The Materiais Diversos Festival promotes the meeting of different audiences and imaginaries around the arts (dance, theatre, music and performance) with thought, questioning actuality and fostering cultural participation as a condition for citizenship. Born in Minde, in 2009, it spread to Alcanena and Cartaxo (in 2013) and became one of the most representative projects for programming outside the large centres in Portugal, attempting to think and act from the places it originates. It had been occurring annually until 2017 and became a biannual event starting with its 10th edition in 2019.
From the 5th to the 15th of October 2023, the Festival Materiais Diversos will be in Alcanena and Minde with a program of dance, theater and music shows, installations and conversations. Slowing down and making people, places and processes visible are the mottos of the 12th edition of the festival.
Through building a chronology for dance in Portugal, PARA UMA TIMELINE A HAVER is a collective exercise in research and the signalling of markers relating to the development and dissemination of dance as an artistic practice in Portugal in the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing especially on the second half of the 20th century.
Taking place between 2016 and 2017, and accepting the present as a place of enunciation, it proposes the singular construction of a series of chronologies for contemporary dance in Portugal, relating significant main social, political, cultural, biographical and artistic events – as suggested by dancers, choreographers, critics, technicians, historians and spectators.
With this exercise, the aim is to signal episodes which – by influencing authors, practices and institutions – gradually delineated the history of dance in Portugal, inserting them into a broader perspective of not only the transformations through which Portuguese society went through, but also the discourse on choreography (and what dance is or could be as an artistic practice), in order to glimpse tensions, key moments and emblematic episodes.
Ana Bigotte Vieira and João dos Santos Martins
* Throughout 2019 a new phase of research will be developed in residency at the Escola Superior de Dança (Lisbon) which will result in a new installation of Timeline.
Diversos