Newsround by Locals : what your Portuguese Peers are up to

I will be pleased to present you my Collection of People.
A project about finding ways of keeping the ephemeral. About that impossibility.
A long term umbrella project that includes 4 collections developed on an ongoing basis.
Collection of Lovers and Collection of Collectors - already have a performance format to be shown and are touring the world.
My next Collection is just starting - Collection of Artists. Premiering on the fall of 2019.

BoCA - Biennial of Contemporary Arts is a biennial of new and original creations and special events that takes place, simultaneously, in the cities of Lisbon and Porto (www.bocabienal.org). BoCA focuses on a transversal program that promotes the dialogue between cultural institutions (theatres, museums, galleries, public space), artistic territories (performing arts, visual arts, performance and music) and their respective audiences.

By curating original creations, artistic residencies, public meetings, conferences and an educational program, BoCA biennial feeds the (re)configurations of the artistic territories in an hydrid and transversal set, with the vocation to support the artistic construction processes of today and the future.

BoCA works in a national and international scale: it has a national representation by working during almost 7 weeks in 2 cities of 2 different regions at the same time (Lisbon and Porto), expanding their activities to all Portuguese regions during the year. In our first edition in 2017, BoCA also expanded its activities to Paris (Festival d'Automne de Paris, Nanterre-Amandiers), Brussels (Kunstenfestivaldesarts), Hamburg (Kampnagel), Buenos Aires (Centro Cultural Recoleta) or Santiago de Chile (Bienal BAM).
For 2019-2020, i wish that BoCA could mark presence in different countries and cities, cooperating with local artists and cultural institutions, throught the organization of artistic residencies, presentations of shows, performances and installations - a small display of works that can be developped to or were showed at BoCA in Lisbon and Porto.

Working together with 29 Portuguese cultural institutions in Portugal (all national theatres, national museums, private foundations and institutions, local and new galleries,...), in 2017 BoCA worked with 59 artists from 20 countries, and had 77.200 spectators, in Lisbon and Porto.

I will present BoCA very briefly at Newsround by Locals.

www.bocabienal.org
facebook.com/boca.bienal

Hello 
I'm the founder of NuIsIs ZoBoP – Cultural Association of Creation, Research and Formation in of Performing Arts, with Hugo Calhim Cristovão. I will be introducing our new Creation/Investigation project entitled "Of the suicides (the vice of humiliating immortality)", show premiering February 2019, debates, academic congresses and publications going up to the end of 2019. We are looking for institutions and individuals looking to participate in publications and debates that will closely follow the creation themes and expand on them as an independent research. For the creations we are looking for venues of exchange where workshops and practical sharing of the work process leading to the show can take place. Our aim is to build a network of affiliated individuals or institutions by which the creation and
it´s themes may expand and be inspired by. A special interest of ours is the confront of Portuguese philosophical and artistical authors with similar oriented authors of other cultures. In this project, the inspiring author in this sense is Raul Leal, that we wish to put on dialogue with Sade, Artaud, and Genet. From these, and their influence on Hijikata, we aim to look a new to what is now called "butoh", not as an aesthetics or style, but as an example of creative irruption to be questioned.

For a glimpse of what we developed in our last projects please see:

NuIsIs ZoBoP – Cultural Association of Creation, Research and Formation in the field of Performing Arts
1.Link to Publication "Insaciability in the case or at the same time a miracle":  http://ler.letras.up.pt/site/default.aspx?qry=id022id1545&sum=sim
2. Link to Publication “Heaven is just a blue disguise of hell”: http://ler.letras.up.pt/site/default.aspx?qry=id022id1500&sum=sim

Hi everyone, looking forward to see you on Saturday. I will be presenting our company Hotel Europa and its recent work on the Postcolonial Documentary Theatre. We had been working on Postcolonial topics for the last 4 years and created cycle of three performances that are finished and already touring: Portugal is not a small country, Pass-Port and Liberation. The work is based on live testimonies using archive and verbatim material and reflecting on Portuguese colonialism and aiming at decolonizing the present. We are looking for collaborations for our new projects.

