Taller

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.

At the end of every school year we like to think of a different way of starting the summer. This time, the artist Pablo Durango will pay us a visit to lead a workshop exploring new artistic strategies.

The workshop will examine the possibility of building an alternative narrative of our own identity.

Using various techniques like drag, storytelling and playing, we will set off on a journey to different realities and potential fictions.

Opening the portals to other dimensions, transforming our bodies and telling ourselves impossible stories is the point of departure on a journey to Multiversal Arcadia where the only limit is our imagination.

Young people from 13 to 21 years of age

18-21 July

11 am – 2 pm

REGISTER HERE

Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. There are certain tasks that the dead summon us to do. And so, we carry them with us in our day to day lives, in small gestures or flashes of very intense emotion. How to share the losses, that which remains bound to us, the strange impermanence, that eagerness to bury our hearts, the confusing and incessant buzzing blue pain? Mourning is a political task, it builds community, it is a ritual of caring that reproduces life. Mourning unites us. I often talk to my friends about this, I believe that our grandmothers were the last ones to truly understand that death was part of life. They knew how to reconnect with the soil, and now perhaps it is time for us to create other rituals, other ways of being, of living and of dying.

Between January and June 2021, Marta Echaves carried out extensive research into mourning, its representations, politics and rituals. She was accompanied by the choreographer Esther Rodriguez Barbero, the artist Julia Montilla and the researcher Maria Rosón. From that series of meetings and conversations emerge certain questions and approaches which have shaped the programme of public activities That Blue Buzzing Sound.

Understanding research as a way of accompanying other projects that also address our contemporary relationship to death and grieving, That Blue Buzzing Sound focuses on sharing practices and poetics that make it possible to grasp experiences when language fails us and the end is centre-stage.

Marta Echaves. She is the coordinator of activities in Spain for the publishing house Caja Negra. She has written for artists' catalogues and publications and is, alongside María Ruido and Antonio Gomez Villar, the editor of Working Dead. Post-work scenarios (La virreina at the Centre of the Image). Interested in writing and historical research, her projects aim to revisit images and metaphors by focusing on intimate experiences and anecdotes as detonators of poetic memory devices. “La Contrarrevolución de los Caballos” was an investigation into heroin and HIV in the context of Spanish neoliberalism, which took on various formats and was shown in places such as Can Felipa, MACBA, MNCARS, ARCO... More recently, she presented her research into post-dictatorship paranormal memory with the conference "De las Acechanzas" (On the Hauntings) at the Domingo Festival.

This course’s educational activity programme is oral. If you are interested in this activity, write to us at educacion.ca2m@madrid.org or call us on 912760227 and we’ll tell you all about it.

You can sign up HERE

This activity is part of the series Overflowing School/Educational workshops created by the EnterArte collective.