Workshop

Born in 1965, João Fiadeiro belongs to a generation of choreographers who emerged in the late 1980’s and led to the emergence of the Nova Dança Portuguesa. In 1990, he founded the workshop RE.AL Company that supported the creation and dissemination of several choreographers and their works, which were regularly performed in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and South America. Real Time Composition is a project that he has been developing for twenty years. In parallel, he has organised several workshops in various training courses, schools and universities throughout the world. João Fiadeiro is currently completing a PhD in contemporary art at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Seeing for the first time

Real Time Composition emerged from the need I sensed early on in my career to create a common system of principles and guidelines to be used with my collaborators in the choreographic process. A tool that could protect us from falling into the common trap of hierarchical pre-established conventions, which perpetuated old habits and prevented us from generating innovative work. Later it asserted as a tool to explore modalities of dramaturgic writing within the performance field. The difficulty is that “seeing things for the first time” is a practical impossibility – once an image becomes imprinted in our imaginary, its very hard to erase or extract it. In order to divert from this obstacle, Real Time Composition trains a contra-intuitive skill: the ability to look at ourselves looking at (ourselves looking at) things.
João Fiadeiro