracing autobiographies is approached here as a way to express, govern and reinvent oneself in a myriad of faces.

“—Walk your life”, says Bill T. Jones in the workshop that led to Still/Here (1994), which is an evening-length dance theatre piece in two acts with a visual and sound score composed by interviews with people who are terminally ill. In the workshop, Jones asked those people to draw a map of their lives and to walk their stories, remembering their earliest years, their diagnosis and imagining the moment of their death. “—Once you have done it forward, try doing it backwards”, says Jones. One of the participants guides the others through the map of her life moving across the space in elaborate lines and narrating her story. The workshop held a place for autobiography, confession and therapy and it generated expressive materials for the two acts Still and Here. The dance theatre piece Still/Here (1994), by means of dance and performed by professional dancers, contemplate survival, art and life. Departing from his own life story, Jones reinscribed the body in the privileged space of who fights to understand his present and performs an embodied act in ethics, aesthetics and politics.

Where:
Galeria Fernando Pessoa – Centro Nacional de Cultura
Largo do Picadeiro 10 – 1º (Chiado)

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ifilnova.pt/, http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/

Permanent Seminar

Performance and Philosophy

19 OCTOBER 2016 | 10:00 – 14:00, Room 1.05, Building I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Performance and Philosophy Research Group (curatorship)

The Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar held in the context of the Performance and Philosophy Research Group of AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices at IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, aims at constituting itself as a platform for discussion and experimentation in the performance and philosophy fields, in their theoretical and practice dimensions, bringing together researchers and artists.

The second edition of Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar opens with the seminar “Body and Radical Presence” by the actor and researcher Renato Ferracini (LUME – Núcleo interdisciplinar de Pesquisas Teatrais and UNICAMP – Universidade de Campinas, BR). These sessions are free and addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Performance and Philosophy.

Where:
Room 1.05, Building I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26, 1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
Performance and Philosophy Research Group /AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices /IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/seminario-permanente-performance-e-filosofia, http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/research-group-on-performance-and-philosophy

Professorship

Body and scenic movement seminar & Movement and composition seminar – B.A. in Theatre

2016 – 2018 Performing Arts Department, Universidade de Évora (PT)

Practices and studies of the body and contemporary dance; experiential anatomy and physiology; movement and perception; gesture, its emergence and sustainability; the methods and its authors; choreographic composition; archive and documentation.

Where & Organization:
Performing Arts Department
Universidade de Évora, Portugal
Colégio dos Leões, Estrada dos Leões 7000-208 Évora
Email:geral@darc.uevora.pt
Website: http://www.dac.uevora.pt/

Launch

Opening Cycle TAKING POSITION the political and place | Experimental Course in Performance Studies, baldio performance studies

12 – 14 SEPTEMBER 2016 | MONDAY, TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY | 18:30 – 21:30
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

Opening Cycle of TAKING POSITION the political and place | Performance Studies Experimental Course, by baldio | performance studies, the only public event of the project, in the frame of the Summer programme at the courtyard Lusco-fusco, Polo Cultural Gaivotas – Boavista.

September 12, 6:30pm – Book Launch, Jeux Sans Frontières #2 – on Spaces of Resistance and Practices of Invention, by Ana Bigotte Vieira, Nuno Leão and Sandra Lang. Presented by Maria Alice Samara and Luhuna Carvalho.

September 13, 6:30pm – Oracle City, a game-performance by Fernanda Eugénio

September 14, 6:30pm – Inter(in)animated Archives, a performative object by Paula Caspão

Where & Organization:
baldio | estudos de performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: baldiohabitado@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support:

Course

TAKING POSITION  | THE POLITICAL AND PLACE Experimental Course in Performance Studies

REGISTRATIONS NOW OPEN UNTIL SEPTEMBER 5
12 SEPTEMBER – 14 DECEMBER 2016 | MONDAYS, TUESDAYS AND WEDNESDAYS | 18:30 – 21:30
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

with baldio | performance studies
Ana Bigotte Vieira, Ana Mira, Ana Riscado, Fernanda Eugénio, Joana Braga, Paula Caspão, Ricardo Seiça Salgado

TAKING POSITION | THE POLITICAL AND PLACE, Experimental Course in Performance Studies (ECPS) is designed as a proposal of encounter with-in study, a process of study for encounters to be, throughout the convergence of reading practices, discussion, research and experimentation: a three month course to experiment with tools, methodologies, issues, concerns, problems and limitations related to Performance Studies, in order to interrogate our present. Emphasizing the contingency of critical thought production, the course is characterized by a tight relation between the performative and the experimental, with a strong focus on the conversation between the several fields at stake: theatre, dance, music, performance, architecture, anthropology, philosophy, politics, history, critical theory, literature. It encompasses a continuous workshop intended as a common thread throughout the course, and three thematic axes.

Where & Organization:
baldio | estudos de performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: baldiohabitado@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support:

Laboratory

Soma: practices of the body and contemporary dance

4, 18 AND 25 JUNE 2016 | SATURDAYS | 10:00 – 13:00
2, 9, 16, 23 AND 30 JUNE 2016 | THURSDAYS | 18:30 – 20:30
Evoé: Escola de Actores

The body has an almost imperceptible dimension that is amplified through our awareness until corporeal volumes are formed in the space, amongst which the danced gestures.

Influenced by the legacy of American avant-garde dance, this laboratory approaches a listening of the body through sensation and aims to develop a dance work at the level of the techniques and experimentation of the body and its states of awareness. The resources are the psychosomatic practices: experiential studies of anatomy, physiology and embryology, release techniques, material for the spine (Steve Paxton), body-mind centering (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen), Zhan Zhuang Chi Kung (Master Lam Kam Chuen), improvisation and composition from the performance research, for example, “the sensation is the image” by Lisa Nelson and “to see is to be seen” by Deborah Hay. This laboratory is open level and allows each participant, differently, to develop an investigative practice of the body and contemporary dance, based on the life of the body (soma), collectively in the studio.

Where & Organization:
Evoé – Escola de Actores
Rua das Canastras, 40 | 1100 – 112 Lisbon
Phone: +351 218 880 838
Mobile: +351 919 790 640
Email: evoe@evoe.pt
Website: http://www.evoe.pt/cursos.php?cd_curso=13

Permanent Seminar

Performance and Philosophy

18 FEBRUARY 2015 – 17 JUNE 2016 | 18:00 – 20:00
IFILNOVA, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Ana Mira (seminar organization)

The Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar held in the context of the Performance and Philosophy Research Group of AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices at IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, aims at constituting itself as a platform for discussion and experimentation in the performance and philosophy fields, in their theoretical and practice dimensions, bringing together researchers and artists.

