26th of September – 12th of October of 2025
Delia Boyano
Titled: Bailar la periferia: de la seguidilla a la bachata
(Dancing on the Fringe : from the Spanish Seguidilla to the Bachata)
Intermedia dance performance
Duration: 30´
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BAILAR LA PERIFERIA: DE LA SEGUIDILLA A LA BACHATA (DANCING ON THE FRINGE: FROM THE SPANISH SEGUIDILLA TO THE BACHATA)
A multi-media performance presented by the artist in the gallery and on video on the following days.
She has created a new mythology of movement in the Carabanchel neighbourhood in Madrid born from a revision of the popular impromtu dances from the past to the present day.
The proposal is structured in a video that introduces the three chronological moments:
-1780. In the seguidilla bolero of the 18th century the beaux and their ladies used the dance and their conspicuous costumes as a protest against the reigning power.
-1850. From the 19th century the seguidilla was substituted by the Schottische, the origin of the Madrid chotis.
-2024. The Latin-American population brings SBK.
Two interludes are included that explore places or moments that represent the neighbourhood: The Vista Alegre estate which became a royal residence in 1832 and the various migratory waves from the 60s to the present.
The narrative and the sections of the video mid-way between the sculptoric and costume, create each of the three chronological moments’ activity: the leather and ceramic cummerband inspired by the girdles worn by the women in Telléz engravings, the white headscarf and leather gloves with ceramic adornments that reflect the neighbourhood as it is now. Video images and text are projected with sound and live dance during the performance.
Bailar la perferia is a project brought to life as a result of field research in the Madrid neighbourhood of Carabanchel although the anxiety felt can be transposed to many other cities: what will happen if the stifling gentrification processes expels the people from their neighbourhood? What will be left of their identity should this happen?
This performance reinterprets the movements and costumes of different historic periods as a way of reflecting on the importance of neighbourhood and the lurking menace of explusion. Dance is proposed as a tool against an oppressive phenomenon to preserve collective memory and generate community.
OTOÑO DE PERFORMANCE
The gallery’s new season begins with four expostive activities in the Autumn Performance Cycle that has as its leit-motif the connection between performance and dance.
The four perfomances create narratives of a collective-testimonial and romantic-distopic resistance as well as subjetification in powerful discursive settings.
MALPAÍS, by Juan Carlos Robles and Guillermo Weickert, will be presented in videographic format, a video installation on three channels. Its integral setting, that only could be seen once, at C3A, Córdoba (2019), entitled MALPAIS versión original (MALPAÍS, original version) create a mammoth performance that requires spatial dimensions and an technical infraestructure which longer exceed the capacities of an art gallery. This is probably one of the most ambitious creations in this intersection of performance, dance and other disciplines.
City Dance, is described by the artist Ana Sedeño Valdellós as videodance. The framework for the development of this work is the city itself, specific urban areas which are melded with her body through dance. The final cut of the video unfurls a dynamism that emphasises the movements of its creator, alternatively on a full screen or on three vertical bands that simultaneously show different speed of the film. On the other hand, incorporates concepts such as “place”, and practices related to Situationist Drifting and to the conceptual one of Mapping.
Bailar la periferia. De la Seguidilla a la bachata (Dancing on the fringe. From the Spanish Seguidilla to the Bachata), by Delia Boyano is a multi-media performance incorporating video and various pieces of sculpture and clothing accessories that the artist will use on herself at different moments. The first day will be a live performance and the following week a video made during the staging in the gallery will be shown.
Danza para el murciélago que quiso ser abanico (Dance for the Pipistrelle who wanted to be a fan), by Paloma de la Cruz is an original performance created especially for the occasion and will also be presented to two different modalities: a live performance and the filming of this. An additional textile and ceramic china accessory lends eloquent weight and significant meaning to the body of the artist who will use it as part of her costume during the live performance.
It is quite clear from these representations that the debate between direct experimentation, live performance and dance on the one hand, and the filming of them on the other, has been settled. The debate goes back to artistic practices in dance and performance contexts, which have been under discussion since the 1960s, giving rise to a new context, called “intermedia”. Filming the body in movement instigates a narration in relation to the body, its movement and of both with the space in which the action occurs that is very different from that obtained in a live performance. Furthermore the recording devices facilitate takes and distances that can barely be perceived live. In MALPAÍS, Juan Carlos Robles appears to open a kind of mise en abyme when he puts himself behind the camera -filming the other performer, who has a camera looking at the ground tied to his body-, in an action that is being filmed at the same time by a third camera operator.
The origen of all this lies in the creative and experimental exercises made by the historic avant-gardes in an attempt to overcome the division between the different artistic disciplines, not solely with the plastic arts but also with architecture, dance, music, literature and the newly-discovered motion-picture and photography. Additionally they wished to eliminate self-referentiality from the work and attenuate the separation existing between art and real-life; between art and society.
Through these four works we can see how the artists deal with the possibility of deviating from their own disciplines and explore how they can evolve in their desplacements towards others, less familiar, disciplines that allow them an expression, if not more complete, one that is different, enriching and renovative.
This event is probably the one that most aptly defines the contemporary art scene, more and more linked to an “intermedial” context.
Sheet of room PDFFrames
