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November 13, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Isabel de Naverán
Thinking Bodies: from the promise of eclecticism to choreographic discourse
In one decade, starting with the transition to democracy in the 80s and lasting through the mid 90s, the changes occurring in choreographic creation indicate the presence of both a desire to experience new forms of dance and also of disappointments resulting, perhaps, from the pressure exerted by understanding the professional in ways that did not always adapt to artistic needs. Such changes give rise however to specific gestures which, making language and poetics the priority, become choreographic discourse. From that time on, and up through the present, the concept of choreography has also undergone a transformation: it is no longer just the arrangement of bodies and movements within a performance. Rather, choreography is understood as a self-reflexive textual practice the consequences of which flow into in areas that no doubt transcend it. One of these areas is the art museum.
Isabel de Naverán is an independent researcher and has a doctorate in Fine Arts. She works in expanded choreography and in the generation of critical discourse. Among her activities in this area, she organises conferences and seminars, publishes articles, is the editor of books and the coordinator of training programs.
She is a co-founder of Artea (www.arte-a.org) and member of the editorial board of Cairon, a journal of dance studies (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares). She is the editor of the book Hacer Historia. Reflexiones desde la práctica de la danza (2010), co-editor, with José A. Sánchez, of Cuerpo y Cinematografía (2008) and with Amparo Écija of Lecturas sobre danza y coreografía (2013).
Since 2004 she has been collaborating as a researcher in the Archivo Virtual de Artes Escénicas (Performing Arts Virtual Archive). She is a guest professor in various Master’s programs: Performing Arts Practices and Visual Culture (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Research and Creation in Art and Arts and Sciences of the Spectacle (Universidad del PaisVasco).
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November 20, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno
Feminism and contemporary dance in the Spain of the 80s
Once the country’s young democracy had become solid, Spanish society, waking up from the lethargy caused by the dictatorship, finally found before it a broad array of performing arts. Among them was contemporary dance, which because of its novelty, stood out from the rest. This lecture analyses the choreographic renewal that took place in the 80s, paying particular attention to the construction of female subjects, the transformation of body techniques and the representations of gender that proved to be means of escape from the cannons established by Francoist biopolitics.
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno is full professor in the Department of Art History and Musicology, at Universidad de Oviedo. A specialist in 20th century art, she has paid particular attention to musical nationalism, the sound languages of Spain’s Silver Age and the music of the post-war period. She is the author of the book Julio Gómez. Una época de la música española (Madrid, ICCMU, 1999).
Without giving up her activity in musicology, in 1996 she opened a new line of research in Spanish universities: dance history. In this field she has directed four projects sponsored by the National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation and was also the coordinator of the book Coreografiar la historia europea: cuerpo, política, identidad y género en la danza (Universidad de Oviedo, 2011) with the participation of specialists from Spain, France, Italy and Portugal.
Part of her work focuses on methodology: the problems that arise in research, dance and gender, the relationship between music and dance, the reconstruction of historical dances and the documentation and conservation of choreographic heritage.
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December 4, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Núria Font/NU2'S
From stage to screen: video as a tool for choreographic creation
Coinciding with the upsurge of contemporary dance companies at the end of the 70s and especially during the 80s, video appears as a new tool for audiovisual creation, one much easier to access and use than film. Choreographers and dancers find that this new technology has very significant applications for the sector: on the one hand, as document and memory, very important things for an eminently ephemeral art; and on the other hand as a means for experimentation, through dialogue between the two languages, choreographic and audiovisual, in the search for a new space – a virtual space – for performance; and finally, and probably the most important, in times in which dance needed to create its audience, as a tool for the promotion and dissemination of dance in the media, that is, in something that was then very powerful: television.
Núria Font Solá. Videomaker and curator. Director of cultural projects related to video, videodance and the electronic arts.
As a videomaker: She began her professional career in 1980 at the Community Video Service of Barcelona. Since then she has worked with audiovisual companies in the making of advertising spots; with television networks such as TVE (Metrópolis, La 2), TV3 and Barcelona TV; she has created videodance works in collaboration with national and international choreographers and has also directed documentaries, promotional clips and recordings of the performances of various dance companies.
As an art and new media curator: For eight years she directed Espai Video at the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica and she directed three editions of the biennials of Electronic Arts and Video Creation (1998, 2000 and 2002). Since 2003 she has been the director of VAD, the International Video and Digital Arts Festival of Gerona.
As a curator of videodance and interactive dance: She directed, starting in 1984, the Mostra de Videodansa, a biennial event dedicated to images of dance, and a number of videodance programs in museums and other types of centres all over the world. She now directs the program of NU2’s, associació per a la creació, which organises the following activities, among others: the IDN festival, the program Territoris Dansa for Canal 33, videodance production through an annual dance project selection, research laboratories at l’Animal a l’esquen and an educational program for children and youth. In 2009 she was awarded the National Dance Prize of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
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From October 15, 2013
The Collection´s Interpretation Area
Each curator has selected the most important pieces for his or her lecture, and these are included in a DVD that will be shown in the Interpretation Area of Collection: Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and globalisation, so that the general public may look at them:
[Belmonte (1988); Gelabert -Azzopardi][Socorro! Gloria! (1991)] and [ 13 Piezas distinguidas; (1993-1994)] La Ribot
[Ahí va Viviana (1988); Bocanada]
[Solos (1990); Vianants danza]
[Kolbebasar (1988); Angels Margarit/ Mudances Company
[El Mar (1989); Angels Margarit/ Mudances Company] (videodance)
[Lugares Intermedios (1993); Olga Mesa] (videodance)
Dance in the 80s
The first steps of contemporary dance in Spain. Conferences
Held on 13, 20 Nov, 04 Dec 2013
Through the gaze of three curators, this lecture series inquires into different topics such as feminism, video dance and the diversity of languages present during these years. These discourses will be complemented by audiovisual material – the fruit of many hours of work dedicated to recovering archives – on the creations that took place in Spain in the 80s and 90s. In parallel with this activity, it is also to be held a seminar.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
En colaboración con
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Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.