Taller

This summer, we’ll all be fish. The children in the summer cabin will become a huge school of fish. Fish without a sea and with just one place to swim: in the museum.

We need three things to dance: body, space and time. What happens when we interplay these three elements?

Swimming suddenly becomes a way of dancing.

We share a space. We have a museum. We walk around the museum; we dance around the museum. We guide, follow and seek a common respite. How do we choose which direction to go in? Who chooses the direction of our route? If we all stop, will we keep dancing?

We are inviting children aged 6 to 12 to dive through the depths of this ocean along with Baiven. Just like every year, the CA2M Museum is scheduling this activity with the goal of creating a space where artists and creators can share their inquiries with the participants. This time, the sessions will revolve around the body, dance and groupwork.

The workshop will be taught by Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente. They are dancers, choreographers, sisters, cultural mediators and the founders of the Baiven collective, a group that uses dance to foster the horizontal exchange of experiences, perspectives, knowledge and critical thinking.

They develop activities that explore the performing arts and education. They seek engagement and interaction with communities and territories and try to expand art’s professional arena by creating accessible, diverse spaces where anyone can find a place, regardless of their situation, body and mind.

Odd Dance is a workshop for all kinds of bodies with all types of experience on dance floors and in festivals and ballrooms, where you can practise classical couple dances in a trio. It’s harder to keep the beat and steps of a dance with three people dancing, but this is precisely what makes us learn new ways of moving.

Odd Dance is a workshop where the simple action-question of translating classic couple dances for two into trio dances for three, or five, or seven, will provide us with the framework of joint investigation and creation in which we’ll get in touch with each other and our own bodies, the bodies of others and the world around us using movement and dance as a means of bonding and creative expression.

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is also trained in dance movement therapy. She works on the margins of dance and the live arts.

Ciudad Sur (‘Southern City’) is a space for shared experimentation launched in 2021 which, taking Móstoles as its starting point, aims to explore the many facets and many riches that generate a sense of belonging in the cities that make up the Madrid’s metropolitan area.   

In this third edition, we will approach Móstoles as post-tourist guides, travelling together through a series of architectures composed of layers of time, experiences and lived moments around what we call free time, based on a proposal of shared experimentation in which this dormitory town will become a holiday destination. 

Leisure, what we call ‘free time’, is one of the things we desire most, a place where we indulge in experiences - lived or projected – which are associated with enjoyment.  

There is a leisure with which we live every day, that which marks the pauses in the flow of daily activity, such as the time we dedicate to sport and its promise of a balanced, healthy, desirable life. But there is also leisure that functions as an escape route, a time and a place where limits are widened: popular festivals, nights out... and of course, the idea of true leisure, and the search for total disconnection: holidays. A long pause that allows us, at least for a while, to pretend to live under another logic, to try to be other people.                                                                                                                

As dormitory towns grew, low-cost ‘getaway’ flights multiplied, definitively linking holidays with the idea of travel. To this end, the tourism industry offers us a myriad of destinations to match our dreams and our wallets, deploying a whole travel imaginary in which this desired ‘freedom’ can take shape. A catalogue of beautiful scenes often constructed in contrast to everyday spaces, based on a play of opposites. From urban grey to the infinite blue skies and seas; from the brick of the city to the white of the Costa Brava, or the warm gold of the sun... But never the ‘brown coast’. This ‘coast’ is Madrid’s metropolitan area, which will be the setting for the activities proposed in this programme, where we will reflect on the evolution of the urban, political and social criteria that have built this city’s landscape of leisure infrastructures. 

The sessions will take place between October 2023 and May 2024: 3rd of October, 7th of November, 12th of December, 16th of  January, 20th of February, 12th of March, 16th of April and 7th of May 2024. 

Coordinated by: Irene de Andrés, La Liminal and Estrella Serrano.

