"Real Time Composition is a tool that practices radical decentering in order to attend to what exceeds human experience" (Emma Bigé)

"João Fiadeiro works with the matter of the ‘in-between’ and his Real Time Composition method is based upon the challenge to produce – by cultivating molecular clarity – a re-assessment of what freedom in improvisation might be." (Fernanda Eugenio)

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This immersion unfolds in two phases. The first four days are dedicated to an intensive guided by João Fiadeiro, offering a rich immersion into the Real time composition practice through approximately 6 hours of daily sessions.

The days that follow are devoted to integration. Without formal teaching, participants are invited to continue exploring the material through self-directed practice, shared inquiry, rest, and reflection. This second phase creates space for the teachings to settle, unfold, and become embodied through direct experience and time.

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Real Time Composition is a theoretical-practical tool that studies, problematizes and systematizes the experience of collective decision-making using the fields of improvisation and composition in contemporary dance as a privileged territory of its experimentation. 

Real Time Composition main drive comes from the need João Fiadeiro sensed early one in his career to create a system of principles and premisses to be used with his collaborators in the process of choreographing. A tool that could prevent the group from falling into the trap of hierarchical conventions between author and interpreter (producing a vertical structure of organization) while, at the same time, acknowledges that horizontal forms of collaboration don't necessary generate sustained and fair formats of relation. Real Time Composition aims to produce a format of collective practice that could be described as “diagonal”, a meta-stable system that adjusts and adapts decision and choice to the actual situation (in opposition to foreseen outcomes based on past experiences or future expectations). 

Real Time Composition "object of study" is the spatio-temporal gap that arises when the experience we all have with linear time is interrupted and suspended by an accident or an incident. This generates a “glitch” in the “timeline arrow”, creating a void in the sense of continuity. Real Time Composition takes advantage of this in-betweenness to transform what could be perceived has an interruption, has an interval. Inside this interval - between the moment we collide with what affects us, and the moment we relate to its possible manifestations – time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, present or absent.  Inside this interval we are able to disappear in the obvious and (re)appear in the absence. 

This approach to time and space proposes to (re)exercise our ability to shift attention towards the periphery of events and the infinitesimal. It proposes to find the movement within the pause. To find time within time. To take notice. In Portuguese, the word "notice" (reparar) beside “noticing, attending”, also means “restoring, repairing”. And can be also read as “stopping twice” (“re-parar”). Real Time Composition works in the entanglement of these multiple senses (of meanings, sensations and directions).

BIO

João Fiadeiro belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the late eighties in Portugal and gave rise to Nova Dança Portuguesa [New Portuguese Dance], a movement highly influenced by the Judson Dance Theater in America and New Dance scene in Europe. Between 1990 and 2019 he was the artistic director of Atelier REAL a venue that played a major roll in the development of contemporary dance and trans-disciplinary initiatives in Portugal, both within art and between art, science and society. João Fiadeiro has tour extensively throughout Europe, North America and South America with his solo and group works. His pieces navigates in-between disciplines (performance, dance and theater), contexts (theaters, museums or site-#specific) and formats (choreographies, happenings or lecture-performances). Between 1995 and 2003 he collaborated with Artistas Unidos (United Artists), a Lisbon based theater company where he staged plays by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Sarah Kane (Psychosis 4’48’’) and Jon Fosse (Nightsongs). Parallel to his work as an choreographer, theater director or curator, João Fiadeiro studied and practiced intensively Contact-Improvisation in the 90’which led him to pursue and systematize his own research on improvisation under the designation of Real Time Composition. This research, which started as a tool to support his own creative practices, has since been used by researchers from art and science (coming from fields as diverse as anthropology, complex systems sciences or economy), as a theoretical-practical platform to study decision-making, representation and collaboration. This work has lead him to teach extensively in different independent venues in Europe and South America (Brasil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile) and lead workshops sessions in the most important master programs and schools in Europe related with contemporary dance like PACAP/Forum Dança; EXERCE Master, MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture at Rainha Sofia Museum; SoDA MA Program; Performing Studies at the Hamburg University; Amsterdam Master of Choreography; Master of Theatre DasArts; a.pass_advanced performance and scenography studies; MA Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki; Villa Arson; Centre National de la Danse, etc. The Real Time Composition tool has since expanded its application outside artistic field with initiatives like “Soft Skills for Hard Decisions”, design with the economist António Alvarenga and applied in human resources departments of foundations; or the discipline “Social Stigmergy” design for the PhD program at ISCTE University in Lisbon with the complex system scientist Jorge Louça. In 2018 he published his book “Anatomy of a Decision” where he synthesized his life long research on Real Time Composition. In 2019 João Fiadeiro co-curate (with Romain Bigé) the exhibition Drafting Interior Techniques at Culturgest Gallery, the first retrospective look taken at Steve Paxton work and legacy. In 2023, his archive of more than 30 years of activity was donated to the Serralves Museum, and in 2024 his body of work was the subject of an extensive retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art / Belém Cultural Centre, entitled INTROSPECTIVA 

info: www.joaofiadeiro.pt