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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).
Más actividades
Economy of Hate
18 ABR, 9 MAY 2026
Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
![Dias & Riedweg, Casulo [Crisálida], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/desafios-cine-2.png.webp)
Other Voices in Us All
17 ABR, 8 MAY 2026
A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Lucrecia Martel. Our Land
Saturday, 18 April 2026 – 4:30pm
Nuestra tierra (Our Land, 2025) is Argentinian film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary and her most recent work. The film focuses on the legal case surrounding the murder, in 2009, of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Los Chuschagasta Indigenous community, who was killed while resisting the forced displacement of ancestral land located in northern Argentina, territory hiscommunity has inhabited and farmed for centuries.
Drawning on fragments of the above-mentioned trial, which took place in 2019, as well as a meticulous reconstruction of the history of Los Chuschagasta since the seventeenth century, Martel decries how colonial violence, far from being a relic of the past, underlies current political and social structures and ends in the mistreatment and systematic invisibility of Indigenous peoples.
Lucrecia Martel is a director and screenwriter widely regarded asone of the most relevant film-makers in the twenty-first-centuryLatin American cinema. To date, she has directed four feature-length films: La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), Zama (2001), La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer rubia (The Blonde Woman, 2008), all of which have been awarded at film festivals, including recognitions in the Official Selection at Cannes. Accross her work Martel explores the complexities of an Argentina shaped by the political and social crisis of the 1990s and by the burden of a colonial past, which she translates into her own visual language of documentary, paradoxically offsetting it against fiction. As Martel asserts: “What I do is all lies, all artifice. I don’t believe in the truth and, if there is any effect of truth in my films, then it’s a miracle”.
These notions, the germinating material of her films, enable a reflection on how the tactics of fiction and imagination, materialized thought creativity, can function as powerful means of resisting the erasure of memory and as a tactic of reparative justice. This line of thought also underpins READ Madrid. The Festival of Books and Ideas, which frames the screening of this film.
READ Madrid is a space of encounter for critical and experimental voices in the sphere of literature and theory. The festival gathers a transatlantic framework of voices related to writing, art and publishing, whose practices challenge hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and make room for performative and cinematic forms as expanded forms of research.
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas
Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April, 2026 – Check Programme
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.
In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.
The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.