17 June 2016
Title: One, two, three: the rhythm beyond metrics
Researchers: Aníbal N. Zorrilla (Universidade Nacional das Artes, Buenos Aires), Salomé Lopes Coelho (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

27 May 2016
Theme: On the deleuzian theory of the body
Researcher: José Gil (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

29 April 2016
Theme: The stolen time or “there is a minute of the world that passes” / (Un)disciplines of time: competences, rules of existence, cost and use of life
Researchers: Ana Godinho and Gianfranco Ferraro (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL) 

30 March 2016
Theme: Multiple times and multiple spaces: on Serviço ACARTE of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation between 1984 e 1989 as Aleph
Researcher:  Ana Bigotte Vieira (IFILNOVA,FCSH-UNL)

27 January 2016
Theme: How to compose sensations in architecture – construction of a map of intensities
Researcher:  Susana Ventura (Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto)

4 December 2015
Theme: For an ethics of inventivity
Researcher: Renato Feraccini (Universidade de Campinas e Lume Teatro, BR)

20 October 2015
Theme: On the brokenness of skin: embodying language in dance and philosophy
Researcher: Ana Mira (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

25 September 2015
Theme: Performance and portuguese art: the value of an history-without history
Researcher: Cláudia Madeira (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

18 February 2015
Theme: The value of the human in the performing arts
Researcher: Paulo Filipe Monteiro (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

Where:
Edifício I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26, 1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/seminario-permanente-performance-e-filosofia

Lecture

I’m stepping in and out of reality…tell me how to fight: Critical acts, in dance and philosophy

8 JUNE 2016 | 14:30
Anfiteatro IV, Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa

International Conference on Theatre Criticism:
Creating Dialogues – Performance Art Criticism and the Public Sphere
8th to 11th June 2016 Lisbon | Porto

In November 26, 1994 the New Yorker published the review Discussing The Undiscussable: When players in a production aren’t just acting out death but are really dying — as in Bill T. Jones “Still/Here” — is it really art?, by Arlene Croce, in which the dance critic writes: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones Still/Here and have no plans to review it”.

Still/Here (1994) is an evening-length dance theatre piece in two acts with a visual and sound score composed by interviews with people who are terminally ill. By means of dance and facing death, the two acts Still and Here contemplate survival, art and life. Through the perspective of Croce, Jones, by representing himself to the public not as artist but as victim and martyr, is “putting himself beyond the reach of criticism”. According to Croce, Jones makes criticism impossible to be approached as theatre or dance theatre (1994).

In February 1995, Meg Stuart performs the solo XXX. For Arlene and Colleagues, also in New York. By this occasion, Lepecki underlines the choreographic, aesthetic and political relevance of Stuart’s solo as “a most appropriate critique of Croce’s aesthetics and politics that forbids art to be aware of its social, cultural and emotional context, i.e., to be aware of life” (1995).

In the sphere of action of dance and philosophy, we aim at reinscribing the body, dance and its criticism in the privileged place of who fights to understand its present and, at the same time, to think criticism as an embodied act in ethics, aesthetics and politics. For such, we resort to the dialogue established amongst the critical acts in the dance art of Jones — Croce — Lepecki in relation with the critical acts in the philosophy of Kant — Foucault — Butler. These last, referring to Kant’s answer to the dialog created with the public by the German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift, in November 1784, with the question — What is Enlightenment?, continued by Foucault (1997) and Butler (2002) — What is critique?

Where:
Anfiteatro IV, Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa
Alameda da Universidade 1600 – 214 Lisboa

Organization:
Centro de Estudos de Teatro
Phone: +351 217 920 086
Email: criticaeteatro@gmail.com
Website: https://criticaeartesperformativas.wordpress.com/

Encounter

Bodied Spaces / Choreography and Philosophy

7 JULY 2016 | 18:30
Escola Superior de Educação do Porto – Instituto Politécnico do Porto

Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (curator)
Ana Mira & João Fiadeiro (guests)

C’est l’espace en tant que médiateur de distance, qui fait surgir la parole (Pankow, 1986). Paris. The first word Travis said in Wim Wender’s movie (1984). Travis had lost his speech in the desert in Texas. Paris Texas. That was where Travis had bought an empty parcel of land by correspondence. Travis showed a photograph of that piece of desert territory to his brother Walt.

In João Fiadeiro’s work sometimes the body disappears. It can dance in the dark, be kept in a photograph, a drawing, a shadow or a vehicle for charcoal. It can run outside the theatre and come back to describe its voyage through story telling and (recovery of) exhaustion. The body can place gesture outside itself, dislocating us around that unfolded space. The body can perform his/her living space, there or not exactly. In Fiadeiro’s choreographic work, where is the body when it is not there, filtered through absence or darkness?

Il a couru comme ça, jusqu’à ce que toute trace d’homme ait disparu (Pankow, 1986). Travis could not endure his relation of  “symbiosis” with his spouse Jane, the house was on fire and Travis could not see her neither their son. He could only run, he just ran for five days. After four years, when Travis and Jane met, a glass was their mediator: She could not see him. He turned his back. He could not see her. He turns again to see Jane and the reflex of his face on hers. She turns on the light on her side of the glass. She can see him. He can only see himself reflected on the glass. According to Pankow, the glass (mirror) that kept Travis and Jane separated allowed each of them to situate in the space, distant from one another. The mirror allows Travis and Jane to trace and recognize the limits between them, previously confound (1986).

In the lived space of the body — filtered through absence or darkness —, discussed previously and present throughout Fiadeiro’s choreographic work, how can we think distance, space and limit?

Where:
Escola Superior de Educação do Porto – Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 602 | 4200-465 Porto

Organization:
Teatro Municipal do Porto Rivoli
Phone: +351223392200
E-mail: geral.tmp@cm-porto.pt
Website: http://teatromunicipaldoporto.pt/PT/programa/bodied-spaces-2-coreografia-e-filosofia/

Workshop

Body-gesture & the making of sensorial documents

14 – 15 JULY 2016 | 14:00 – 18:00
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

Summerschool And 2016＃1 In between ways of doing
with Fernanda Eugénio (curator) & guests

In a certain state of awareness in dance, a body-gesture gathers the sensations that transforms into images as a series of fluid crystallizations and successive in time. The proposed exercises are centred on the listening of the body as a means to the emergence of the danced gesture. The sensorial document consists of a mapping of that experimentation of the body that dances through writing: how can writing translate sensations, small perceptions and images of the body that dances into verbal language and conceptual thought? For the experimentation of a body-gesture and the making of sensorial documents, in dance, it is needed to consider the molecular plane, microscopic and almost imperceptible of the minute movements and smallest impressions of the body (following José Gil’s philosophy). Through the effort of describing what is almost not sensed in the body during its danced gesture, language hesitates by the haunting of the body and the reminiscence of a non-verbal of the verbal: we rehearse sensation analysed by word in another space of the body reconstructed and transcribed. Bring the whole body to dance and a small writing board.

