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.
Tempos Livres is based on the book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture by Emanuele Coccia. This poetic and philosophical essay is takes the point of view of plants – leaves, roots, flowers – to understand the world not simply as a collection of objects, but also as a metaphysical mixture, in which everything interacts with everything and in which all living things share the same breath. The way Coccia describes the relationship between a plant and its environment, to me suggests the experience of a body which dances and animates that which I understand as dance. Both plant and dancer are constantly exposed and in constant communication with the surrounding environment and both are “creators” of the world around them.
I am interested in researching this relationship between subject and surrounding space, in which both are interconnected, and to understand how one influences, transforms and defines the other, reciprocally and continually. From this relationship, one focuses on the air and the breath, the voice and sound, as mediums which cross the barriers between the bodies. The body becomes space and space becomes body. Who is active and who is passive, who moves and who is moved become blurred. A place of immersion, permeability, circulation and fluidity od materials and meanings is suggested, diluting barriers, in attempting to bring closer, perhaps even confuse, the dancer, the scenic space, the spectator. Tempos Livres is a possibility to experiment with our impermanent, interdependent, mobile, porous and shareable nature.
Teresa Silva
Teresa Silva is one of the artists supported by the Europena Network More Than This (2018-2020), co-financed by the program Creative Europe of the European Union. More information: www.morethanthis.eu
Diversos