Study for Tambourine, by Sofía Asencio and Tirso Orive
Held on 28 Apr 2018
The Museo Reina Sofía brings International Dance Day forward to Saturday 28 April with a double programme showcasing the work of choreographers Sofía Asencio (Societat Doctor Alonso) and María Muñoz (Mal Pelo), accompanied by Tirso Orive and Federica Porello, respectively.
Both proposals, despite differing in points of departure and focal points, come together over a specific concern with the relationship between the languages of dance and music. Both are presented as "situations of investigation" around the body; Study for Tambourine draws from popular tradition and the idea of travelling dance, while the choreography of Mal Pelo explores the possibility that the transfer of a performance does not necessarily mean copying and repeating.
“St. John of the Cross speaks in his stanzas of ‘to understand without understanding’
I leave home with Tirso and a tambourine. We look for ecstasy with tired contemplation, imitating the song of certain birds, but without any idea of the meaning of these sounds we are making. We embark on a journey that closes inwards. Merely doing or saying with an iPad, a tambourine and some verses for company. We have made the maxim of St. John of the Cross from the Ascent of Mount Carmel our own, where he says ‘to come to what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not’.
In the autumn-winter of 2017 we started on this work, which relates dance and music in the spirit of mystique incarnate. For us movement is akin to wondering around places with the aim of ensuring the signs we emit become marked and transformed by the external accidents of the journey; at times intimate, at times abrupt and invasive.
What we are performing here is part of a process of investigation which will culminate in the presentation of a broader work in the autumn of 2018”
Sofía Asencio
Drawing inspiration from the writings of St. John of the Cross and the mystical music of the 15th and 16th centuries in Spain, Study for Tambourine is conceived as a moving dance which strikes up a dialogue between folk references and a widely considered heightened culture. This polarity between knowledge located between the quotidian and the popular and excessively encoded knowledge is used by choreographer Sofía Asencio and experimental musician Tirso Orive to explore the idea of displacement in their own art-related comfort zones.
Creators
Sofía Asencio y Tirso Orive
Director
Tomàs Aragay
Production
Inma Bové
Curatorship
Isabel de Naverán
Framework
Día Internacional de la Danza
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Sofía Asencio is a choreographer. Between 1989 and 1993 she studied contemporary dance at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, while participating in a music magazine with the companies of Tania Doris and Lita Claver La Maña, and in the Music Hall La Belle Epoque. She subsequently worked with Vicente Sáez, Lanonima Imperial, Mudances and Cía. ACTA, and in 1998 she joined the collective General Eléctrica. In 2000 she created, with Tomàs Aragay, Societat Doctor Alonso, a stage company and platform for the research and production of shows in collaboration with other artists and researchers. From 2003 to 2011, with Ernesto Collado and Tomàs Aragay, she directed the collective Cèl·lula, which ran the festival MAPA and collaborated in programmes such as the series Contraban in the Teatre Jardí, Figueres, and the curatorship for Escena Plural in Girona’s Teatre la Mercè.
The work of Tirso Orive Liarte is linked to performance, visual and sound disciplines, with collaboration projects such as DuoCaphre and MarTir. In 2014, he produced the solo Tirsomàtic plays… an infra-active pop concert which later became the playful workshop En què m’he convertit? Through the series GLOSTROPO, started in 2015, he set up PARASITE TOUR, referencing the infrastructure of the companies he has collaborated with, for instance Kokoharuka, Aimar Pérez Galí, Ariadna Rodríguez, Les Brönte, ECDT and Mar Medina. He has also participated in other collaborations, including [Infra] for Xarxa Zande, Possible Bodies for Constant, Testigo Pogo for MACBA’s Habitació 1418 space and CCCB, and the experimental art platform ARTAS, associated with La Poderosa. At the present time, he designs stage pieces for specific sites, for instance GLOSSTROP VII (La Cadena De Negación) for the Antic Teatre in 2017.
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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.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
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Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
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When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
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Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
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