Where:
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas 8 | 1200 – 202 Lisboa

Organization:
AND_Lab | Research on Art-Thinking & Togetherness
Email: info.andlab@gmail.com
Website: http://and-lab.org

Workshop

Surrounding gesture, in the making of dance and philosophy

18 – 22 JULY 2016 | 18:30 – 20:30
CEM – Centro em Movimento

In a practicing of listening of the body, we establish a relation between dance philosophy writings and movement research through the acts of dancing, reading, reflecting and writing together. We search for a voice and its resonances in continuous transpositions between those readings and the danced movements—on the theme of “gesture” and its philosophical derivations.

Where & Organization :
CEM – Centro em Movimento
Rua dos Fanqueiros 150, 1° | 1100-232 Lisboa
Phone: +351 218 871 917
Email: cem@c-e-m.org
Website: http://www.c-e-m.org/

Workshop

Movement for Actors and Dancers

23, 25 and 30 October | 19:30 –  22:30
Evoé – Escola de Actores

This module consists of a research on the sensation and image in practices of the body, movement and perception, improvisation and composition, derived from the universe of contemporary dance.
Throughout the three sections of the Movement module, a series of exercises and scores is developed, in which the participants improvise, individual and collectively, immersed in the phenomenon of awareness and amplifying their capacities of perception and expression of the body in movement.
The transmission, experimentation and reflexion about the exercises and scores is done methodically – maps of the body, with the aim that each participant can integrate tools from training techniques, movement research, improvisation and composition, in the actor’s work.

Price:
65€
60€ Evoé Students and second workshop

Where & Organization:
Evoé – Escola de Actores
Rua das Canastras 40, 1100-112 Lisboa
Phone: +351 962 525 866
Email: evoe@evoe.pt
Website: http://evoe.pt/workshops/movimento-para-atores-e-bailarinos/

Lecture and Laboratory

Lecture: Nijinsky’s writings
and
Dance and Philosophy Laboratory: rhythm trajectories

6 – 7 – 8 September 2018
Centro Cultural San Martin, Sarmiento 1551, CABA
UNA Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Departamento de Artes Dramáticas, French 3614, Aula 16, CABA
Buenos Aires

JIRA
IV Jornadas Internacionales El Ritmo En Las Artes
Ritmo, poética y espacio

Symposium
Silvia Pritz (coordination), Salomé Lopes Coelho and Aníbal Zorrilla (co-organization)

Nijinsky’s writings
The oeuvre “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky” (2006) has three chapters: Life, Life and Death. The reader follows Nijinsky’s stream of consciousness throughout the descriptions of life at Saint-Moritz, his universe as a dancer, his preoccupation with humanity, his relationship with God. However, this stream of consciousness about the triviality of his life and death emerges intersected with fragments that seem to lose contact with reality or make reality appear as an illusion. In this paper I present a reading of this oeuvre through the concept of “rhythm” in the perspective of Gilles Deleuze-Félix Guattari (2004) and José Gil (2016, 2018), with the aim of tracing some lines of thought on the presence of rhythm in “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky”, by Vaslav Nijinsky (2006).

Workshop
Carla Fonseca (coordination)

Dance and philosophy laboratory: rhythm trajectories
This laboratory consists of a practice-theory research on the concept of rhythm, from a reading of the chapter “1837: of the refrain” In: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze-Félix Guattari (2003).

Where & Organization:
UNA – Universidad Nacional de las Artes
French 3614, C1425AXD Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (54.11) 4804.2352 / 9743
Email: artesdramaticas@una.edu.ar
Website: https://ritmoenlasartes.com/

Workshop

Of the archive as gesture

With Ana Bigotte Vieira, Ana Mira e Joana Braga – baldio | Estudos de Performance

UNFINISHED – Summer School
Rogério Nuno Costa (curator), Joclécio Azevedo and Ana Carvalho (coaching)

29 August 2018 | 10:00 – 18:00
Armazém 22, Vila Nova de Gaia

On most occasions, archives are considered repositories more or less secure of memory. Archives are intimately related to the narratives and to the logic that support their own existence – narratives and logic that frequently reinforce legitimation. In this sense, it is possible to understand archives in a large sense (for ex., the body as archive as some performative artistic practices do), in a common sense (for ex., the institutional archives) or the archive in general (in accord with the philosophical and epistemological tradition) as a series of practices and gestures. What is or should be archived? Why? For what? By whom? What are the political implications of creating or working with an archive? With what questions and choices is an artist confronted with, or a researcher, by working with an archive, or making one? Departing from the notion of the archive as gesture, in this workshop, we will discuss some key-texts from recent debates on the relation between archive and memory, so that we can problematize some artistic production that in the last years has been focusing on this questions – and by that redefining the way of posing those questions. Texts by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Hal Foster will be discussed in relation with studies on the performative transmission of memory by authors such as Enzo Traverso, Diana Taylor, Paul Connerton and Joseph Roach. (Text by Ana Bigotte Vieira).

Where & Organizatio:
Armazém 22
Kale | Armazém22
Rua de Guilherme Braga, nº 22-60
4400-178 Vila Nova de Gaia
Phone: 915 509 149
Email: info@armazem22.pt
Website: http://www.armazem22.pt/Events/detail/1021?label=unfinished-escola-de-verao

Essay

Walking the air, remembering the earth

Mira, Ana. Walking the Air, Remembering the Earth (Caminhar o Ar, Lembrar a Terra), an essay on the dance work “Sacrum – Efabulations on intensive maps” by Sara Anjo [Project financed by República Portuguesa-Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes], Lisboa, 2018 
Full-text: http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/a69b4b_2019402adee847a590482ed252870f3b.pdf

Dance work & Artist:
Sacrum
Choreography: Sara Anjo
Creation and Performance: Flora Detraz, Madalena Palmeirim e Sara Anjo
Sound Design: Artur Pispalhas e Madalena Palmeirim
Live Music: Madalena Palmeirim
Light Design: Artur Pispalhas
Set Design: Daniel Melim
Costumes: Sara Anjo
Project financed by República Portuguesa-Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes
Website: http://saraanjoo.wixsite.com/saraanjo/mapas-intensivos

Photo credits: Laís Pereira

Laboratory

Dance and Philosophy Laboratory:
The presence of stillness in the formation of the image

26 July 2018 | 19:00 – 22:00
27 July 2018 | 19:00 – 22:00
28 July 2018 | 10:30/13:30 – 14:30/17:30
Fórum Dança

We will begin by studying the chapter “1730 – Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible” of the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2003). During the reading of selected excerpts of this chapter, we will study the concepts of becoming, affect, multiplicity, plane of consistency, speed and slow, movement and stillness, longitude and latitude of the body, Chronos e Aiôn. This study will be related to other selected excerpts from the book “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinksy”, by Vaslav Nijinsky (1953), together with archives and testimonies of his dance. We will try to think about the presence of stillness in the formation of the image in both the dance and writing of Nijinsky. After that, we will develop movement and perception research on the theme of this laboratory – the presence of stillness in the formation of the image –, and from corporeal sensations. We will broaden the space and time of certain images that were formed and speak to us more intensely, through improvisation and composition exercises. At a later stage, we will address the free associations that emerged throughout the study and practice developed previously and we will observe them objectively through drawing, dialoguing and writing. Last, we will gather to reflect upon the relation between the study of the philosophical concepts and the movement and perception research, improvisation and composition experimented so far and the formation of the artistic image in the tension between movement and stillness. This laboratory is addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Dance and Philosophy.

