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October 25, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
New agents/new institutions
Debate in which various managers with important roles during that time will analyse institutional development: different methods used in the management and exhibition of the new national and international trends in contemporary dance in Spain.
Moderated by: Beatriz Martínez del Fresno
Participants: Manuel Llanes, Guillermo Heras, Beatriu Daniel and Toni Pastor
Manuel LLanes. Founder, programming director and general director, successively, of the International Theatre Festival of Granada, over a period of 16 years. This Festival specialises in contemporary theatre and dance. Currently the artistic director of Espacios Escénicos, an initiative of the Department of Culture of the Regional Government of Andalucía (at Teatro Central in Seville, Teatro Alhambra in Granada and Teatro Cánovas in Málaga).Guillermo Heras. Director of Centro Nacional de Nuevas Tendencias Escénicas (1983-1993), which was founded as a platform for exhibiting and producing contemporary dance in Spain. Currently the director of the Muestra de Teatro Español de Autores Contemporáneos and executive secretary of the technical unit at Iberescena.
Beatriu Daniel. Cultural manager specialised in dance. Member of the generation that in the 80s did a great deal to advance contemporary dance in Cataluña, as the co-director of the magazine DANSA-79 and director, from 2005 to 2011 of “Centre de creació de dansa i arts escèniques.”
Toni Pastor. Cultural manager for the past 30 years, working for different private enterprises and also public bodies. Through the Generalitat Valenciana, in 1987, he created the Circuito Teatral Valenciano and the contemporary dance festival “Dansa València” in 1988, which he also directed for the first five years. -
October 26, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Creation: tendencies and geographies
Round table on the creative effervescence of contemporary dance in the 80s in Spain. Several of the main creators active during those years will discuss the diversity of the languages so characteristic of that period in this country.
Moderated by: Isabel de Naverán
Participants: Angels Margarit, Bocanada Danza (La Ribot and Blanca Calvo), Rosángeles Valls and Antonia Andreu
Angels Margarit. Angels Margarit / Company. MUDANCES began its activity in 1985, taking its name from its first show, MUDANCES. In 2010 Angels Margarit was awarded the National Dance Prize, creation modality, by the Ministry of Culture.
La Ribot and Blanca Calvo. Choreographers and dancers, had the idea in the 80s of founding Bocanada Danza (1986 – 1989), thus creating a young platform for experimentation, one of a kind at that time in Madrid. Afterwards they worked separately: La Ribot began her internationally recognised work with the series "Piezas Distinguidas", which had a major influence on the new conception of contemporary dance. Blanca Calvo would collaborate with the Basque choreographer Ion Munduate in various pieces, and together they undertook the project Mugatxoan, which focused on emerging practices and projects located between choreography and the visual arts. In 1997 La Ribot and Blanca Calvo worked together again, when they organised Desviaciones 1997- 2001, with José A. Sánchez. This project consisted of a series of presentations, debates and lectures of what now might be called “expanded choreography.” Many of the artists and intellectuals who later marked the new currents in international contemporary dance during the following decade were involved in this initiative.
Rosángeles Valls founded Ananda (a Sanskrit work meaning "be happy in all that you do") in 1981 in Valencia. Since then, over 18 shows and numerous prizes and other types of recognition have dotted her long career.
Antonia Andreu. Dancer and choreographer. In 1980 she traveled to New York and studied with Merce Cunningham at the latter’s Professional Training Program. During her time in the city she learned about and took part in the work of other choreographers of post-modern dance, such as Douglas Dunn, Thrisha Brown and Lucinda Childs. In 1986 she returned to Spain and founded her own company.
Held on 25, 26 oct 2013
In parallel with the presentation of the new section of the Collection: Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and Globalisation a seminar is to be held, entitled Dance in the 80s: the first steps of contemporary dance in Spain. It includes two round tables, lectures and the display of archival materials in the Collection’s interpretation areas.
It offers a space in which to reflect on a key period in the development of this discipline in Spain.
Context
Once Spain’s transition to democracy was complete, an important new stage began in the configuration of the contemporary culture system and, particularly, that of dance. In the words of the art historian José Antonio Sánchez “the decade of the 1980s was understood as a normalising process”. New exhibition venues appeared, contemporary creation was promoted, in 1980 it became possible to study contemporary dance in a public institution (Institut del Teatre, Barcelona) and in 1985 the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music was founded.
As these new languages took shape, the appearance of festivals, exhibitions and theatres was decisive, since they enabled creators to see international productions and present their own work through new structures such as “Dansa València” (Valencia), Centro Nacional de Nuevas Tendencias Escénicas (Madrid), and Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona), among others.
To explore this period of great creative effervescence, two round tables have been organised. One about institutional development – the different modes of managing and exhibiting the new trends – and another about choreographic creation, which during this decade was very much a melting pot of different languages and forms of experimentation.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.