SWITCH – WORKSHOP CYCLE | 8 – 10 & 22 – 24 July, CRL – Central Elétrica, Porto
SWITCH | Workshop Cycle
8 – 10 July + 22 – 24 July 2025 | CRL – Central Elétrica, Porto
SWITCH is a project by CRL – Central Elétrica, comprising a training programme focused on the performing arts, oriented towards research, reflection, critical thinking and practical experimentation.
It arises from the desire to offer the public an immersive experience in the field of artistic training, inviting consolidated names from the performing arts scene, such as Paula Aros Gho, Thereza Rocha and Francis Wilker.
Coordinated by Pedro Vilela, the project includes two free training courses to be held during the month of July 2025 at the CRL – Central Elétrica premises.
Paula Aros Gho (Chile)
Paula Aros Gho is a performing artist trained as an actress at the University of Chile with an MA in Devised Theatre from Dartington College of Arts (UK). She has worked for 20 years as a stage director and university professor. Currently, she is the director of the Theatre School at Universidad Mayor in Chile.
Her artistic research focuses on the co-presence between audiences, artists, spaces, and specific contexts, exploring unconventional spaces as a gesture of reinterpretation and an invitation to collectively re-inhabit spaces often overlooked in daily life.
Thereza Rocha (Brasil)
Thereza Rocha is a dance and performance arts researcher, director, and dramaturge of creative processes. She teaches undergraduate and graduate programs in Dance at the Institute of Culture and Arts (ICA) of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), where she develops the research project Scene of the Text, Text of the Scene: drifts of a processual writing.
Francis Wilker (Brasil)
Francis Wilker is a performing artist, director, professor, researcher, and curator interested in the interdisciplinary intersections of the performing arts. He teaches in the Theatre program and the Graduate Program in Arts at the Institute of Culture and Arts of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), where he coordinates the research group Horizons of Staging.
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8 – 10 July 2025, 5 – 8pm
22 – 24 July 2025, 5 – 8pm
8 – 10 July 2025, 5 – 8pm
Laboratory of Contemporary Situated Performing Arts
Paula Aros Gho
Deadline for applications: 02 July (applications after the deadline will not be considered)
Announcement of results: 04 July
Registration: by sending a letter of motivation to p.vilela@circolando.com
A theoretical-practical program offering knowledge, tools, and procedures for situated stage directing, with the central axis being the theories and practices of the Aesthetics of the Performative (Erika Fischer-Lichte). The lab takes place over four days and primarily aims to guide and support participants in a formative process, offering theoretical and methodological content and a practical space to experiment with original proposals, with the goal of deepening each participant’s artistic language and signature.
Creation methodologies and project design for situated aesthetics and performativity with audiences will be practiced.
This program provides a space for training, research, reflection, and creative practice that encourages the development of contemporary methodologies of stage creation, based on the notion of situated performativity—understood as the evidence of co-presence among bodies, spatialities, soundscapes, and narratives that make up an event or performance.
These aesthetics allow artists and researchers to engage with the territorial and social context in which they are embedded, while also enabling audiences to develop a sense of belonging to the artistic creation, opening new readings and integrating the cultural process with the sociocultural context.
22 – 24 July 2025, 5 – 8pm
Transits and Borders: Staging, Dramaturgy, and Dramaturgism
Thereza Rocha and Francis Wilker
Deadline for applications: 16 July (applications after the deadline will not be considered)
Announcement of results: 18 July
Registration: by sending a letter of motivation to p.vilela@circolando.com
This workshop proposes a conceptual and practical journey exploring the meanings of staging, dramaturgy, and dramaturgism in the performing arts and their sense-making projects. Where do they intersect, differ, or even conflict? Each poetics brings a bundle of relationships and an ethical-political agreement.