Price:
60 Euros
45 Euros (students, professors, researchers and artists)

Where, Organization and Registration:
Fórum Dança
Travessa do Calado, 26 B, 1170/070  Lisboa
Phone: 21 342 89 85 | 925 103 596
Email: forumdanca@forumdanca.pt
Website: http://www.forumdanca.pt/

Photo credits:
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1910 – 1911).Nijinsky, Vaslav Retrieved fromhttp://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-5291-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (left)
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1910 – 1911).Nijinsky, Vaslav Retrieved fromhttp://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-5292-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (right)

Lecture

Nijinsky’s life life death

International Conference
“Art of Living /Art of Dying: Philosophical and Literary Perspectives”,
IFILNOVA | Culturelab, Questions of Subjectivity: Philosophy and Literature (org.)

21 June 2018 | 09:30 – 19:00
22 June 2018 | 10:00 – 19:00
Room Multiusos 3, 4th Floor, I&D Building
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities  – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Nijinsky’s “Diary” is made of three chapters: Life, Life, Death (2004). As a reader, I could follow his stream of consciousness throughout the descriptions of his life at Saint-Moritz, his universe as a dancer, his preoccupations with humanity, his relationship with God until I stumbled in an image that seemed to suspend the current of everyday life: blood in the snow. Nijinsky writes that he is in front of an abyss where he can fall. Then, he describes a walk he took during which it seemed to him that there was blood in the snow, so he ran following its trail. It seemed to him that a man had been killed, but that he was alive, so Nijinsky ran in another direction and saw a large blood stain. This paper is intended to reflect philosophically upon Nijinsky’s “Diary” as a prolonged exacerbation of life and anticipation of death as a means to create an “unlocatable place both in space and especially in time” where images emerge (Lepecki, 2000). I will address Nijinsky’s haunting stillness in dance as a suspension of a sequence of gestures and, in his writings, of words. In “the full migratory flight towards the “land of madness” that Nijinsky’s diary encompasses, according to Uno (2012), I will try to understand his process of “disruption of the space, time and identity of the subject” (Gil, 2016). Last, and recalling “One Manifesto Less” (Deleuze, 2008), Nijinsky’s operation of bringing language to a minimum will unravel the potency of an image.

Where:
Room Multiusos 3, 4th Floor, I&D Building
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26
1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.culturelab.ifilnova.pt/events/art-of-living-art-of-dying

Lecture

Sensible geographies, a study on the body and dance in the experience of the city

29 MAY 2018 | 15:00 – 18:00
Sala Multiusos 2 – Edifício ID – piso 4
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

The notion of “undercommons” is elaborated by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), as the space and time that is always here, in reality and fantasy, and where we are part of the movement of things — We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. That one may cohabit in the space of the “undercommons”, no longer as an abandoned space, will have to be considered that what is broken will remain broken and it can never be repaired. Then, we reach in the direction of the other and place searching for a conexion, cultivating the included and excluded in the space and time of the regimes of surveillance. Therefore, in that vigilant space and time, just in the refusal of its normativity, start coexisting movements of dissonance, noise, flutter, disorientation, fugitivity, hapticality, dispossession; which can be shaped performatively. For Deleuze, a “milieu” is made of “qualities, substances, powers, and events”, a “trajectory” merges with the subjectivity of the milieu itself and of those who travel through that milieu and a “map” (of the trajectory) traces the journey and what one journeys through in a dynamic cartography (2000). In the coalescence between real and imaginary we propose to reflect upon the enormous praxis of precice gestures in the experience of the city revealed by the following performance works: Early Works by Trisha Brown (1966-1979), The Geography Trilogy by Ralph Lemon (1997-2007) and Acções by Eleonora Fabião (2008-), for example: smashing vinyl records and burying them in the courtyard, building a spaceship with recycled materials, walking down the side of a building, going down the street hand in hand and off balance, or making a rainbow with fluorescence lights in the middle of the night.
By convoking the notions of “undercommons” (Stefano Harney e Fred Moten, 2013), “milieu”, “trajectory” and “map” (Gilles Deleuze, 2000), in relation with the performance works mentioned above, we will try to think on the emergence of sensible geographies, capable of reinventing the experience of the city, its livingness and images.

Where:
Sala Multiusos 2 – Edifício ID – piso 4
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna, 26
1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ifilnova.pt/events/leituras-criticas-sobre-a-experiencia-da-cidade-8

Photo credits:
Ação Fortalezense #5: jarros, Eleonora Fabião
Bienal Internacional de Dança do Ceará de Par em Par, Fortaleza 2010
Foto: Victor Furtado

Laboratory

Dance and Philosophy Laboratory: rhythm trajectories

SATURDAYS | 10:00 – 13:00 and 14:00 – 18:00
Dance Studio, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista

• 24 February 2018
• 24 March 2018
• 28 April 2018
• 20 October 2018
• 17 November 2018
• 15 December 2018

“Je veux écrire un peu en vers, mais ma pensée est ailleurs. Je veux décrire mes promenades” (“Cahiers”, Nijinski, 2000) This laboratory consists of an embodied practice of dance and philosophy, which main theme is rhythm trajectories. The laboratory aims at generating a field of thought in motion, as Massumi would say, through the acts of reading, dialoguing, writing and dancing collectively. The main sources of this laboratory are selected texts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and José Gil, and dance archives and documentation on/by the russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinski. Throughout the sessions we will be tracing philosophical concepts, inventing dance scores than can be reenacted through movement research, improvisation and composition, and still harvesting to transpose this work into forms of expression in dance, philosophy and writing. The Laboratory is addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Dance and Philosophy.

Price:
45 euros (single session), 140 euros (4 sessions, 35 euros each), 240 (8 sessions, 30 euros each)

Where:
Dance studio
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Phone: (+351) 218 172 600
Email: pologaivotasboavista@cm-lisboa.pt
Website: http://www.cm-lisboa.pt/en/polo-cultural-gaivotas-boavista

Organization:
Ana Mira
Email: anasfmira@gmail.com
Website: ana-mira.com

Support:  , baldio | Estudos de Performance

Photo credits: Susana Ventura

Lecture

Cartografias #0

17 FEBRUARY 2018 | 18:00
Fórum Dança

Ezequiel Santos (curator)
Ana Mira, Hugo Calhim Cristovão & Joana von Mayer Trindade (guests)

“A proposal that aims to build and present maps of possibility to contemporary dance. Movement and its thought will be the nucleus and the pretext to articulate a program that includes performances, choreographic encounters, and debates.
We will start by presenting two visions of the possible relation of dance to philosophy: that of the researcher Ana Mira, with a reflection on the dancing body from the philosophical notions of sensitive and primitive affection, and that of Hugo Calhim Cristovão and Joana von Mayer Trindade who will talk about the choreographic project “Of the insatiability of the case or at the same time a miracle”; presenting us the resulting publication.
Between visibility and experimentation, this is the line on which we intend to continue Cartographies on its route #1 in October 2018: a dance that is wondering and attentive to the world, and that reacts to other ecologies besides the stage” (Ezequiel Santos, 2018).

