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Introduction
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno
This introduction poses some of the questions raised by the seminar: Why does a dance take on the category “national”? How is the image of a nation constructed through choreography? Is a national style necessarily the outcome of homogenised politics? Does the nation have a gender? Are there different corporeal images for the nation-state and nation-people? Why have women’s bodies often been associated with tradition and territory? What agency capacity do the bodies that danced in a dictatorial political context have? What were the margins of silent resistance or transgression in patriarchal and strongly nationalised contexts?
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The Grimaces of a Dancer: Joséphine Baker
Isabelle Launay
Joséphine Baker was the first black dancer to achieve stardom. How did Baker react to the stereotypes of race, gender, nation and class, and what survival strategies did she employ when faced with the attributions these stereotypes imposed upon her? Through an analysis of the period stretching from 1925 to 1930 in the context of the Revue Nègre, there will be an examination of the inherently gestural and kinaesthetic movements with which the revue dancer revealed the traps of those categories that ensnared her. From the way in which she questioned the gaze, could Joséphine Baker not in fact have been a “toxic dancer” figure in the history of 20th-century dance?
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Movement as Memory: On the Culture of Memory in Dance
Madeline Ritter
Physical and technical knowledge in dance is passed down from generation to generation, from one “life sphere” to the next, from one body to another. Yet, in contrast to the other arts, dance does not possess uniform methods of register; there are writings about dance, choreographic notations and images but, as in performance movement, dance cannot be conserved. That said, the context in which it is produced and the social effect it gives rise to remain legible and are the subject of the practice of Tanzfonds Erbe (Dance Heritage Fund), created in Germany to facilitate the transmission of choreographies through innovative methods and in order to broaden the knowledge of “incorporated genealogies”.
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Flamenco Dance and National Identity through Audiovisual Registers of Francoism
Cristina Cruces Roldán
The corporeal narratives and choreographies which, during Franco’s Spain, contributed to disseminating an archetypal identity around “the national” will be explored from an anthropological perspective, through diverse audiovisual registers that at one time acted as key media to establish images, clothing, choreographies and repertoires. Namely, the reification and “heritage status” of flamenco, its aesthetic and stylistic reconsideration and its association with an ideologically homogenising message.
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Dancing the Homeland. Choreographic Programmes from the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) of FET y de las JONS, 1937–1952
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno
Dance practices fostered by the Sección Femenina represented a phenomenon with a patent institutional and collective imprint under Franco’s dictatorship. Reinvented tradition was established as a bargaining chip with the Axis powers, and, shortly after, with the growing mass practice deployed by the organisation; dance took on a quality to represent the Falangist “way of being”, thus becoming a symbol of the new State from a nation-people perspective and for many years as a representation of the daily ritual of national unity and the bonds between regions. Through women’s education, songs and dances helped to embrace the sense of belonging to the homeland and to build a unique model of women. Moreover, the trips abroad made by choirs and dance groups from 1948 onwards served as a diplomatic mission geared towards recovering the image of the regime inside the foreign policy framework.
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Woman’s Body, Mexico’s Body: Mexican Nationalist Dance, 1930–1960
Margarita Tortajada Quiroz
In the 1930s, the women-led Mexican dance scene broke through as women, who made up this specialist field, created memorable works in which they danced with a Mexican sentiment and linked their individual body to the social body, representing and reworking it and also projecting a genealogy. Those dancers and choreographers, active until the early sixties, signed up to a staunch nationalism which, as well as fuelling popular and indigenous culture, also made use of modern dance, enhancing the freedom of expression and the use of new technical strategies to construct the body. Equally, those artists knew how to build up ties of mutual understanding with creators of other arts, negotiate support from cultural bureaucracy and ensure the acceptance of the public, who applauded their work because they could identify with it.
Dance, Gender and Nation: 1930–1960
Held on 29, 30 Sep, 01 Oct 2016
Dance, gender and nation, three closely bound concepts within the context of contemporary Western culture, and the thematic cornerstones of this seminar. The focal point is the period spanning the second third of the 20th century - a period of upheaval in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929 and the rise of the totalitarianism that would trigger the outbreak of the Second World War shortly afterwards.
