Paulo Maria Rodrigues’s research while affiliated with University of Aveiro and other places

This article explores how the Portuguese ensemble Companhia de Música Teatral (CMT) adapted their live performance PaPI – Opus 8 for Zoom in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which severely limited in-person gatherings and artistic events. Originally planned for a nationwide tour, PaPI – Opus 8 faced major challenges due to pandemic restrictions, prompting CMT to rework the piece for an online audience. The result was a transformed version titled PaPI – Opus 8.z, crafted specifically for the Zoom video-conferencing platform. The article gives a detailed examination of this performance piece and its reception, providing a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and achievements associated with the adaptation of this live performance to the virtual realm. The article explores the transformation process into an online format, examining both the losses and gains incurred. To facilitate this exploration, an introduction to CMT and a contextualization of their work is given. Subsequently, PaPI – Opus 8 is situated within CMT's body of work, including its "sister" pieces, with a particular focus on evaluating the significance of interaction with the audience during the performance. This is followed by an overview of the pandemic-related constraints and the strategies employed by CMT to continue creating performances. To illustrate these strategies, two other CMT creations developed during quarantine are discussed as pivotal steps on the pathway from PaPI – Opus 8 to the transformed online performance PaPI – Opus 8.z. Cover photo by Companhia de Música Teatral

This article analyses and reflects upon a community music project that occurred in 2016 in Portugal. It involved a community of people with disabilities and a group of artists from different fields. The project’s promotors aimed to create a space in which differences were abated, social well-being was nourished and individual desires were fostered. This article endeavours to understand how artistic performance may provide opportunities for empowering less advantaged people and how it might have been achieved during this project. The reflections present in this article are based on the current literature on community music and are informed by other similar analysis of these kinds of projects. The article starts with a brief description of the project and then elaborates on the term ‘community music’ and its relationship to this project. The project made use of a mix between an art installation and an experimental instrument called Pianoscópio. This article describes this instrument in detail and analyses how it enabled the participants to express themselves to their fullest abilities. A characterisation of the participating community members follows, focusing on the core tenets of the association they were part of. After that, the article examines how the workshops took place and what transpired in the final performance, focusing specifically on the steps taken to accommodate the different disabilities of the participants. The article ends with a reflection upon these kinds of projects and the impact this one project might have had on its participants.

Music theater performances (MTPs) in the early years provide stimulating environments for babies and their caregivers and have spawned intriguing questions about babies’ ability to be engaged in different modalities of art. The aim of this study was to assess babies’ engagement in an MTP designed for children aged 0–3. A video microanalysis of recordings of eight babies, who attended performances of AliBaBach by Companhia de Música Teatral, was made through a coding system designed to quantify a set of behaviors that indicated engagement. The videos were coded on a 1-s time base for (a) babies’ engagement with the performance, caregiver, environment, and self-engagement and (b) five indicators of engagement with the performance: gaze at the performance, positive affect, negative affect, vocalizations, and body movements. The results indicate that engagement with the performance was the most prevalent type of babies’ engagement (62%). The most prevalent indicator of engagement with the performance was gaze. These results suggest that babies were highly engaged in the performances, mostly through visual attention. Babies’ engagement was more evident in scenes that were narratively structured, scenes that were based on musical repetition, and scenes that sped up.