
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.






Más actividades
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.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.