The specific exploration of national identity and the allocation of gender in dance during the post-war period in Spain are at variance with two other approaches from highly divergent political and cultural contexts, with the aim of fostering international perspective and bolstering the comparison between traditional, popular and modern phenomena. On one side, there is an analysis of how Joséphine Baker, a popular 1930s icon, was received in Paris with all of her national and racial connotations, and her undeniable commercial allure. And on the other, an examination of the creation of modern Mexican dance in the 1950s by a generation of nationalist choreographers who, setting out from traditional and indigenous imaginaries, explored collective identity whilst also advancing new ways of constructing female bodies.
Furthermore, the seminar offers a reflection on memory and the modes of conservation and conveyance of choreographic heritage through the study of the recent programmes developed in Germany to reconstruct, archive and disseminate dance.
Finally, in conjunction with these these seminars, a workshop with a focus on research and choreographic reconstruction in the Spanish repertoire and a theoretical-practical approach will be held between October and December 2016. Participants will be made up of pupils from the Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila de Madrid, and the results will be published at the Museo Reina Sofía on 17 February 2017.
Framework
Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica de Excelencia Proyecto de I+D+i HAR2013-48658-C2-2-P
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica de Excelencia Proyecto de I+D and Universidad de Oviedo and Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila de Madrid
Participants
Raquel Alarcón Saguar has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish Dance, a degree in Philosophy and Educational Sciences and an M.A. in Performing Arts. She teaches Spanish Dance Methodology and Didactics, Performance Techniques and Workshops at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila. As a dancer she has worked with the choreographers Antonio Gades, José Granero, Rafael Aguilar, Luisillo and Antonio Márquez, among others, and has been invited to the IDD (International Dance Day) galas to perform pieces as a bolero school soloist, for instance Puerta de Tierra, by Antonio Ruiz, and Alberto Lorca’s Intermedio de los Burladores. Her own creations include Sueño, Escenas de Ida y Vuelta, De paso… paseo and Cuestión de t(i)empo. She is part of the team from the R+D+I project Danza durante la Guerra Civil y el franquismo (1936-1960): políticas culturales, identidad, género y patrimonio coreográfico (Dance during the Civil War and Francoism (1936–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage).
Cristina Cruces Roldán is head professor of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville. Specialised in flamenco research, she has directed a Doctoral Programme specialised in this subject and she is the author of more than ninety publications in books and magazines, both in Spain and internationally, most notably the two volumes Antropología y Flamenco. She is the director of two R+D projects from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs on the relationships between flamenco, the market, ethnicity and gender, and she is a researcher on the R+D+I project Danza durante la Guerra Civil y el franquismo (1936-1960): políticas culturales, identidad, género y patrimonio coreográfico (Dance during the Civil War and Francoism (1936–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage).
Isabelle Launay is a professor of History and Aesthetics in Contemporary Dance at the University of Paris 8. She has published À la recherche d’une danse moderne, Rudolf Laban et Mary Wigman (1996), with Boris Charmatz; Entretenir, à propos d’une danse contemporaine (2002); Undertraining, on a Contemporary Dance (2012); Les Carnets Bagouet (2008), with Sylviane Pagès; Mémoires et histoire en danse (2011), and with Marie Glon, Histoires de gestes (2012). She has also taught at the National Centre of Contemporary Dance, Angers, and has collaborated in a wide range of contemporary dance and art projects. She has worked for a number of years with the artist Latifa Laâbissi and has explored memory in choreographic pieces.
