Composición en Tiempo Real -CTR (Real Time Composition) is the name given to the research work developed by João Fiadeiro along other national and international collaborators since 1995. CTR has consolidated itself as a reflexive approach to methodologies of composition and improvisation that offer the performer a frame of references and working tools that allow him to place himself within the representational space as a result of a choice making act.

The CTR terminology does also apply to other artistic fields and is tangential to some theoretical production contexts, such as philosophy, cognitive sciences and semiotics. This double theoretic-practical side is also reflected on its transmission models, ranging from workshops to research laboratories or demonstrative lectures. The need for theoretical exposure and the confrontation with the practice in action is the distinctive seal of a research that envisions itself as mutating and that claims for itself the fragile space of research through art.

We all have had the experience of not following the thread, of losing track, of not knowing the aim of something, and have found ourselves for a short moment lost in a state of uncertainty concerning what comes now. We know how this state awakens in the body internal tensions, transforming it into a real battle field, where the logical evidence of not knowing opposes to the natural reaction of protecting ourselves.

The method of Real Time Composition sets up the following question: How can we substitute our own dependency of a future we already now it can not be anticipated? How can we fill in that vacuum, that gap?

And this is the answer it proposes: The only way to tune in to the present- and consequently to the past  from which we depend to keep on going -, is to keep ourselves open and willing to adjust and redirect it according to the new information we have access to. Is to accept that some of the convictions upon which we where constructing our existence must be, at least, questioned. To accept that , even though, it seems that we move linearly from the past to the future, we still make a double movement when we look forward in the direction of the past and backwards towards the future.

João Fiadeiro