Artsadmin Weekenders: João Fiadeiro

Artsadmin is delighted to welcome Lisbon-based João Fiadeiro to lead an intensive weekend lab at Toynbee Studios in March. An artist of world renown, Fiadeiro has been developing his Real Time Composition method since 1995. Although Fiadeiro is associated with the dance field by many, this Weekender is a rare chance for people from all disciplines and all levels of experience to learn the principles or extend their knowledge of Real Time Composition.

As a result of his growing interest in new formats of encounter, collaboration and exchange, João Fiadeiro is focusing his energy and attention on research in the crossroads between theory and practice and between the arts and sciences. This research takes place through the organization of workshops, ateliers and lectures-demonstrations in several national and international universities and organisations, primarily connected with art but also with complex systems sciences, cognitive sciences, evolutionary economics or design thinking.  

The method of Real Time Compositionsuggests that the quality of the decisions we take, individually or in group, can be substantially optimised if we manage to get round the 'interference' of free will in the moment of decision. This strategy, counter-intuitive for it radically questions our habits and patterns of behaviour, enables the relevance and coherence of our actions to get closer to those we find within emergent and self-organised biological or physical systems.

Instead of focusing on what we expect or wish to get, Real Time Composition proposes that we focus on the removal of the 'noise' that prevents us from reading a situation as it presents itself, as well as on the reduction of the 'friction' inherent in communication processes, which creates resistances to the fluidity and the lucidity of reasoning.

Real Time Composition reassesses what freedom in improvisation might be, as well as what ‘creativity’ might mean. Fiadeiro’s work deals with life head-on.

“It is a clarification of vital functioning, of the operative dynamics of human relations, of cohabitation. The protagonist-artist is no longer to be seen; the only protagonist is the event itself.”
Fernanda Eugénio