Procrastination School (2020-2022) is a project proposed by choreographer and researcher Sílvia Pinto Coelho to several different groups of artists and researchers. The project began by approaching a particular moment we recognize in improvised performances where you have no clue what is possible next. We can learn much from enduring this moment and trust that vibrant questions may arise.

Suddenly, Covid came to fit the project rather than the contrary. Everything was on hold and postponed somehow… So, in 2020, during the first Covid confinement in Lisbon, an online Reading Group was dedicated to thinking together about slowing down, procrastinating, sabotaging, laziness, modes of production, and, of course, about the confinement and the pandemic. Because it was one of the first online reading groups familiar with what was happening in the working, living, and moving of everyday lives, it took quite an interesting political detour.

At that time, we had also proposed a durational live event with improvisers and artists from the fields of dance and performance at the Teatro Bairro Alto called the Procrastination Marathon to happen in June 2020. When the event had to be postponed for a year (finally happening in July 2021 at the Lisbon Botanical Garden), we proposed instead to record eight interviews with two generations of dance improvisers talking about their methodologies and ideas on “improvisation,” creating the Procrastination Marathon (in other terms). These interviews focus on delaying a resolution in a creative process, recognizing that the act of delaying can lead to a fertile process of inventing inside the unknown. See excerpts from the interviews recorded online at Procrastination Marathon (in other terms).

These artists make it clear that thoughtful and organised processes of improvisation in artistic fields like dance have something to give to thinking in general; they are human tools, not just ways of creating pieces.

The title PROCRASTINATION SCHOOL uses the harshness of the word and the action of “procrastinating” to introduce some sense of humor in ideas that tend to install themselves as clichés, such as creation, invention, innovation. In this proposal, it was relevant for us to understand some strategies for constructing another “commonplace”, a commonplace that would be closer to the constitution of the community, of sharing recognizable criteria of sensibility and human affections. Some artists dedicate themselves to thinking about the emergence of this kind of meeting-place, with much persistence and art – valuing both the possibility of being able to choose and of being chosen by the event (the happy accident) -, in processes that resemble the learning of techniques and human knowledge, in general. The word “school” is applied here to an attitude of discussion and leisure (see the etymology of “school”). Learning the commons is an integral part of psychic and collective individuation (cf. Gilbert Simondon). Do we desire a commonplace with the potency of several worlds, a metastable commonplace? Or do we choose a commonplace that generates crystallized patterns that only allow us to conceive of “the world,” the commonplace of cliché?

With “procrastination”, we place ourselves in a territory between the investigation of sensorial (aesthetic) proposals and the research of philosophical or scientific purposes, giving importance to the space-time of not-knowing, of not naming by prior decision, ideally creating conditions for “relevant encounters”. Improvisational games often involve playing with what is present in the moment, for long enough to overcome the clichés installed in the matrix of our experiences.

Duration is important to provide and exponentiate the degree of probability of encounter. The proposal is to dilate the time of thought, placing it in an endless process (instead of wanting to rush to conclusions). Discursive practices are desired that promote encounter that can be speculative and collective, making room for reflection, self-criticism, and criticism in general.

It is common to view attention/distraction or procrastination ideas with a moral, or moralizing, charge. This charge possibly comes from the accumulated guilt linked to the “lack of productivity” that the system inculcates in us early. Now, in the experimental dance practices of a specific ethical aesthetic line, it is essential to dismantling this moral and guilt system to relearn how to observe and create new hypotheses of relation. For this reason, and starting from the improvisation, composition, and real-time composition practices of choreographer-researchers we have been following for many years, we set out to test the tools of attention/distraction and procrastination of these artistic areas an approximation to other possible ways of functioning. That is, we asked ourselves how to cherish and accept the role of various levels of attention and procrastination, both in artistic, creative processes and in processes of actualization of thought and life routines. How do we move from a choreopolitical and self-policing tendency to a possible pandemic and post-pandemic choreopolitical freedom? (Lepecki 2011, 2013). Politically, we need to understand what deceleration strategies are possible in arts, crafts, and discourses after a radical stop in 2020.