FELD/LAB
FELD/LAB is a project created by O Espaço do Tempo. This initiative has the support of the Goethe Institut, in Portugal, in partnership with HAU Berlin and Coffeepaste. Focused on the emergent performative arts and contemporary dance, this project seeks to create a bridge between Montemor-o-Novo and Berlim, encouraging the ideal environment for creation in artistic residencies through the chosen artists. O Espaço do Tempo guarantees full technical and production support by its team, using the most recent space in the structure, XL Box, a large space that was chosen as a response to the need of the artistic scene in Portugal for larger scale productions.
In 2022, FELD/LAB welcomed three artists in residencies, all emergent artists in contemporary dance and based in Germany: the choreographer and performer Kat Válastur, choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis, both living in Berlin; and freelance choreographer Moritz Ostruschnjak, from Munich. Recorded by film-producer Bruno Canas, each project was presented as a video documentary that shows the creative process and the residence environment in parallel with an interview moderated by Rui Horta, former Artistic Director of O Espaço do Tempo.
The FarNear, by Kat Válastur
TheFarNear, by Kat Válastur, approaches the notion of trauma and healing, with special attention to the collective wounded unconscious of women by facing the question of the use of the female body as a disposable body. Drawing on the Greek myth of the Arta bridge, where the builder sacrifices his wife so the construction doesn’t collapse, TheFarNear goes back to folktale narratives where the female body is always sacrificed in the name of something.
O Espaço do Tempo welcomed Kat Válastur and her team at XL Box. This artistic residency took place from June 13th to the 25th. In Montemor-o-Novo, the choreographer continued the investigation that questions what forces these myths carry and how they can be translated into a staged context, inhabited by female performers.
A Plot/A Scandal, by Ligia Lewis
If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking in decorum, scandals are incidents in which fantasy and pleasure take center stage. A Plot/A Scandal, by Ligia Lewis, explores the stage where scandals abound, building a scene in formation where emotion for something that doesn’t fit can find its place.
Ligia Lewis was at O Espaço do Tempo in an artist residency from August 1st to 8th.
Hard to be a God, by Moritz Ostruschnjak
On an island with no name, memory is a crime that must be forgotten. The Memory Police, the force that guarantees the supremacy of this dictatorship, makes sure that whoever pursues memory also ends up forgotten. Moritz Ostruschnjak‘s new piece Hard to be a God is based on the novel Island of Lost Memory, by Yoko Ogawa. Seeking a free translation of the constraints of classical narrative, Ostruschnjak focuses his play on the theme of forgetting and disappearing, understanding the author’s dystopian novel as an analogy to our present, where various data are stored and disembodied in our world in bits and byts, which will eventually make us forget about the past and our physicality.
Hard to be a God was the last project of 2022 that we welcomed on XL Box regarding the FELD/LAB project. Moritz Ostruschnjak and his team remained in artistic residency from the 8th to the 20th of November.