![Meg Stuart, An evening of solo works [Una velada de solos], 2018. Fotografía: © Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/meg-g_0.gif.webp)
Held on 08 nov 2019
How to translate sensations and inner monologues into movement? Is it possible to track the hesitation before speaking, the movements not chosen, the spaces we travel to when we are daydreaming, the memories and projections that cloud our awareness of the present?
Meg Stuart
As part of the performing arts series staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents An Evening of Solo Works by choreographer Meg Stuart. Upon the conclusion of the performance, the artist will participate in a conversation, presented and moderated by Isabel de Naverán.
The evening will see Stuart re-engage with various solos created between 1995 and 2018, in which she reflects on her state as a woman, choreographer, worker, and lover. Her practice questions duties, roles, status and power relations through physical, poetic and emotional work driving movement, with her oeuvre traversed by dialogue maintained with the diverse community of collaborators that customarily surround her — musicians, visual artists, film-makers – and by the images, desires and questions that have accompanied her across her career and which gain an overtly poetic texture in her solos.
Curator and researcher Susan Gibb wrote of her work that it is movement more than dance that best describes her medium; movement she calls upon, guided by her resolute desire to plumb the mysterious depths of experience and human relations.
Since she first performed Disfigure Study in 1991 at the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven, Stuart has become a reference point in a particular European dance scene and part of a constellation of choreographers made up of, among others, João Fiadeiro, Vera Mantero and Alain Platel, and, in Spain, Mónica Valenciano, who also came to prominence at the same edition of Klapstuk, curated by Bruno Verbergt. Her artistic language ever since has seemed to adopt the body as a necessarily vulnerable physical entity which, distorted and displaced by movement, can have a voice and meaning. This line of investigation around the potential of the body with regard to materiality, with its ability to affect and enunciate and, above all, generate new forms of relations, became a constant running through her subsequent works.
By means of improvisation, Stuart explores such questions, positioning herself in ground fertilised by the uncertainty, doubt and suspicion that things, relationships and thoughts could be different: they could arise and reveal themselves in and via movement that is transformed and continually redefines us, affecting the variety of physical, mental and emotional states that decide our way of inhabiting the world.
In collaboration with
Curatorship
Isabel de Naverán
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Participants
Meg Stuart, born in New Orleans in 1965, is an American choreographer and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. She studied dance at NYU, moving to New York in 1983 and continuing her training at the Movement Research centre. In 1991 she presented her first full-length piece Disfigure Study at the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven, and in 1994 founded her company Damaged Goods, thereby fulfilling her desire to have her own structure from which to develop art projects. With Damaged Goods she has created over thirty productions, from solos to large-scale choreographies such as Visitors Only (2003), Built to Last (2012) and UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP (2015).
Moreover, she has worked with artists like Philipp Gehmacher, Ann Hamilton, Claudia Hill, Benoit Lachambre, Brendan Dougherty and Hahn Rowe, and has been involved in audiovisual projects, installations and in situ creations such as Projecting [Space], unveiled at the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Germany in 2017, where she and Damaged Goods worked from 2015 to 2017, at the request of theatre director Johan Simons. Her improvisations have also seen her promote and actively participate in projects like Crash Landing (1996–1999) and Auf den Tisch! (2004–2011). In 2016, she presented City Lights - a continuous gathering at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin, in collaboration with a group of local female artists.
She has also participated in art residences at the Schauspielhaus Zürich (Zurich, 2000–2004) and Volksbühne Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin, 2005–2010) theatres and has collaborated with theatre directors Stefan Pucher, Christoph Marthaler and Frank Castorf, among others.
With Damaged Goods, Meg Stuart has worked since 2010 as an associate artist at the Kammerspiele theatre in Munich, and, in addition, her company regularly collaborates with other performance centres such as Kaaitheater in Brussels and HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.
Her work has been performed at a wide array of international theatres, and at exhibitions that include documenta X in Kassel, in 1997, and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, in 2008, a year in which she also received the Bessie Prize for her body of work and the Flemish Culture Award in Belgium in the category of performing arts. In 2012 she received the Konrad-Wolf Award from the Akademie der Künste (Berlin).
In 2018, she was awarded the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.
Ficha artística
Choreography and performance: Meg Stuart
Live music: Brendan Dougherty
Light design: Emanuelle Petit
Sound design: Vincent Malstaf
Technical director: Jitske Vandenbussche
Technical assistant: Kobe Le Duc
Tour: Delphine Vincent
Distribution in Spain: Mondigromax, Cultivos de cultura
Production: Damaged Goods (Bruselas)
Support: Gobierno Flamenco y Comisión de la Comunidad Flamenca
![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
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.