Irene de Andrés was born in one of the world’s most desirable destinations - the island of Ibiza - which has inevitably led her to investigate the evolution of the concept of leisure and the very meaning of travel throughout history, from the first settlers to today’s tour operators. Spas, cruise ships and nightclubs are the key settings for the artist who, through film, sculptural pieces and graphic work, creates journeys through time and through different waters, connecting different historical events that make us reflect on the model of tourist consumption, especially designed for the working class. 

La Liminal is a cultural mediation collective that investigates the city and uses the urban tour as a tool to analyse public space collectively. Our aim is to experiment with the urban landscape in order to propose new readings that focus on those stories that have been made invisible over time, those we have not sufficiently valued, in order to construct alternative discourses that are based on collective learning and that allow for a re-appropriation of the idea of public space as a common good. 

‘I didn't expect such a sound to come out of such a small body. It was very impressive, she wanted to do the same with her voice: not to disguise it, but to dress it with other voices, her voice, her throat, as if another voice was coming from inside her, as if she were speaking, not with another, with herself, having a conversation, for example, about what disappears, from babbling to the last breath without passing through the middle, with a new everyone-voice, what would it be like? A mouth with many tongues, a ventriloquist who comes to us to multiply our voices, to transcribe the sound like when that leaf sounded like a twirler, as if it was telling us come on, let's go, its sound, that amplified experience, we had to draw the sound out of the ground, what does that mean? I don't know, it was like a breathing game, I was obsessed with feeling that sound, focusing attention on what you hear after singing, the throat clearing, the swan song with many tongues, the song that accompanies the moment just before going to sleep, doing it until we were voiceless together.’ 

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, the choir does its own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.  

Our Amateur Choir has included Sonia Megías, Itziar Okáriz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Lolita Versache, Bea Narcoléptica, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández and Noela Covelo.   

Odd Dance is a workshop where you can practise typical partner dances as part of a trio. It is designed for all types of individuals who have had all kinds of experiences on dance floors and in nightclubs and ballrooms. Dancing in threes means we will have to arrange ourselves in a different way, and the resulting movements and dances will be radically new. 

 Throughout this workshop, many of the binary assumptions that have accompanied the history of dance and dancing will be questioned. Its main objective is to find other ways of connecting with dance and its history, in order to enjoy the most beautiful and vital aspects that dancing as a community offers us: the pleasure of feeling part of something shared, the joy the body feels when it is moved, the surprise felt when the invisible and the unknown become manifest, the magic that comes from bodies being in tune with the world, the sensation of creating meaning as we dance. 

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is trained in Dance Movement Therapy. She works on the margins of Dance and the Living Arts.

 The previous editions of Odd Dance were facilitated by Tania Arias and Mónica Valenciano.

There are sounds that stick in your head, like a sewing machine, or when my mother used to wash clothes outside in our backyard, I remember sitting there listening to the rhythm with which she rubbed the clothes against the washboard, and for me, the sound of a washing machine is hypnotic, the purring motor of a fridge is like a whisper and when it rattles out a whistle I would have the iiiiiiiiiii in my brain all day, and I was never sure whether it was me or the machine, tinnitus, tinkling like flowing water inside your head, and then the silence was terrifying, and depending on your position you could hear your vertebrae because we all have internal, interior sounds and you sometimes hear a beat in your ears like when you come out of a club and keep getting that buzzing, ringing pum-pum-pum, and seeing as I live on the seventh floor all the clock bells sound differently and drive me up the wall. Have you never thought that a repetitive sound is like someone talking? Or maybe a ghost. You have to be very careful with all this, look for places that have voices and for voices that seem like they are not there because they are inside your head, in another world, in abandoned villages in Madrid, in the materials of things. We want to learn a song together, to rustle up a storm, to sing to the stars in Valencia and so on until we embrace all the sounds that exist in the universe.

An Amateur Choir is a creative project that welcomes any kind of voice which wishes to participate. Besides our own experimental sessions every second Thursday, we also have sessions with artists who work with the voice and listening. Some of the people who have passed through our choir are: Sonia Megías, Itziar Okáriz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Lolita Versache, Bea Narcoléptica, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda.