Performances in the Contemporary

Performances in the contemporary is a research project – carried out as a laboratory and thought encounter – whose aim is to bring together a set of voices and approaches in performance and the performing arts as accomplices and bearers of a politics of the contemporary. In the expanded territory of performance and performativity, the margins, movement, mobilisation, the landscape, the archive, discourse and various strategies of command and destruction are emerging subjects for a debate on a potential body and a political body.
At the intersection of practice and theory, this project, created in 2015, aims to question the condition of the contemporary and create a corpus of events that document the work developed in a space of tensional thinking between philosophy and the arts. In the paradoxical relationship of adherence to and distancing from reality, in visibility and invisibility, in light and darkness – as Giorgio Agamben says about contemporaneity as a singular relationship with time – performances also emerge as singular projects of marginalised worlds and forms of resistance.
We are interested in a contemporary way of thinking about the voice in the first person, the speaking body of art, to use an expression by Mário Perniola. We are interested in the direct discourses of those who produce the works, as well as the discourses of those who are thinking about and interfering with art.

Coordination: Né Barros and Eugénia Vilela
Group of Research Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge, Institute of Philosophy, U.P.
Guests: Alexandra Balona, Alice Laggay, Ana Pais, Beatriz Albuquerque, Cecília de Lima, Cláudia Marisa, Cláudia Melo, Cristina Mateus, Diogo Tudela, Elisabete Magalhães, Eugénia Vilela, Fernando José Pereira, Filipe Martins, Flávio Rodrigues, Godofredo Pereira, Gustavo Costa, Gustavo Vicente, Hernâni Reis, Isabel Barros, João Martinho Moura, João Mendes Ribeiro, João Sousa Cardoso, Joclécio Azevedo, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Jorge Gonçalves, Jorge Leandro Rosa, José Alberto Gomes, José Alberto Pinto, Júlio Cerdeira, Lúcia Evangelista, Luciana Fina, Michael Thomsen, Mischa Twitchin, Né Barros, Nuno Grande, Óscar Faria, Paulo Ferreira Lopes, Paulo Mendes, Pedro Sobrado, Rita Castro Neves, Roberto Neulichedl, Sandra Guerreiro Dias, Sónia Carvalho, Susana Caló, Susana Camanho, Susana Chiocca, Takako Hasegawa, Teresa Lacerda, Teresa Macrì, Vera Mota
Partner: Balleteatro

Publications
-Performances no Contemporâneo II (2023). Né Barros & Eugénia Vilela (ed.). Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/balleteatro.
-Performances e Pós-Fenomenologia: Apropriação e contacto (2019). Né Barros. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/balleteatro.
–Política Poética (2019). Teresa Macrí. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/balleteatro.
-Performances no Contemporâneo (2018). Né Barros & Eugénia Vilela (ed.). Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/balleteatro.
–Coreografias: Ensaios sobre dança e filosofia (2025). Né Barros. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/balleteatro.