interactive performance

For 10 weeks I attended a course in Interactive Performance - The Lisbon Interdisciplinary and Technological Performance Arts Course (ITPA) - at Gulbenkian Foundation with tutors from the postgraduate program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts of theBrooklyn College of the City University of New York. It was an intensive full-time experience in performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and interactive media technology. Historical and theoretical study of improvisation, performance, and collaboration in the performing arts was also an important component of the program. Eleven artists from all disciplines came together to realize a total of 5 performances per group. The final performance was presented to the public at the Center of Modern Art on the 23rd August 2008.

My great interest and research was related with the set-up and interaction of performance with moving image, in particular the use of multi-screens. Mirrors, glasses, retroprojection, software, acting, lighting, movement, space, was all part of the experiments I could realise through the residence. Also in that context I did a research project about The Light Surgeons a multi-media artists' colective based in London. That research included a video-interview with Chris Allen and it had the collaboration of Kevin Walsh and Sérgio Cruz.

by Cláudia Tomaz, Tiago Dionísio, Carlos Oliveira

You spell it MEYOUIT, all together, as a new word, because the result is more than the some of the parts. The building up of this piece is based on metamorphosis.  We started with an object, a glass that becomes a mirror and broken mirrors that become projection surfaces. Then we got inspired by ‘The invention of Morel’ written by Casares, a friend of Borges, ‘Alice through the looking glass’ and cyborgs and clowns and music! and little by little characters and events started to take place. Over 2 weeks we developed this… thing… this IT. We presented it as a work in progress, unfinished as any transformation process.

new devellopments based on this performance are planned...

"How could it be, that perfect place? Maybe that’s not the question… Only Time matters! and time is not linear as we used to think, it goes in many directions. What if we lived only in Time? And different people from different times could meet and talk? What would be the repercutions of that for human kind? We all feel incomplete some days… He started to imagine the possibility of the invention of a strange machine able to build integrally a human being. A machine that could extend all the senses, like the mirror does for the eyes. And so he did it…" excerpt of a text written for the piece