Where & Organization:
Fórum Dança
Travessa do Calado, 26 B, 1170/070  Lisboa
Phone: 21 342 89 85 | 925 103 596
Email: forumdanca@forumdanca.pt
Website: http://www.forumdanca.pt/cartografias/index.html

Book launch & Essay

Several authors, Bodied Spaces: crossed discourses between body and space, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (ed. coord.), Teatro Municipal do Porto and Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Porto, 2018

20 JANUARY 2018 | 15:30
Café Rivoli, Teatro Municipal do Porto

Mira, Ana, “Contours of inexistence: a reading of the choreographic piece I Am Here, by João Fiadeiro (2003)”, Chapter Choreography and Philosophy, in: Bodied Spaces: crossed discourses between body and space, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (ed. coord.), Teatro Municipal do Porto and Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Porto, 2018

His own body was now as if detached from him, becoming ever more estranged, as transparent and bright as he had seen Claude’s and as he now saw Aia’s, who would come down from the carpeted mansion into Cluny’s old naked wood floor. His thinking, isolated, figured: a place like this, both abbey and museum, doubly contemplative, is a place of strong passions, of bodies seeking the image, of spirits seeking to satisfy their desire. Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, 2005

In the short story O Unicórnio [The Unicorn], featured in Contos da Imagem [Image Short Stories], by Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (2005), the museum visitor stood in front of the 15th century tapestry with the lady and the white unicorn for three days and three nights without the guards noticing his incarceration. In the wall of the museum, writes the author, Claude de la Viste held the mirror with the image of the unicorn, which was kneeling and laid its legs in her lap. The image of the unicorn stayed in the mirror even when Claude, transparent, moved it away from the animal. The visitor contemplated them from the museum bench. On the wall, they didn’t seem to care he was there: “Could Aia bring the mirror down here for a second?” the visitor asked Claude (Brandão 2005: 15). And Aia came down from the tapestry on the wall and into the museum’s wood floor. Claude wouldn’t take her eyes off the unicorn. The visitor was handed the mirror of the images, and in Fiama’s view, if the image stayed in the mirror even after it was moved away from the unicorn, then the world had no explanation. Just as well. Man withdraws from himself to emerge in contours of inexistence. Invisible in the dark and motionless in the light, man escapes toward space and immateriality. I Am Here is a place in which man, assimilated to space, is reflected in the double images that reflect him, mutually haunting each other. Thus, arise other constellations of images that are almost unnoticeable – the contours of inexistence – as forms of existence. Perhaps the body wouldn’t end “suddenly at our feet, at our hands”. It wouldn’t end there, with “nothing beyond” as “a slope of a cliff over the ocean”, in the words of Helena Almeida, whose photographic work influenced the choreographic piece I Am Here, by João Fiadeiro (2003), on which I elaborate in this dance and philosophy essay.

Essay

“Primitive affective, a study on the potency of the body that dances through the perspective of Nietzsche according to Deleuze”

Mira, A., “Afectivo primitivo, um estudo sobre a potência do corpo que dança a partir de Nietzsche segundo Deleuze”, In: Da insaciabilidade do caso ou ao mesmo tempo um milagre, Nuisis Zobop – Associação Cultural de Criação, Investigação e Formação no Domínio das Artes Performativas e Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto: Grupo de Investigação Raízes e Horizontes da Filosofia e da Cultural em Portugal (eds.), Porto, 2017, pp.71-74
Full-text: http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/15708.pdf

Organization:
Nuisis Zobop – Associação Cultural de Criação, Investigação e Formação no Domínio das Artes Performativas
E-mail: nuisiszobop@gmail.com
Website: http://www.nuisiszobop.com/
Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto
Phone: (00.351) 22 607 71 80
E-mail: ifilosofia@letras.up.pt
Website: ifilosofia.up.pt

Round Table

Cities of Amadeo – International Cycle of Round Tables

30 SEPTEMBER 2017 | 11:00 – 18:00
Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto

Maria Celeste Natário (organization)
Mariana Pinto dos Santos, Ana Mira, Cláudia Marisa, Hugo Calhim Cristovão, Maria Celeste Natário, Luísa Malato, Marta Soares, José Carlos Seabra Pereira, Renato Epifânio, Rui Lopo, João Oliveira Duarte (guests)

My participation in this round table brings to light the notion of translation amongst different art genres and philosophy; for example in the book “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, written by Gustave Flaubert, with drawings by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and a philosophical essay by Maria Filomena Molder, coord. Manuel Rosa /Assírio & Alvim, Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2006.

Professorship

Body and creative processes and Choreographic research – B.A. in Performing Arts

2017 – 2018 B.A. in Performing Arts, ESTAL – Escola Superior de Tecnologias e Artes de Lisboa

Practices and studies of the body and contemporary dance; experiential anatomy and physiology; movement and perception; gesture, its emergence and sustainability; the methods and its authors; choreographic composition; archive and documentation.

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible (theoretical)

The dance and philosophy laboratory: testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible seeks to practice theory through movement meditations (influenced by Chi Kung) and philosophical investigations around the themes “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible”. We begin a talk, read a text, open the axial coordinates and the earth line in the body. We breathe and listen, till where was the text heard? We write in a spiral, instead of straight lines. We talk again, this time with our eyes closed. We stand still like a tree, we feel the warmth of energy passing through the body and air. We take the place of the other to think of a philosophical concept. A book will always be revisited: “Treino e(m) Poema” (“Practice and/in Poem”), by Kazuo Ohno (2016), together with an analysis of some collected texts on the experience of “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible”: Caillois (1935), Lévi-Strauss (1958), Chatwin (1988), Lepecki (2015, conferência online), Abram (2007), Gil (2010, 2016), Deleuze (2000, 2004), amongst others. We make questions, what does the experience of “in the darkness of gesture” and “a geography of the sensible” bring to dance, philosophy and life?

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: a geography of the sensible

MONDAY 17 JULY 2017 – FRIDAY 21 JULY 2017 | 17:00 – 19:00

CEM SUMMER I, c.e.m. – centro em movimento, Lisboa

How to make of dance a map of attentive listening of the body? How to write the body and its path taken? The theme of this laboratory – a geography of the sensible – is approached by an embodied practice of dance and philosophy, which relies upon an investigation in practices of the body, contemporary dance, chi kung and philosophy. Departing from philosophical texts of Gilles Deleuze and José Gil, the philosophy and cultural ecology of David Abram and the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and Bruce Chatwin, the laboratory seeks to foster meanings for a geography of the sensible through the acts of reading, understanding, dancing, dialoguing and writing. The laboratory readings will be given beforehand. During the laboratory selected excerpts of those readings are studied and, still in auscultation, an experimentation of the body takes place through scores that aim to reenact the life of the concepts apprehended. In the meantime, through a geography of the sensible, paths are built where body and environment are bewildered in danced gestures, words and writings.

