Live Arts

On the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough (November 1, 2017 - March 19, 2018), the artist gives a performative lecture that analyzes his relationship with the drawing and the creative process.

Archipelago is a new series of concerts that views listening at once as a form of knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment.

Archipiélago es un ciclo de conciertos y un proyecto de investigación que se desarrolla entre 2017 y 2023 con el objetivo de cuestionar la universalidad del término “experimentación" en el ámbito de la música occidental. Surgido como concepto en Estados Unidos, este término se ha replicado hasta generar un canon e incluso un género. A lo largo de sus diferentes ediciones, este ciclo reúne a diferentes músicos, performers e investigadores de diversas partes del mundo en un intento de repensar otras formas de experimentación alejadas de los marcos de pensamiento hegemónicos. En colaboración con agrupaciones musicales y artistas procedentes de distintas áreas geográficas, Archipiélago aborda este concepto de “experimentación” desde variadas perspectivas.

As a culmination of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with the artist Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), featuring the participation of Elena Filipovic, Christian Rattemeyer and João Fernandes. The conversation also serves as an accompaniment to a series of activations performed by Walther.

In Brazil, in 1959, the International Congress of Art Critics was held, a symposium where artists, architects, art and architectural historians were brought together to debate the role of modernity in a new world surfacing in the post-war period. This new reading of the minutes sets out to activate the document, understood as a performative exercise of a past utopian episode that still has huge potency and resonates in a present time in which art history and critique have been displaced from their role and public influence.

In conjunction with the exhibition Pity and Terror in Picasso. The Path to Guernica and the eightieth anniversary of the first showing of Guernica, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Deep Song by Martha Graham (1894–1991), a dance solo created by the American choreographer as a response to the Spanish Civil War and performed, on this occasion, by Blakeley White-McGuire from the Martha Graham Dance Company.

In conjunction with Argentina’s special participation as Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents a piece by the Spanish-Argentinian composer Fabián Panisello entitled L’officina della resurrezione, which was created in 2013. The work seeks to establish a musical dialogue between biblical texts from the Book of Ezequiel and the writings of Erri de Luca, a prestigious Italian writer known for his commitment to social issues.

Within the framework of the parallel programming in relation to Argentina as Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the intervention Eine Brise. Flüchtige Aktion für 111 Radfahrer (A Breeze. Transient Action for 111 Cyclists).

In conjunction with Argentina’s special participation as the Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents La Wagner, a work by the Argentinian dancer and choreographer Pablo Rotemberg. First performed in 2013, the piece was awarded the Main Prize in Choreographic Direction and Choreography at the World Theatre Awards.

This activity is linked to the Seminar Dance, Gender and Nation 1930-1960, held in the Museo Reina Sofía from 29 September to 1 October 2016, and presents the results of the Workshop of Choreographic Research and Reconstruction: The Bolero School developed at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila between October 2016 and February 2017, inside the framework of the R+D+I project Dance During the Civil War and Francoism (1930–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage.

Museo Reina Sofía presents 20 Dancers for the XX Century by the French choreographer and incumbent director of the Musée de la danse, Boris Charmatz. The piece will feature the participation of twenty dancers and performers and will be executed across different gallery spaces housing the Museo’s Collection.

Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with Boris Charmatz, the French choreographer and incumbent director of Musée de la danse, in conjunction with the presentation of his piece 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Engaging in dialogue with João Fernandes, deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía, Charmatz will analyse the relationship between dance and contemporary art, along with the idea of the museum as a living institution which includes dance creation.

The dancer Toni Jodar, a representative of contemporary dance in Catalonia, puts forward this “dancing” lecture, in which he explains the history of dance, illustrated with his own body, across the 20^th century.

Museo Reina Sofía once again welcomes the annual Acción!MAD, International Action Art Encounters, to take place in Madrid across different venues throughout November.

