SOLOS | ENACTMENTS study: I am sitting in a different room from the one you are in now (1997)

The performance I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now inaugurates, in a more explicit way, the influence of Real Time Composition – a tool Fiadeiro started to outline two years before, in 1995 – on the way he relates with composition and improvisation. It is with this solo that he begins a more visible rupture with those composition strategies that came from his first influences (American Post-Modernism and Belgian New Dance) and which served as a reference for the Re.Al Company’s first works.

Alvin Lucier's sound work I Am Sitting in a Room served as conceptual platform and perfect sound landscape to make explicit and assert the position Fiadeiro wanted to explore with his investigation. Namely the relationship between repetition and difference or the way how, without subterfuges, effects or second senses, the piece does “exactly what it says”: “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.”

(taken from the program notes of the SOLOS | ENACTMENTS performance series 2014, translation Vito Evola)

“During one of our interview sessions, Fiadeiro meticulously examined the dramaturgical structure of I am sitting..., using video annotation software to identify nineteen distinct sections or scenes in the recording of the performance from the 4th of October, 2014 at Atelier Real. He named each section according to its dramaturgical function and content. Following this analysis, Fiadeiro affirmed, conceptually, that two distinct pieces existed within the same work; that for him a piece “always starts somewhere else” (later in the performance than the audience perceives); and that the analyzed work had several beginnings and endings.

Evidently, the audience witnessing the live performance of I am sitting... perceives this solo work quite differently; namely as a continuous flow of events from the moment the performance begins (by convention the first performative event) until the performance ends (the last performative event). How could we visualize the dramaturgical structure in a way that would respected the audience perception, and simultaneously reveal the conceptual structures underlying the work?”

The text above is an excerpt from our article:
Jürgens, S., Henriques, F. and Fernandes, C. (2016) Re-Constructing the Choreographic Studio of João Fiadeiro through Animated infographic films, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Issue 1, Volume 1.

Read on here:
scholar.colorado.edu/partake/vol1/iss1/3/