"Real Time Composition is a tool that practices radical decentering
in order to attend to what exceeds human experience"
(Emma Bigé)

Real Time Composition is a theoretical-practical tool that studies, problematizes and systematizes the experience of collective decision-making using the fields of improvisation and composition in contemporary dance as a privileged territory of its experimentation.

Real Time Composition main drive comes from the need João Fiadeiro sensed early in his career to create a system of principles and premisses to be used with his collaborators in the process of choreographing. A tool that could prevent the group from falling into the trap of hierarchical conventions between author and interpreter (producing a vertical structure of organization) while, at the same time, acknowledges that horizontal forms of collaboration don't necessary generate sustained and fair formats of relation. Real Time Composition aims to produce a format of collective practice that could be described as “diagonal”, a meta-stable system that adjusts and adapts decision and choice to the actual situation (in opposition to foreseen outcomes based on past experiences or future expectations).

Real Time Composition "object of study" is the spatio-temporal gap that arises when the experience we all have with linear time is interrupted and suspended by an accident or an incident. This generates a “glitch” in the “timeline arrow”, creating a void in the sense of continuity. Real Time Composition takes advantage of this in-betweenness to transform what could be perceived has an interruption, has an interval. Inside this interval - between the moment we collide with what affects us, and the moment we relate to its possible manifestations – time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, present or absent.  Inside this interval we are able to disappear in the obvious and (re)appear in the absence.

This approach to time and space proposes to (re)exercise our ability to shift attention towards the periphery of events and the infinitesimal. It proposes to find the movement within the pause. To find time within time. To take notice. In Portuguese, the word "notice" (reparar) beside “noticing, attending”, also means “restoring, repairing”. And can be also read as “stopping twice” (“re-parar”). Real Time Composition works in the entanglement of these multiple senses (of meanings, sensations and directions).

"João Fiadeiro works with the matter of the ‘in-between’
and his Real Time Composition method is based upon the challenge to produce
– by cultivating molecular clarity –
a re-assessment of what freedom in improvisation might be."
(Fernanda Eugenio)