Concept and performance
João Fiadeiro

Music
“I am sitting in a room” by Alvin Lucier

Premiere in Oct 1997
at the Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montreal, Canada
Re-enactment in Oct 2014
at Atleier Real, Lisbon

Between 1997 and 2003 “I am sitting in a room…” was presented in numerous theatres and festivals all over Europe (Festival de Montpellier, TanzQuartierWien, Center National de la Danse in Paris, South Bank in London etc), in Portugal (Centro Cultural de Belém) and in Canada (Nouvelle Danse Festival), in addition to being filmed for the television station Mezzo. More recently he presented this work in the frame of Boris Charmatz’s project “20 dancers for the XX century” which opened the possibility to perform it in a more non-conventional spaces.

"I am sitting in a room" is one of the first works where João applied Real Time Composition premises and principles. Not only to guide his presence on stage but also to establish the dramaturgy of the work, intimately linked with the text and voice degradation explored by Alvin Lucier in his work.

"I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have." 

WHAT'S BEEN WRITTEN

“/…/ Recently, in Festival Danças na Cidade, the audience could witness how Fiadeiro seems to be more and more working on a performed schizophrenia of authorship /…/ It is as if Fiadeiro’s investment on the self-destruction of his body-as-author (a destruction we can observe in “I’m sitting in a room different from the one you are in now”), had triggered a need to verbalise the sonic and physiological power of the revolted scream that is leading Fiadeiro to performance art.”

André Lepecki in Ballet International, 1998

“It’s funny how you don’t have to like something for it to affect you. I thought that I had wasted my evening with João Fiadeiro’s “I’m sitting in a room different from the one you are in now”, yet for days afterwards I’ve been having flashbacks and the whole thing has telescoped together to for a clearer picture in my mind. A picture that hasn’t quite formed itself into words but which makes sense, somehow, to my non-verbal understanding of identity. It stayed with me, and its power has surprised me. I appreciate that.”

Melanie Klimchuk in “www.montrealmirror.com”, 1997

“/…/ What does the Portuguese New Dance have in common? A taste for surreal, an interest in personal identity – yes, all those themes of eroticism, alienation, the Self, and so on. Also, a lack of concern with being “dancey”: they use whatever theatrical devices they feel appropriate. Cross-genred. Of course it doesn’t always work, but they take the risk. With Fiadeiro’s "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now" that risk paid off.”

John Percival in “Dance Now”, 1998