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.
Más actividades
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.