Upcoming laboratory: 7, 8, 9 September Dance and philosophy laboratory: Testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible, baldio | Estudos de Performance, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – CML, Lisbon.

Photo credits: Carolina Figueiredo

Laboratory

Dance and philosophy laboratory: in the darkness of the gesture

THURSDAY 8 JUNE 2017 | 19:30 – 22:00

FRIDAY 9 JUNE 2017 | 19:30 – 22:00

SATURDAY 10 JUNE 2017 | 9H30 – 13:00

Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – Lisboa (dance studio)

This laboratory will focus on a practice of dancing in the dark, or in a weak light, and of reading and reflecting upon selected texts by Deleuze, Gil, Massumi, Pelbart, Lepecki, Caillois e Abram. Approaching the themes of dark and light, visible and invisible, potency and a certain relation with the sensible, space and time, the laboratory deepens an embodied practice in dance and philosophy. This work is informed by acute research into movement perception, contemporary dance, chi kung and philosophy. The practice of dancing in the dark, or in a weak light, consists of movement improvisations, which scores have been drawn from a reading of those texts. The laboratory reserves a space for, individual and collective, reflection and writing on the readings and improvisations previously held.

Upcoming laboratories: 17 – 21 July Dance and philosophy laboratory: Of a geography of the sensible, CEM – Centro em Movimento, Lisbon 7, 8, 9 September Dance and philosophy laboratory: Testimonies and reflections on the experience of the sensible, baldio | Estudos de Performance, Polo Cultural Gaivotas Boavista – CML, Lisbon.

Price: 35 euros
Where & Organization:
baldio | Estudos de Performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: anasfmira@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support: 

Encounter

Tracing Dance (an encounter about maps and scores)

11 MARCH 2017 |16H

Porta33, Funchal – Madeira

Sara Anjo with Ana Mira

This encounter will have as a point of departure the presentation of a map, which reports to dance practices, developed throughout Sara Anjo’s participation in the MA Das Choreography, at Das Graduate School, in Amsterdam. The map contains a compilation of texts, images e scores that sustained and supported the research developed during that MA (2014-2016). After, the audience will be invited to participate in an exercise of perception of the body and to register it through drawing and writing, working operative concepts for a sustained analysis and experience in the performing practices.

Where & Organization :
Porta33
Rua do Quebra Costas 33, 9000-034-Funchal, Ilha da Madeira
Phone: +351291743038
Email: porta33@porta33.com
Website: http://www.porta33.com/

Debate – Encounter

Of the insatiability in the case or at the same time a miracle

10 FEBRUARY 2017 |14:30 – 17H

Escola Superior Artística do Porto 3º Andar

Hugo Calhim Cristovão and Joana Von Mayer Trindade (artists, curators)
Eduarda Neves, Cláudia Marisa, Cláudia Galhós, Ana Mira, Celeste Natário, Maria Manuela Brito Martins, Mário Correia, Paulo Costa (guests)

Where:
Escola Superior Artística do Porto – Largo São Domingos 80, 4050-545 Porto

Organization:
Nuisis Zobop – Cultural Association of Creation, Research and Formation in Performing Arts
Website: http://nuisiszobop.com/

Essay

Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)

Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Vol 8 Issue 2, December 2016

The article ‘Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)’, consists of an approach to a dance and philosophy practice, through the lens of analysis of Gil’s philosophy, and aims at reflecting upon the notion of danced gesture and its formation through a change of scale from a macroscopic to a microscopic level of the corporeal phenomena. The embodied practice in dance and philosophy exposed in this article features a translation of sensations and images of dance experience into verbal language – sensorial document – followed by a philosophical analysis of the procedures that led to the formation of danced gesture and its transcription. This research was developed from dance collaboration with choreographer and visual artist Rosemary Butcher, in the context of the piece After Kaprow: The Silent Room (2012).

Keywords
embodied practice,danced gesture,sensorial document,change of scale,relation,force

Mira, A. (2016), ‘Sensorial document: An embodied practice in dance and philosophy from collaboration in After Kaprow: The Silent Room by Rosemary Butcher (2012)’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 8:2, pp. 177-86, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.8.2.177_

Where:
C-Dare Centre for Dance Research – Coventry University
Institute for Creative Enterprise, Parkside, Coventry CV1 2NE

Organization:
C-Dare Centre for Dance Research
Coventry University (UK)
Phone: +44 (0) 24 7615 8301
Website: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=22972/

Lecture

Walk your life: tracing autobiographies in Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones (1994

schedule (t.b.a.), Galeria Fernando Pessoa – Centro Nacional de Cultura

Faces of the Self: Autobiography, Confession, Therapy 

II Anual Conference of AELab IFILNOVA

24th to 25th November 2016 Lisbon

Bartholomew Ryan, Gianfranco Ferraro, Marta Faustino, Ana Falcato (Organisers)

This paper addresses the dance theatre piece Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones (1994) and the chain of reactions that it generated in the dance critical acts of Croce (1994), Stuart (1995) and Lepecki (1995). On another sphere, Foucault (1997) and Butler (2002)—influenced by Kant (1784)—, walked in the direction of a future philosophy and its critical attitude, as the art of not being governed quite so much and developing a new practice of values.

If here is the place where one can stand in the present day, then still calls for the many faces of the self needed to persevere, understand, survive and, eventually, cross over. For such courage, one may be asked to mirror his life story and confess what one loves, fears and wants. Collectively and, at the same time, as an autonomous being in a permanent critical attitude in relation to the present, tracing autobiographies is approached here as a way to express, govern and reinvent oneself in a myriad of faces.

“—Walk your life”, says Bill T. Jones in the workshop that led to Still/Here (1994), which is an evening-length dance theatre piece in two acts with a visual and sound score composed by interviews with people who are terminally ill. In the workshop, Jones asked those people to draw a map of their lives and to walk their stories, remembering their earliest years, their diagnosis and imagining the moment of their death. “—Once you have done it forward, try doing it backwards”, says Jones. One of the participants guides the others through the map of her life moving across the space in elaborate lines and narrating her story. The workshop held a place for autobiography, confession and therapy and it generated expressive materials for the two acts Still and Here. The dance theatre piece Still/Here (1994), by means of dance and performed by professional dancers, contemplate survival, art and life. Departing from his own life story, Jones reinscribed the body in the privileged space of who fights to understand his present and performs an embodied act in ethics, aesthetics and politics.

