Extemporânea

The Extemporânea performing arts festival, organised by balleteatro, is a collaborative curatorial project between Flávio Rodrigues, Isabel Barros, Jorge Gonçalves and Né Barros, which consists of the development of a programme of performances and/or performative installations, taking place over two days and on an annual basis, in which the artists are called upon to articulate their artistic practices with the social, economic and political circumstances inherent in the location of each edition. The conceptualisation of the Extemporânea programme proposes an expansion of the notions of choreography and performativity to different social and geographical contexts in the city of Porto. With critical and discursive thinking, we invite artists to experiment with different presentation formats and audience reception modes, in terms of the space-time experience and the spectrum of possibilities between audience participation and contemplation.

The second edition of Extemporânea takes place on 15 and 16 June 2024 and features a programme of performances, concerts and audio walks designed specifically for the Business Centre of the former Dunil factory. This industrial complex, the site of an important 20th century shirt factory, is currently being refurbished but retains a number of elements and traces of its history. The suspended temporality, and at the same time its openness to new manufacturing activities, opens up this space to different dimensions, between what was and what is to come, what remains and what disappears. The typology of these industrial spaces, which acquire new functions while maintaining the previous architectural layout, highlight the tension between the different strata of memory, placing us before a spectrum of the immaterial mechanics of the body's relationship of effort with itself, with objects, machines, concrete and abstract entities. As a liminal space, we provisionally occupy the former Dunil factory, with artistic proposals that equate a series of modes of activation and performative listening, which are positioned between the archaeological imagination of the past and the projection of visionary futures.