performingborders returns to Dias da Dança Festival 2026 (DDD, Porto, Portugal) with a new edition of Live Art Writers Network (LAWN), gathering conversations around experimental writing in dialogue with performance and live art. Centering writers and artists whose practices are shaped by lived experiences of intersectional borders, this year’s LAWN programme is co-curated with director, researcher and curator Pedro Vilela.
Departing from the Encruzilhada (the crossroad) as a space for non-linear thinking, divergent methods and entangled investigation (learning alongside texts such as Pedagogia das Encruzilhadas by Luiz Rufino), this year we will co-commission two artists-writers, Hilda de Paulo and Claire Sivier, to engage with the festival’s programme and produce multidisciplinary critical texts in response. The commissioned pieces will be shared publicly after the festival, contributing to an ongoing dialogue on the intersections of art, writing, and experiences of borders.
As part of DDD’s ten-year milestone, performingborders will also engage with the festival’s archive. We will draw out histories and narratives from the festival’s trajectory, and the multiple ways it has been enmeshed in, shaped by, and experienced within the city of Porto producing responses and resources from our research, to be shared digitally during and after the festival.
This year’s LAWN programme focuses on the role of performance within the city, and on how critical writing can unfold what this relationship looks and feels like. Taking a critical view of performance’s potential to transform, the programme considers how performance has operated across different territories to document change, struggle, and lived experience. We are interested in engaging with these histories, and in thinking about how a festival can form part of a city engaging art as a civic practice. Through two public moments LAWN will explore writing, critical response, and performance in the city:
LAB: Arquivo e Performance como práticas de reflexão e crítica | Archive and performance as reflective, critical practice, with: performingborders, Pedro Vilela and Daniele Avila Small
Saturday 11 April 2026 | 11:00 – 13:00 | Campus Paulo Cunha e Silva
This Lab explores how performance generates traces, memories, and narratives, and how writing can operate as a method for activating and re-reading these materials. The laboratory will include contributions from archival practices and projects, which trace not only histories of art and performance, but connect these histories to ongoing social and political landscapes.
Participants will be invited to experiment with writing, discussion, and collective reflection as ways of responding to archival material and its relationship to the city. The session asks how archival practices might participate in processes of memory, and how performance has operated within movements to remember, resist erasure, and hold collective histories in the present.
Those wishing to participate in this Lab can request a place by emailing [email protected]
Conversa Pública: Estes corpos, nesta cidade: território, performance e escrita crítica
with Pedro Vilela, Tiziano Cruz, Dori Nigro, Anahí Saravia Herrera
Monday 13 April 2026 | 17:00 – 18:30 | A PiSCiNA, Porto
This conversation brings together performers with a socially engaged practice and writers to reflect collectively on the role of performance within a city. Moving from within and beyond institutional and festival contexts, the discussion asks what performance can offer to everyday life, and how it might address, interrupt, or speak back to the city and its communities.
The conversation convenes performers working in socially engaged ways alongside critics interested in writing that carries a social dimension, writing that reaches beyond the art world echo chamber and remains accountable to lived experience, public space, and civic life. How might performance and creative/critical writing become practices that belong and echo the city and those who live in it?
Bios:
Pedro Vilela is an artist-curator-researcher. He is a PhD candidate in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto, where he is developing TREMA!, an association that through art connects Brazil and Portugal, and collaborates with different organizations in the city of Porto. His central interest lies in the Afro–Latin American scene, engaging with themes such as decoloniality and mechanisms of racialization. He is the first Latin American to receive the Magaly Muguercia Grant, promoted by the Iberescena Programme.
Hilda de Paulo (Inhumas-GO, Brazil, 1987) is an artist, independent curator, researcher, and writer. She develops a transfeminist and transdisciplinary artistic practice that moves between painting, sculpture, performance, writing, and critical pedagogy, addressing themes such as gender dissidence, decolonial perspectives, and belonging. She is a PhD candidate in Literary, Cultural, and Interartistic Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto (Portugal). She is the author of the project Arquivo Gis and a founding member of Cia. Excessos and the e-journal Performatus.
