NA PRÁTICA is a summer school focused in the performing arts field, for both artists and researchers, co-organized by Materiais Diversos and the Centre for Theatre Studies (FLUL). It’s an annual meeting where, deliberately, no distinction is made between theory and practice as a way to re-evaluate and re-inscribe our actions, as individuals as well as professionals, in a world driven towards effectiveness, acceleration and competition. We thus propose to embody one of the great challenges of the present time, to re-learn how to speak to each other, to re-learn how to make.
Na Prática, does not distinguish between theory and practice. The name we decided to give this Summer School (Escola de Verão), a partnership between a university Theatre Studies research centre and a festival dedicated to interdisciplinary practices, is itself an exercise in the disappropriation of the binary format which, for a long time now, has engrossed our sights and formatted how we conceive of things. To think and to do are two sides of the same coin. As are activity and passivity, movement and pause and the intellectual and the physical, among other dichotomies which insist on butchering the biology of bodies. The world can be organized (dreamed of?) in other ways and forms. There are gaps to be explored in the patterns of perception and the representation of life, interstices to occupy between the disciplinary structures of knowledge and new hypotheses to suggest the possibilities for affirmation in the public space. We want to map the path suggested by those indistinctions, indispositions and other types of informations as forms of re-mediating and reevaluating our relationship with others, the others and the world.
Na Prática, means to embrace an attitude of re-questioning and re-problematizing a world which is increasingly held hostage by the neoliberal dynamic. A world increasingly run by the kinetics of the capture and domination of our subjectivities; increasingly choregraphed by the rhythm of consumerism and waste; more driven by an abiotic velocity which atrophies our muscles and makes us immune to wonder. It is urgent to once again restore the ability to feel (the aura?) the singular, difference, the ephemeral, the material. Retake the gaze of curiosity and patience with things, the indispensible. The compass we wish to adopt is guided by “Re-Re-…” A grinding of teeth which is also a manifesto. An invective of attrition to the corporate gears in motion; a calibration of our bodies to respect for Life. We are prepared to ruminate, talk, walk, discourse, slowly, ambulatorily, about all of this. Sometimes we call them day to day politics; at other times, those of the resistance.
Na Prática, wishes to dislocate the gaze towards the knowledge of that same mercantile economy at the heart of which, only that which is admissible as product is legitimate – deliverable, as is proclaimed at international science fairs. Knowledge (knowing?) is not born and dies in the multiple selection boxes of applications and financing, nor in bibliometric data, nor in the amount of sent email or any other performance indicator. Often it isn´t even there anymore, but in everything that is collateral to this regime of enclosing knowledge, in everything in which doubt has been installed and pollinated as such. Knowing does not respect authorial patterns nor digital identifiers. Just like affections, it propagates itself though those hosts which are more adequate, glues itself to reflections which, by way of contingencies, it comes up against. Knowledge is situated between those people who make an effort to achieve it, who contaminate others through it, in an epidemic effect beyond any universal validation method. Generally we start by asking something. Then we invite someone to give it a body. We call those who, in the meantime, gather to watch, listen, experiment fool around, contest and share, among other forms of critical conviviality, correspondents. They are part of a memory of a truth to be “(de)terminated”.
Na Prática, recognizes the importance of preserving memory and of the constant battle against forgetting. The obsession is not to clean house and frame ideas, but to build a new archive which keep the memory of our encounters alive for a little while longer. Just enough time to reverberate in as many other possibilities for encounters, in as many other dialogues, in as many other forms of assimilation and critical reflection. In truth, we built this on-line-site (this territory?) to watch it emerge more clearly beneath its multiple layers. The rhizome which will come out of it may assume the most diverse forms, the most varied configurations and transmutations. Isn´t that why we create things? – we usually ask. To see their ramifications in other things and from those, others still? For now, we will throw the doors wide open. Who knows where this may lead.
Na Prática, doesn´t even need to evoke art. Isn´t it from there that possible futures always granulate?