mala voadora

"In 2012, when we (the five of us) began to work collaboratively, we decided to try to counteract any kind of individualism or hierarchy in our creative process by producing an object outside ourselves that would bring us together in a common action. The result of this process was HALE - a study for an artificial organism, a 40-minute play in which the incessant metamorphosis of an extensive plastic surface is interpreted by the performers from within, performing a choreography of rigorous actions, which is totally invisible to the public.

ELAH - study for a collective of organisms is based on the reinterpretation of this choreography, in which we introduce new rules and ways of doing it proposing other approaches to the original version. With the absence of the plastic material that contextualized the functionality of HALE's choreographic; in ELAH the performers appear as a group of people who obviously cooperate in something ambiguous. The detailed study of the structure of the score has suggested to us a kind of mise en abyme, with narratives that may contain other narratives, in an unfolding of branching actions that gradually distanced themselves from the original version of HALE.

This analysis also allows us to relate choreographic decisions with the behavioral structure of our group in a collaborative way. Based on the process of accomplishing something (a piece in this case), we want to highlight the standard procedures and habits of our group, through the methods of negotiation, election, suggestion, imposition, as tools for choreographic composition, exposing them and reenact them in the play. It is perhaps a study for a social choreography on human interrelationships.

This objective comes as an answer to a question that has always inspired us in our collective work: truly functioning as a whole, against any kind of individualism, what can we do that one of us alone could not?"

Ficha

THIS TAKES TIME is an international collective of five choreographers and dancers from Portugal, Spain, France and Poland with a multidisciplinary background in dance, performance and music. Helena, Inês, Filipe, Matthieu and Aleksandra met for the first time in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2010, at the PEPCC course at Forum Dança, which they all joined until 2012. 

5 -17 december . residence ELAH - study for a collective of organisms by THIS TAKES TIME . mala voadora