THE PORTO SESSIONS

Meg Stuart, with her ongoing desire to instigate new territories and commitment to collaboration practices, has designed with Ana Rocha the program for the Porto Sessions. The Rivoli Municipal Theatre hosts the Porto Sessions during a two month residency, where Meg Stuart will launch a long term research, looking at alternative formats for encounters between artists and their environment, with the intention to ultimately transform collective artistic spaces. The sessions are an extension of the practices of other artists, with whom she finds a common ground and shares artistic interests. The September session, Collective Dreaming, will be an ongoing exchange and experimentation between choreographers and performers including Benoît Lachambre, Mark Tompkins and Anna Nowicka, and Portuguese artists. The dream space of utopic futures will meet somatic base work with a focus on irrational scores and improvisation. In October, the dramaturge Jeroen Peeters and scenographer / architect Jozef Wouters, will collaborate with other guests, on Phantasmal Archeology to investigate possible relations on cultural archetypes proposed by art centres and theatres. Looking at the city as a body of contradictory temporalities, we will extend the studio into the urban landscape. What collective artistic dreams do we share? How can one imagine new places of artistic practices and rethink cultural spaces? How to project other possible ways of ephemeral inscriptions, and transcend the archaeology of these territories to imagine other places? How can we dream together? The Porto Sessions as a curatorial program is a process of rendering and transforming the theatre space to experience and embody live matters in process. Open studio sessions, spontaneous actions, seminars, and improbable events are the different modules shared and open to the audience.

Bio
Born in New Orleans, Meg Stuart is an American choreographer and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. Invited to perform at the Klapstuk festival in Leuven (1991), she created her first evening-length piece, Disfigure Study. Interested in devising her own structure through which to develop artistic projects, Stuart founded Damaged Goods in Brussels in 1994. Over the years, Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods have created a great variety of productions, ranging from solos to large-scale choreographies and including site-specific creations, installations and improvisation projects.