Claire Sivier (she/her) is a Black-British social researcher, cultural producer and facilitator living in Porto. Over the last 15 years her work has been developed with artists, young people and those from marginalized communities, as well as delivering a range of festivals and cultural programmes. In 2020 Claire completed a masters degree in Art & Design for the Public Space at Belas Artes Faculty, Porto where she developed a walking art methodology exploring the lived experiences of black female diasporic artists in Porto. She has since founded Caminhada de Mulheres Negras (2021) as a space for black women and no-binary people to connect and walk in nature. Claire is the co-director and co-founder of There is an Alternative, an arts-based research social enterprise. As a walking artist she is interested in the intersections of the black queer experience, ecology, rituals, and unlearning. She is also a member of the InterStruct Collective; a network of researchers and artists working across socially engaged projects and decolonial practice based in Portugal and across Europe.
Daniele Avila Small (Rio de Janeiro, 1976) is a theatre maker, critic, and curator. She is currently a collaborating professor of the Graduate Programme in Performing Arts at UNIRIO. Since 2023, she has been dedicated to developing the art-research project The Endless Museum of 1976 and collaborates with the platform Trilhas da Cena. Among her most notable work is Há mais futuro que passado – Um documentário de ficção (There Is More Future Than Past – A Fictional Documentary), which premiered in 2017 and toured until 2022. She has published plays with the publishers Cobogó and Javali. She is the founder of the magazine Questão de Crítica, which she edited from its creation in 2008 until its closure in 2024. She is also the author of the book O crítico ignorante – Uma negociação teórica meio complicada (The Ignorant Critic – A Rather Complicated Theoretical Negotiation, 7Letras, 2015).
She is currently a member of the jury for the Shell Theatre Prize. Her experience in programming and curating began with the Ocupação Complexo Duplo at Teatro Gláucio Gill in 2011 (nominated for the Shell and APTR awards). She has been part of curatorial teams for festivals and reflective programmes, such as Olhares Críticos at MITsp between 2018 and 2020. She is one of the creators of the Movimentos de Solo programme by Complexo Sul. She is currently the research and curatorial coordinator of the project Theatre and Brazilian Democracy.
Dori Nigro is a creator, performer, art educator, and researcher, affiliated with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto and the College of Arts at the University of Coimbra. Since 2007, he has been dedicated to interdisciplinary artistic practices. He holds a PhD, a Master’s degree, and a postgraduate specialisation in the fields of contemporary art, artistic practices, and art/education. He also holds a degree in Pedagogy and a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication/Photography.
He lives and works between Portugal and Brazil, facilitating collaborative activities with artists and local communities. Together with Paulo Pinto, he cares for LÁRoyé, a house/studio for affective, creative, and ancestral exchanges, where they develop research and creative work within artistic practice and art/education. He is a member of União Negra das Artes (UNA).
Tiziano Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist whose work fundamentally integrates visual and theatrical language, performance, and artistic interventions in public space. Tiziano has been a fellow of the National Arts Fund and the National Theatre Institute of Argentina (INT-ARG). He was the winner of the 2019 Young Art Biennial, the ANTI Prize in Finland in 2023, and in 2024 received the “ZKB Audience Prize 2024” at Zürcher Theater Spektakel in Switzerland. He is the founder of the cultural management platform ULMUS, dedicated to mediating between different cultural organizations in Argentina and neighboring countries. He has worked as a content producer at the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. His work has been presented in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, France, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tiziano’s participation is made possible through the Fragmented Cities residency cycle, a program of architecture, research, and art by the studio Frame Colectivo, which investigates forms of socio-spatial segregation in the Lisbon metropolitan area and the practices of resistance that emerge from peripheral territories. The program will take place in 2026 at the c/arpa space in Lisbon. As part of the residency, Tiziano Cruz will present public performances of his work on April 9 and 16 in Lisbon, and on April 13 in Porto.