
Held on 17 dic 2016
Museo Reina Sofía presents 20 Dancers for the XX Century by the French choreographer and incumbent director of the Musée de la danse, Boris Charmatz. The piece will feature the participation of twenty dancers and performers and will be executed across different gallery spaces housing the Museo’s Collection.
20 Dancers for the XX Century is conceived as a living archive in which twenty dancers from different generations perform, recall, appropriate, explain and transmit extracts from a selection of 20th-century dance solos, originally created and performed by pre-eminent figures from the discipline. Each dancer will put forward their own “museum”, freely interacting with diverse spaces in the Collection, and the piece sees Charmatz explore and expand upon the notion of the museum as a living institution with room for dance practices.
Paraphrasing Boris Charmatz, the project, more than an inheritance, encompasses a kind of archaeology: it seeks to elicit past gestures, restored gestures, reinterpreted by the dancer’s body in the present. From a metaphorical and literal perspective, a dance museum’s collection resides in dancers’ bodies; the body is the most operative storage space: formed by gestures and inhabited by memories which are ready to be activated, in the present and future. The dancers, artists and actors participating in this piece are free to choose and remember, to teach, speak, repeat, reproduce and reappropriate the solos of their choice. Their knowledge of particular works could hail from education or could have been performed previously, while their exercises could adopt the form of wild appropriation or respectful homage, of a division, text, or the reading of documents. The solos are shown where the dancers feel they should be shown and are presented and embodied, but without being allocated a place or time. In this way, emphasis is placed on the mobility and fluidity of bodies: there is no programme to follow, no schedule to adhere to; no one knows exactly who will present what, or where or when. However, everyone is invited to discuss, talk, question and comment.
The activity will be held alongside an encounter with the choreographer, to take place on Tuesday 13 December inside the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400
The projects of Boris Charmatz (Chambéry, France, 1973) focus on investigating, rethinking and developing dance from different perspectives. Internationally renowned for his experimental creations, Charmatz’s works have featured at major international festivals and in museums like MoMA, New York. He was also recently the subject of a programme at Tate Modern and Sadler’s Wells, in London, which explored at once his strongest elements of choreography and performance. After passing through Les Champs Libres (Rennes, 2012); MoMA (New York, 2013); the Foreign Affairs Festival (Berlin, 2014); Tate Modern (London, 2015), and Palais Garnier (Paris, 2015), 20 Dancers for the XX Century arrives at the Museo Reina Sofía to coincide with the participation of the Musée de la danse at the Madrid Community’s XXXIV Autumn to Spring Festival with the piece manger (Wednesday, December 14 and Thursday, December 15 at 8:oo p.m. in the Teatros del Canal). Both works are presented within the framework of a two-fold programme which provides audiences with a sharper focus on the figure of the choreographer through different perspectives.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Comunidad de Madrid
In collaboration with
Participants
A project by
Boris Charmatz / Musée de la danse
Dancers
Boglárka Börcsök, Magali Caillet-Gajan, François Chaignaud, Ashley Chen, Raphaëlle Delaunay, Olga Dukhovnaya, Antonia Franceschi, Latifa Laâbissi, La Ribot, Mark Lorimer, Filipe Lourenço, Vera Mantero, Fabrice Mazliah, Mani Mungai, Olga Pericet, Sonja Pregrad, Marlène Saldana, Frédéric Seguette, Frank Willens and Thomas Wodianka.
* cast susceptible of changes
General stage manager
Mathieu Morel
Direction of productions
Martina Hochmuth with the collaboration of the Musée de la danse team
Project produced by
Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne, directed by Boris Charmatz. The association is subsidised by the Ministry of Culture and Communication (the Regional Department of Cultural Affairs / Bretagne), the city of Rennes, the Regional Council of Brittany and the Ille-et-Vilaine General Council. The Institut Français also regularly supports international tours by the Musée de la danse.
Thanks to
Vito Acconci, Jerôme Bel, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Esther Ferrer, William Forsythe, Sanja Iveković, Eszter Salamon, Meg Stuart, The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, The George Balanchine Trust.
Choreography by Merce Cunningham © The Merce Cunningham Trust. Merce Cunningham’s choreography is performed by Mr Ashley Chen with the permission and support of the Merce Cunningham Trust. All rights reserved.
Marco Antonio Álvarez Fernández, Laura Andreu Sedeño, Elisa Angelina Antunes, Matías Daporta González, Ana Isabel Guzmán Morales, Irene Holguín Gómez, Anastasiia Lauhina, Helena Llorente de Carli, Ana Martín García, Nicole Pérez Rapp, Daniel Raventós Puchol, Marta Salas Lozano and Clara Santiago Beato.






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Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
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27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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