Live Art Writers Network at DDD Festival 2026 | Porto, Portugal

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?

More information about the programme here.