Where:
Galeria Fernando Pessoa – Centro Nacional de Cultura
Largo do Picadeiro 10 – 1º (Chiado)

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ifilnova.pt/, http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/

Permanent Seminar

Performance and Philosophy

19 OCTOBER 2016 | 10:00 – 14:00, Room 1.05, Building I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Performance and Philosophy Research Group (curatorship)

The Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar held in the context of the Performance and Philosophy Research Group of AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices at IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, aims at constituting itself as a platform for discussion and experimentation in the performance and philosophy fields, in their theoretical and practice dimensions, bringing together researchers and artists.

The second edition of Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar opens with the seminar “Body and Radical Presence” by the actor and researcher Renato Ferracini (LUME – Núcleo interdisciplinar de Pesquisas Teatrais and UNICAMP – Universidade de Campinas, BR). These sessions are free and addressed to anyone interested in research issues and experimentations related to the field of Performance and Philosophy.

Where:
Room 1.05, Building I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26, 1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
Performance and Philosophy Research Group /AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices /IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/seminario-permanente-performance-e-filosofia, http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/research-group-on-performance-and-philosophy

Professorship

Body and scenic movement seminar & Movement and composition seminar – B.A. in Theatre

2016 – 2018 Performing Arts Department, Universidade de Évora (PT)

Practices and studies of the body and contemporary dance; experiential anatomy and physiology; movement and perception; gesture, its emergence and sustainability; the methods and its authors; choreographic composition; archive and documentation.

Where & Organization:
Performing Arts Department
Universidade de Évora, Portugal
Colégio dos Leões, Estrada dos Leões 7000-208 Évora
Email:geral@darc.uevora.pt
Website: http://www.dac.uevora.pt/

Launch

Opening Cycle TAKING POSITION the political and place | Experimental Course in Performance Studies, baldio performance studies

12 – 14 SEPTEMBER 2016 | MONDAY, TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY | 18:30 – 21:30
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

Opening Cycle of TAKING POSITION the political and place | Performance Studies Experimental Course, by baldio | performance studies, the only public event of the project, in the frame of the Summer programme at the courtyard Lusco-fusco, Polo Cultural Gaivotas – Boavista.

September 12, 6:30pm – Book Launch, Jeux Sans Frontières #2 – on Spaces of Resistance and Practices of Invention, by Ana Bigotte Vieira, Nuno Leão and Sandra Lang. Presented by Maria Alice Samara and Luhuna Carvalho.

September 13, 6:30pm – Oracle City, a game-performance by Fernanda Eugénio

September 14, 6:30pm – Inter(in)animated Archives, a performative object by Paula Caspão

Where & Organization:
baldio | estudos de performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: baldiohabitado@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support:

Course

TAKING POSITION  | THE POLITICAL AND PLACE Experimental Course in Performance Studies

REGISTRATIONS NOW OPEN UNTIL SEPTEMBER 5
12 SEPTEMBER – 14 DECEMBER 2016 | MONDAYS, TUESDAYS AND WEDNESDAYS | 18:30 – 21:30
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

with baldio | performance studies
Ana Bigotte Vieira, Ana Mira, Ana Riscado, Fernanda Eugénio, Joana Braga, Paula Caspão, Ricardo Seiça Salgado

TAKING POSITION | THE POLITICAL AND PLACE, Experimental Course in Performance Studies (ECPS) is designed as a proposal of encounter with-in study, a process of study for encounters to be, throughout the convergence of reading practices, discussion, research and experimentation: a three month course to experiment with tools, methodologies, issues, concerns, problems and limitations related to Performance Studies, in order to interrogate our present. Emphasizing the contingency of critical thought production, the course is characterized by a tight relation between the performative and the experimental, with a strong focus on the conversation between the several fields at stake: theatre, dance, music, performance, architecture, anthropology, philosophy, politics, history, critical theory, literature. It encompasses a continuous workshop intended as a common thread throughout the course, and three thematic axes.

Where & Organization:
baldio | estudos de performance
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas, 8 | 1200-202 Lisboa
Email: baldiohabitado@gmail.com
Website: https://baldiohabitado.wordpress.com/

Support:

Laboratory

Soma: practices of the body and contemporary dance

4, 18 AND 25 JUNE 2016 | SATURDAYS | 10:00 – 13:00
2, 9, 16, 23 AND 30 JUNE 2016 | THURSDAYS | 18:30 – 20:30
Evoé: Escola de Actores

The body has an almost imperceptible dimension that is amplified through our awareness until corporeal volumes are formed in the space, amongst which the danced gestures.

Influenced by the legacy of American avant-garde dance, this laboratory approaches a listening of the body through sensation and aims to develop a dance work at the level of the techniques and experimentation of the body and its states of awareness. The resources are the psychosomatic practices: experiential studies of anatomy, physiology and embryology, release techniques, material for the spine (Steve Paxton), body-mind centering (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen), Zhan Zhuang Chi Kung (Master Lam Kam Chuen), improvisation and composition from the performance research, for example, “the sensation is the image” by Lisa Nelson and “to see is to be seen” by Deborah Hay. This laboratory is open level and allows each participant, differently, to develop an investigative practice of the body and contemporary dance, based on the life of the body (soma), collectively in the studio.

Where & Organization:
Evoé – Escola de Actores
Rua das Canastras, 40 | 1100 – 112 Lisbon
Phone: +351 218 880 838
Mobile: +351 919 790 640
Email: evoe@evoe.pt
Website: http://www.evoe.pt/cursos.php?cd_curso=13

Permanent Seminar

Performance and Philosophy

18 FEBRUARY 2015 – 17 JUNE 2016 | 18:00 – 20:00
IFILNOVA, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Ana Mira (seminar organization)

The Performance and Philosophy Permanent Seminar held in the context of the Performance and Philosophy Research Group of AELab – Aesthetics and Philosophy Laboratory for Artistic Practices at IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, aims at constituting itself as a platform for discussion and experimentation in the performance and philosophy fields, in their theoretical and practice dimensions, bringing together researchers and artists.

17 June 2016
Title: One, two, three: the rhythm beyond metrics
Researchers: Aníbal N. Zorrilla (Universidade Nacional das Artes, Buenos Aires), Salomé Lopes Coelho (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

27 May 2016
Theme: On the deleuzian theory of the body
Researcher: José Gil (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

29 April 2016
Theme: The stolen time or “there is a minute of the world that passes” / (Un)disciplines of time: competences, rules of existence, cost and use of life
Researchers: Ana Godinho and Gianfranco Ferraro (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL) 

30 March 2016
Theme: Multiple times and multiple spaces: on Serviço ACARTE of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation between 1984 e 1989 as Aleph
Researcher:  Ana Bigotte Vieira (IFILNOVA,FCSH-UNL)

27 January 2016
Theme: How to compose sensations in architecture – construction of a map of intensities
Researcher:  Susana Ventura (Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto)

4 December 2015
Theme: For an ethics of inventivity
Researcher: Renato Feraccini (Universidade de Campinas e Lume Teatro, BR)

20 October 2015
Theme: On the brokenness of skin: embodying language in dance and philosophy
Researcher: Ana Mira (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