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno is head professor at the Department of Art History and Musicology at the University of Oviedo and a specialist in music and dance from the first half of the twentieth century. In 1996 at Universidad Española she opened up a new line of research on the history of dance, a field in which she has directed five national research projects. She has also coordinated the book Coreografiar la historia europea: cuerpo, política, identidad y género en la danza (2013), and currently directs the Research Group Music, Dance and Cultural Studies (MUDANZES) and is head researcher on the R+D+I project Danza durante la Guerra Civil y el franquismo (1936-1960): políticas culturales, identidad, género y patrimonio coreográfico (Dance during the Civil War and Francoism (1936–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage).
Guadalupe Mera Felipe is a professor of Dance Theory and History at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila de Madrid. She also holds a PhD from the University of Oviedo, a degree in Spanish Studies and Modern and Contemporary History from the Autonomous University of Madrid, and in performance from RESAD. She is also a graduate in Spanish Dance from the Royal School of Dramatic Arts and Dance, Madrid. She has performed as a dancer in a number of Spanish dance companies and worked as a dance teacher, as well as collaborating on a range of scientific publications with contributions on the history of dance in Spain. She also forms part of the R+D+I project Danza durante la Guerra Civil y el franquismo (1936-1960): políticas culturales, identidad, género y patrimonio coreográfico (Dance during the Civil War and Francoism (1936–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage).
Madeline Ritter is a lawyer, arts manager and dance curator. Between 1989 and 2004 she was the artistic director of Tanz Performance Köln (Cologne, Germany), an international production and programming platform for contemporary dance and new media. In 2004 she proposed national financing programmes for dance at the core of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Tanzplan Deutschland, Tanzfonds Erbe), where she directs projects. In 2014 she launched Dance On, an initiative focused on the promotion of artistic excellence in dancers over forty years of age, whereby projects related to dance and age are addressed and developed. Moreover, she teaches cultural management classes at a number of European universities, and is the administrative vice-president of the Pina Bausch Foundation and a member of the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Advisory Board.
Margarita Tortajada Quiroz has a PhD in Social Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and she has been a researcher at the National Centre for Research, Documentation and Information on “José Limón” Dance from the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, since 1988. Her career combines her experience as a dancer and her academic training. Her publications have seen her offer reflections on dance theory, particularly on the history of Mexican dance, and she is a pioneer of gender studies in dance and the author of benchmark monographs such as Danza y poder (1995), La danza escénica de la revolución mexicana (2000), Danza y género (2001) and Las mujeres en la danza escénica (2001).
![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
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call “aestheticide” — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?
This three-hour seminar engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.
TEJA 2026. Open Call for Emergency Art Residencies
Proposal submission until 12 January, 2026
TEJA / Red de espacios culturales en apoyo a situaciones de emergencia [Network of Cultural Spaces in Support of Emergency Situations] has the mission to promote transnational cooperation by offering temporary art residencies to artists and cultural practitioners who find themselves in complex socio-political situations in their countries of origin. During their stay in Spain, residents receive accommodation, legal and psychological counseling, and access to a network of organizations and professionals with whom they can share, develop, and continue with their creative projects. The goal is to provide a safe and stimulating environment where artists can continue their work despite adverse circumstances and generate dialogue spaces that ensure freedom of expression through joint activities both in Spain and with international collaborators.
During 2026, TEJA hosts three new residencies, each lasting three months, dedicated to supporting artists and cultural practitioners residing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, in the second half of the year, TEJA hosts three additional residencies for Gazan artists, which are offered by invitation (as Spain is currently unable to facilitate evacuations from Gaza, these invitations are coordinated through France). These residencies aim to provide a stable, creative environment and foster artistic exchange in the face of ongoing adversities. Through this new program, TEJA reaffirms its commitment to amplifying Palestinian voices and empowering artists as they navigate these turbulent times.
The selection is carried out by the TEJA network in close collaboration with each hosting partner. This year the hosting partners are: La Escocesa (Barcelona), hablarenarte / Planta Alta (Madrid), Espositivo (Madrid), Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), Casa Árabe (Córdoba). The selection prioritizes the artist’s personal and professional situation first, and then the alignment with the practices and themes of the hosting spaces. Proposal submission deadline is January 12th, 2026, 23:59 h.