João Fiadeiro (1965) is a Portuguese performer, choreographer, researcher, teacher and curator. He belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the late eighties in Portugal and gave rise to the New Portuguese Dance movement. 

As an artist, his work is positioned at the intersection of performance, dance, visual arts and theatre. As a researcher, he navigates the intersections between practice and theory, art and science, and life and art. In the late 1990s, he began systematizing Real-Time Composition, a theoretical-practical tool supporting creation, decision-making, and collaboration, around which all his activities as an artist and researcher revolve. 

He was the artistic director of Atelier Real, a venue that played a major role in the development of contemporary dance and trans-disciplinary initiatives in Portugal for almost 30 years (1990-2019). João Fiadeiro tours extensively throughout Europe, North and South America with his solo and group works. He is regularly invited to be a visiting professor at various institutions linked to training and research. He is currently an associated artist-researcher at Forum Dança in Lisbon. His work was recently the subject of a major retrospective at Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. 

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 “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 as an interruption, into 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.

Exploring Real-Time Composition with João Fiadeiro: The Intersection of Dance, Improvisation, and Collaboration

João Fiadeiro (1965) is a Portuguese performer, choreographer, researcher, teacher and curator. He belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the late eighties in Portugal and gave rise to the New Portuguese Dance movement. 

As an artist, his work is positioned at the intersection of performance, dance, visual arts and theatre. As a researcher, he navigates the intersections between practice and theory, art and science, and life and art. In the late 1990s, he began systematizing Real-Time Composition, a theoretical-practical tool supporting creation, decision-making, and collaboration, around which all his activities as an artist and researcher revolve. 

He was the artistic director of Atelier Real, a venue that played a major role in the development of contemporary dance and trans-disciplinary initiatives in Portugal for almost 30 years (1990-2019). João Fiadeiro tours extensively throughout Europe, North and South America with his solo and group works. He is regularly invited to be a visiting professor at various institutions linked to training and research. He is currently an associated artist-researcher at Forum Dança in Lisbon. His work was recently the subject of a major retrospective at Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon

www.joaofiadeiro.pt