25 September 2015
Theme: Performance and portuguese art: the value of an history-without history
Researcher: Cláudia Madeira (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

18 February 2015
Theme: The value of the human in the performing arts
Researcher: Paulo Filipe Monteiro (IFILNOVA, FCSH-UNL)

Where:
Edifício I&D, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26, 1069-061 Lisboa

Organization:
IFILNOVA – Nova Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities – Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Phone: +351 217 908 300 Ext.1527
Email: ifl.fcsh@gmail.com
Website: http://www.aelab.ifilnova.pt/pages/seminario-permanente-performance-e-filosofia

Lecture

I’m stepping in and out of reality…tell me how to fight: Critical acts, in dance and philosophy

8 JUNE 2016 | 14:30
Anfiteatro IV, Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa

International Conference on Theatre Criticism:
Creating Dialogues – Performance Art Criticism and the Public Sphere
8th to 11th June 2016 Lisbon | Porto

In November 26, 1994 the New Yorker published the review Discussing The Undiscussable: When players in a production aren’t just acting out death but are really dying — as in Bill T. Jones “Still/Here” — is it really art?, by Arlene Croce, in which the dance critic writes: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones Still/Here and have no plans to review it”.

Still/Here (1994) is an evening-length dance theatre piece in two acts with a visual and sound score composed by interviews with people who are terminally ill. By means of dance and facing death, the two acts Still and Here contemplate survival, art and life. Through the perspective of Croce, Jones, by representing himself to the public not as artist but as victim and martyr, is “putting himself beyond the reach of criticism”. According to Croce, Jones makes criticism impossible to be approached as theatre or dance theatre (1994).

In February 1995, Meg Stuart performs the solo XXX. For Arlene and Colleagues, also in New York. By this occasion, Lepecki underlines the choreographic, aesthetic and political relevance of Stuart’s solo as “a most appropriate critique of Croce’s aesthetics and politics that forbids art to be aware of its social, cultural and emotional context, i.e., to be aware of life” (1995).

In the sphere of action of dance and philosophy, we aim at reinscribing the body, dance and its criticism in the privileged place of who fights to understand its present and, at the same time, to think criticism as an embodied act in ethics, aesthetics and politics. For such, we resort to the dialogue established amongst the critical acts in the dance art of Jones — Croce — Lepecki in relation with the critical acts in the philosophy of Kant — Foucault — Butler. These last, referring to Kant’s answer to the dialog created with the public by the German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift, in November 1784, with the question — What is Enlightenment?, continued by Foucault (1997) and Butler (2002) — What is critique?

Where:
Anfiteatro IV, Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa
Alameda da Universidade 1600 – 214 Lisboa

Organization:
Centro de Estudos de Teatro
Phone: +351 217 920 086
Email: criticaeteatro@gmail.com
Website: https://criticaeartesperformativas.wordpress.com/

Encounter

Bodied Spaces / Choreography and Philosophy

7 JULY 2016 | 18:30
Escola Superior de Educação do Porto – Instituto Politécnico do Porto

Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (curator)
Ana Mira & João Fiadeiro (guests)

C’est l’espace en tant que médiateur de distance, qui fait surgir la parole (Pankow, 1986). Paris. The first word Travis said in Wim Wender’s movie (1984). Travis had lost his speech in the desert in Texas. Paris Texas. That was where Travis had bought an empty parcel of land by correspondence. Travis showed a photograph of that piece of desert territory to his brother Walt.

In João Fiadeiro’s work sometimes the body disappears. It can dance in the dark, be kept in a photograph, a drawing, a shadow or a vehicle for charcoal. It can run outside the theatre and come back to describe its voyage through story telling and (recovery of) exhaustion. The body can place gesture outside itself, dislocating us around that unfolded space. The body can perform his/her living space, there or not exactly. In Fiadeiro’s choreographic work, where is the body when it is not there, filtered through absence or darkness?

Il a couru comme ça, jusqu’à ce que toute trace d’homme ait disparu (Pankow, 1986). Travis could not endure his relation of  “symbiosis” with his spouse Jane, the house was on fire and Travis could not see her neither their son. He could only run, he just ran for five days. After four years, when Travis and Jane met, a glass was their mediator: She could not see him. He turned his back. He could not see her. He turns again to see Jane and the reflex of his face on hers. She turns on the light on her side of the glass. She can see him. He can only see himself reflected on the glass. According to Pankow, the glass (mirror) that kept Travis and Jane separated allowed each of them to situate in the space, distant from one another. The mirror allows Travis and Jane to trace and recognize the limits between them, previously confound (1986).

In the lived space of the body — filtered through absence or darkness —, discussed previously and present throughout Fiadeiro’s choreographic work, how can we think distance, space and limit?

Where:
Escola Superior de Educação do Porto – Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 602 | 4200-465 Porto

Organization:
Teatro Municipal do Porto Rivoli
Phone: +351223392200
E-mail: geral.tmp@cm-porto.pt
Website: http://teatromunicipaldoporto.pt/PT/programa/bodied-spaces-2-coreografia-e-filosofia/

Workshop

Body-gesture & the making of sensorial documents

14 – 15 JULY 2016 | 14:00 – 18:00
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista

Summerschool And 2016＃1 In between ways of doing
with Fernanda Eugénio (curator) & guests

In a certain state of awareness in dance, a body-gesture gathers the sensations that transforms into images as a series of fluid crystallizations and successive in time. The proposed exercises are centred on the listening of the body as a means to the emergence of the danced gesture. The sensorial document consists of a mapping of that experimentation of the body that dances through writing: how can writing translate sensations, small perceptions and images of the body that dances into verbal language and conceptual thought? For the experimentation of a body-gesture and the making of sensorial documents, in dance, it is needed to consider the molecular plane, microscopic and almost imperceptible of the minute movements and smallest impressions of the body (following José Gil’s philosophy). Through the effort of describing what is almost not sensed in the body during its danced gesture, language hesitates by the haunting of the body and the reminiscence of a non-verbal of the verbal: we rehearse sensation analysed by word in another space of the body reconstructed and transcribed. Bring the whole body to dance and a small writing board.

Where:
Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Rua das Gaivotas 8 | 1200 – 202 Lisboa

Organization:
AND_Lab | Research on Art-Thinking & Togetherness
Email: info.andlab@gmail.com
Website: http://and-lab.org

Workshop

Surrounding gesture, in the making of dance and philosophy

18 – 22 JULY 2016 | 18:30 – 20:30
CEM – Centro em Movimento

In a practicing of listening of the body, we establish a relation between dance philosophy writings and movement research through the acts of dancing, reading, reflecting and writing together. We search for a voice and its resonances in continuous transpositions between those readings and the danced movements—on the theme of “gesture” and its philosophical derivations.

Where & Organization :
CEM – Centro em Movimento
Rua dos Fanqueiros 150, 1° | 1100-232 Lisboa
Phone: +351 218 871 917
Email: cem@c-e-m.org
Website: http://www.c-e-m.org/