Hotel Europa was cofounded by André Amálio (Portugal) and Tereza Havlíčková (Czech Republic), after meeting at the MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths University in London. The company develops documentary theatre work exploring the boundaries between dance, performance art and theatre in a process of collaboration. Their creations are based in autobiographical material, verbatim, testimonies, archives, family stories, and national stories, mythologies and folk tales. Hotel Europa’s work includes: Portugal is not a Small Country (2015), Pass-Port (2016) and Liberation (2017). In the moment they are preparing three new performances that will premiere in 2019, Postcolonial Love (Teatro Nacional D.Maria II), The end of Portuguese Colonialism (Culturgest) and Postmemories - The Children of colonialism (Culturgest)

We have in development a project for an International Center of Residences and Transdisciplinary Creation for the old Power Station of Freixo, a large industrial space, located next to the river, in the zone of Campanhã.
We want to see it as a permanent laboratory, a place where you’re free to investigate, to research, to try, to fail and to try again.
We want to reach something special, a project that goes well beyond the simple concession of facilities for rehearsals and other works. We want to create a Creation Center that really promotes new encounters, provokes the challenge, the risk, the experimentation, contributing to the "ever-emerging artist".
We already have several actions going on, we have ideas and initiatives that we want to share and we would like to hear your inputs about it.

Hi,
I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow and to talk about my latest project OUR FAVORITE SPORT, a tetralogy written and directed by myself, in which the i propose a reflection on our evolution as a universal species. The first part of the work, which is subtitled PRESENT (Alkantara 2016 e FITEI 2016) focuses on a team of scientists lead by a misanthropic man who dreams about the creation of a human species which is freed from basic needs such as eating, digesting and maybe the most important for the play, reproducing — thus becoming a species exclusively focused on hedonism and abstraction, following, according to his vision, the natural evolution of our civilization from type 0 to type 1, in which we'll finally become a global, multicultural, multi-ethnic and scientific society. The second part DISTANT FUTURE (Co-produced by São Luiz Teatro Municipal and Teatro Nacional São João in 2017) focuses on the results of the experiment, a hundred thousand years from now: a new humanity, with amazing physical and intellectual power, but with no sexual desire. They try to find a way to correct the mistake that was made way back in the past. They play badminton, the Holy Sport, waiting for a death that will never come. The third part VERY NEXT FUTURE (opening in 2019 in Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II - TNDMII) will focus on the same characters of the first part, but they are now very, very old. While they wait for death to take them all at once, they will do everything they can to find some meaning to their wasted lives, since they think their years of hard work and research was all in vain. The fourth part GENESIS (opening in 2020 in Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II - TNDMII) will be a monologue, played by myself, where i'll propose a reflection on creativity in art and science and their boundaries (or lack of them).

Hello everyone!
Later this morning I will talking about CUMPLICIDADES - Lisbon International Contemporary Dance Festival and our upcoming project "Choreographic Heritage in the MED region" which falls in the scope of the European Year of the Cultural Heritage.

To know more, come by!:)

Hello, here's the story of Grupo 23: silêncio!

In the begining, it was the desire of a portuguese coreographer, Sílvia Real, to share what she believed essential for the development of her son: to experience the artistic practice. This desire was shared by a special primary teacher in a school in Lisbon.
And so, Sílvia started voluntary dance-theatre classes once a week in a classroom of 8 years old's. Two years later, the continuous work started to reveal some good effects, and an idea shaped in Silvia's mind: “what if I produced a new performance in co-criation with these children?”.
Rehearsals went on with Sílvia and artists, musicians, an ilustrator, and a philosophy researcher, and this way Grupo 23: silêncio! was born.
In 2015, with the entusiasm of some co-producers, a dance-theatre performance had been shaped: What if everything was yellow?, with 7 children on stage, premiered in Lisbon. Of this process of experimentation and co-criation between adults and children an original script had been writen, as well as the coreografic struture, and music compositions live performed by the children.
After some group reseach, the error emerged as the central idea. What if we didn’t always want to erase the errors but to underline them and build a performance together starting from there?
From the classroom to the premiere it took us five years. This is our main challenge: how to build an open environment for a group to grow and maturate their ideas in order to integrate them as co-criators other than simple performers of someone else’s vision? To co-create means to embody the experimental and the improvisation. Continuously, until we reach sistematization.
For this to happen, time is essencial not to fix a work formula. We need to embrace the risk. How do we do it? First, by taking critical distance from the concept of arts school with its tecnics and competition, and so we don’t do castings. On the other hand, we do not want to infantilize our aproach, but to adapt the speech to the group.
Secondly, we want each new project to bring it’s own specific challenge, like in the performance AGORA were we integrated a child with cognitive disabilities, or in our next co-creation project, that brings professional performers and children together on stage.
Our main goal within Grupo 23 is to promote acess to artistic education to children with different social backgrounds. We stimulate their creativity by offering a place where they can question the world and build singular voices.
About international partnerships, we would like to connect with artists and schools that work on the potencial of artistic creation in the development of children, and showcase our projects.
Another challenge is to bring our experience between arts and education to other geographies and activate the necessary environment for the local communities to engage in their own dinamics of co-criation.
In 2016 we were challenged to co-create a book about Grupo 23. We want to make it available outside Portugal, through digital form and with an english version so we can share our particular case.