In 1993, Alexandre Melo wrote in the weekly newspaper Expresso that the Portuguese had no body: ‘the dominant discourses do not address sexuality and, above all, diversity, discrimination and sexual repression.’ In fact, after witnessing the work of Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho, Melo was addressing the expressiveness of a new emerging dance practice in Portugal, in which, on the contrary, he grasped a sexualized and sensuous body that functioned as a transformative agent. The title of Vera Mantero’s piece, a prominent figure within the movement that came to be known as New Portuguese Dance, was Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards. Back then she announced the emergence of a paradigm. Now she inaugurates this cycle. In an evening of short pieces, originally produced between 1991 and 1996, Mantero engages not only with the somewhat subjective relational process of the post-colonial legacy and the political and cultural vacuum she sensed at the time, but also brings to Santarém a paradoxical artistic practice, traversed by more than two decades of continuous activity.

João Fiadeiro, is an influential contemporary artist and pedagogue, with a prolific work that predominantly explores the relationship between art and science. Renowned for his development of "Real Time Composition" and the creation of RE.AL, a central organization for choreographic research in Portugal, Fiadeiro presents two recent pieces in which one can, nonetheless, sense a genealogical drive to revisit his own artistic path. I was here is a "performance-lecture" that alludes to I am here, a piece Fiadeiro created in 2003 in dialogue with the work of artist Helena Almeida. On the other hand, This body that occupies me, a 2008 performance, "re-enacted" in 2014, which Fiadeiro defines as a "thesis" of his own work, proposes an overview of several key ideas that traverse his practice, such as the notions/tensions between “time and duration”; “presence and absence”; or “real and fiction”. As part of the Timeline’s conversations and activations programme (see p. 3), these subjects will also be addressed in a talk between researcher Paula Caspão and Fiadeiro at the end of his performance.

Teresa Silva and Filipe Pereira are two Generation Z (2010s) choreographers whose work is characterized by the interest in collaborative processes translated in several co-creations with other artists and informal collectives. Both attended Escola Superior de Dança and Fórum Dança - two key institutions in Portugal’s dance scene -, where they came across Vera Mantero and João Fiadeiro and met each other, beginning a relationship of both personal and artistic sharing.
Premiered in 2013, O que fica do que passa is their first de facto collaborative project, preceded by a shorter experience titled Letting Nature Take Over Us Agains. Both works derive from a fascination concerning the scenographic, where materials, body, light and sound create a visual choreography that rejects narrative linearity and simultaneously produces a multiple sensory fiction.

Throughout the 2000s dance practice was heavily shaped by the desire to salvage archives, discourses, aesthetics and corporeality. Since then, there has been a persistent number of re-enactments, revivals and reactivations that reclaim a trans-historical present traversed by memory and reflections concerning its role in contemporary performing arts. This because numerous stories were left untold and many things were left to record, events that are currently perceived by official history as unexpressed counterculture.
In 1984, ten years after the Carnation revolution, António Olaio presented his performance Il faut danser Portugal, which literally translates as Portugal Must Dance. Created a decade before Alexandre Melo questioned the absence of body narratives in Portuguese society, Il faut danser Portugal was already announcing, or asserting, as claimed by researcher and dramaturge André Lepecki, a set of reconfigurations concerning the experience of "national" corporeality.
The work by multidisciplinary artist and dancer Vânia Rovisco, associated with a time-reaction-project based on her research on Performance Art in Portugal, predominantly investigates corporeality transmission forms. In this cycle, the artist will transmit Olaio’s performance to the students attending the Vocational Performing Arts Course at Dr. Ginestal Machado Secondary School, and present the results of this experience in the main programme of the cycle.
In continuity with the "Portugal Must Dance” motto, the cycle invited three choreographers from distinct generations to establish a reflection concerning the processes of performance in their own practice.
Carlota Lagido, an archive-dancer that has channelled the work of several generations of makers, presents one of her first choreographic experiments, notforgetnotforgive, a site-specific piece created in 1999 for a men’s toilet. Sónia Baptista - choreographer, dancer and writer - revisits one of her haikus (俳句), a short form of Japanese poetry, from her homonymous 2002 performance. Moustachus, The lament of the non-bearded woman or A woman is free to grow her own body hair unavoidably brings to mind Duchamp’s LHOOQ (1919) in which the artist drew a moustache and beard on a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.Lastly, Daniel Pizamiglio, a dancer and choreographer born in Fortaleza (Brazil) and currently based in Lisbon, will present Concrete Dance, his final project at Fórum Dança’s choreographic research program, where he met Vânia Rovisco and Sónia Baptista. The piece evokes key ideas present in concrete poetry and particular ontological concerns associated with the idea of dance as an ephemeral event. The above program will be accompanied by a lecture on the history of Performance Art in Portugal given by researcher Verónica Metello, which will also involve an extended debate with several guests, including two key figures of this movement - António Olaio and Clara Menéres - concerning the heterogonous nature of the concepts ‘dance’ and ‘performance’.

Since 2012, Ana Rita Teodoro has developed a series of choreographic works devoted to body cavities. Through the critical distance of anatomy, physiology and paleontology, Delirious Anatomy questions the imperative nature of bodily functions. Thus far, the set comprises: Gut's Dream, a piece about the anus and its related organ, Orifice Paradis, about the mouth-vagina, and two new pieces that will be premiered in Santarém, Stage and Pavilion, that pay tribute to the knee and ear, respectively.
A new piece by Carlos Manuel Oliveira of disconcert, on the one hand / of adventure, on the other will also debut during the cycle. Although not focused on any particular anatomical organ, Oliveira’s piece explores the body as a field of knowledge, from the simplest organization of touch to the problematic negotiation of the “common”. The work will be developed and presented at Oliveira’s former primary school, São Salvador (currently housing INcubadora D’Artes – a working space for artists), and proposes a discussion about learning and the transmission of knowledge. The last event of this programme is also a double premiere, the release of a new record by pianist Simão Costa followed by a techno acoustic dance concert.

Presented in the gallery space of Sá da Bandeira Theatre, A Timeline To Be is a collective research project that attempts to illustrate 20th and 21st century milestones in the development and dissemination of dance as an art practice in Portugal, with a particular focus on post-1950s work. Conducted between 2016 and 2017, and acknowledging the present as a place of enunciation, it proposes a singular construction of several chronologies pertaining to contemporary dance in Portugal. Based on an inquiry involving dancers, choreographers, critics, technicians, historians and spectators, the project intersects several key social, political, cultural, biographical and artistic events. This exercise proposes to highlight historical events that – through their influence upon authors, practices and institutions – came to frame the history of dance in Portugal. In order to expose potential tensions, key events and iconic occurrences, the project also contextualizes events in relation to much broader aspects, namely, key transformations in Portuguese society and choreographic discourse (what dance is and what it can be as an artistic practice).

Ana Bigotte Vieira and João dos Santos Martins