Throughout her career as a performer and composer, Joan La Barbara, a hugely influential figure in the sphere of contemporary experimental music, has explored the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, developing a true and signature vocabulary of experimental techniques. She uses these techniques to explore the potential range of timbres in a single pitch, circular breathing inspired by French horn playing, and multiphonics, in addition to recovering classics such as choral singing.

To mark International Museum Day, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a piece awarded first prize in the 2015 Madrid Choreography Competition: the dance piece entitled …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock), created by Carmen Fumero and Miguel Ballabriga.

On 18 May the Museo Reina Sofía will host a special programme to celebrate International Museum Day, held worldwide since 1977. The idea is to share a day of celebrations with visitors, who will be able to gain a better understanding of the lesser-known spaces and sides of the institution and feel part of its programme, exhibitions and working process.

Niño de Elche ofrece en el Museo Reina Sofía un concierto cuyo título, Animal Numero, se basa en los números que portaban en sus cuerpos los presos marroquíes de Guantánamo. Cuenta para el evento con la colaboración de los músicos Raúl Cantizano y Darío del Moral, y Benito Jiménez a cargo de las luces. 

The Museo Reina Sofía once again takes part in the activities that mark International Dance Day, organising two sessions that aim to grant visibility to and assimilate inside its spaces an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly prominent in the Museo’s programming, lines of research and Collection.

This double performance serves as an introduction to the Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Museo. The studied disappearance of the image in modern surveillance technology is developed in a performance lecture by the artist, followed by an exploration into the new acoustic landscape of war – between military noise and sounds from consumer devices - by Kassem Mosse. Both performances are a posthumous homage to Harun Farocki.

The Museo marks the 55^th anniversary of the OuLiPo group with two activities: The presentation of the work 66 Exercises in Style by Colectivo Armadillo, and a discussion which revolves around the group, which includes participation from illustrious specialists and certain members of this historic literary experiment.

The Limitless Place is the first collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Centro Dramático Nacional (National Drama Centre) and Teatro Pradillo, with the latter conducting a programme of performances, lectures and encounters. It comes about from the desire to question the forms and language of the stage with the will to think about the theatre we actually want; what is, in short, the world we strive to build our society upon.

Resonance is a series of sound interventions for a specific site, activating the acoustic and historical space in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Sabatini Building. The programme refrains from using the auditorium and electronic amplification, which means guest artists, musicians and composers will present a series of pieces that set in motion alternative contexts for sound and contemporary music.

To mark International Dance Day, the Museo calls on all those interested in taking part, for 10 minutes, in the reinterpretation of one of the most emblematic pieces in the history of contemporary dance: Rosas danst Rosas.

Once again, the Museo joins in with the activities held to mark International Dance Day, to take place on Wednesday 29 April, with a view to giving an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly more prominent in the Museo’s Collection and activities visibility and integrate it into its spaces.

After organising activities with Merce Cunningham and Simone Forti, the Museo presents the choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton (USA, 1939), a central figure in the development of contemporary dance and the creator of contact improvisation. On this occasion Bound, a solo devised by Paxton, will be performed, for the first time in Spain, by the dancer Jurij Konjar, who will also hold a workshop.

This programme of activities, which relates Sahrawi culture to a broader social and cultural framework, aims to become tuiza, a space that reimagines an alternative possible geography, where its centres are not metropolises of financial power, but narrations and accounts of a periphery that lives on in expressions of identity and cultural contamination.

Eclectic, poppy, sophisticated, the music of Arto Lindsay evokes reverse trajectories and unexpected influences. Educated in Brazil during the emergence of Tropicália in the 1970s, Lindsay added the references and characteristics of this broad cultural movement in Brazil, focused on diluting art in a multifarious and impalpable experience, to the No Wave scene in the USA.

Short Dance Films is a touring programme that includes a selection of forty-five short dance films produced in Europe in recent years. It is curated by Núria Font/NU2’s, commissioned by the European Dancehouse Network, a network with the participation of 20 dance houses from 16 countries.