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.
A closer look at childhood, allowed us to see that many of the states of presence and choreographic materials in our projects are tangential to the way children relate to their context. The attempts to deviate from a linear time, the alternation between the concrete and the abstract, the way we deal with the ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity looking for a non-hierarchical relationship between movement, voice, word and objects are strong directions of our research, but they also seem intrinsic to children in their interaction with the world.
For this reason, in this new project, more than adapting our modes of research and composition to the children’s universe, it seems more useful to continue experimenting focusing on the characteristics that bring us closer to it: the freedom to jump from one thing to another, to ability to transform concrete into something magical due to the “intensity” of the gaze and, above all, the way to summon issues that are simultaneously metaphysical, ontological, aesthetic, banal and almost always unpredictable.
Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz
Diversos