How to dance in a library? In a lobby? How to dance in a public space, a reading room, a walkway, without losing oneself in it? How to make the dancing body visible among other bodies in transit? The Dancing Museum has chosen to foster teaching and dissemination by way of a panorama of twentieth-century dance.
Performers with diverse backgrounds and from different generations take over the hallways, rooms, and stairways of institutions of learning, appropriating and exhibiting some of the landmark solos of the twentieth-century.
As they stroll around, the audience may come across these strange visitors in motion dispersed around the building: they might discover a Merce Cunningham solo or a dance by Isadora Duncan, allowing everyone to build, each in his own way, a living, non-linear archive of dance in which they may forget themselves, pause, wander from echo to echo, from gesture to gesture…
Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards (1991)
This solo has a prominent place in Vera Mantero’s choreographic career. It has run across almost two decades and, remarkably, is still alive and being performed. Why?
It was with this solo that the author found part of her identity concerning movement, way of being on scene, instruments and elements she uses to create and perform: a body that does not neglect gestures, the hands, the face, expressions, that includes them because knows that those elements are absolutely part of the body-person; that constantly tries to get a hold of what goes through it; that tries to expose that through the answers of a vibrant body; a body that clashes against time-cadence and plays with it (them) as a child plays with marbles; a body that produces an almost-speech, in sounds that resemble words, in lips that articulate inaudible words.
Former versions of 20 Dancers for the 20th Century were implemented in collaboration with:
Les Champs Libres, Rennes (November 2012), MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York (October 2013), Berliner Festwochen / Foreign Affairs, Berlin (June 2014), Tate Modern, London (May 2015), Opéra national de Paris / Palais Garnier in collaboration with the Ballet de l’Opéra, Paris (September 2015), Tanzkongress, State Opera, Hannover (June 2016), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (December 2016), MAC VAL, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne / 19th Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne de la Briqueterie, Val-de-Marne (March 2017), Base sous-marine de Lorient / Théâtre de Lorient, Lorient and Les Ateliers des Capucins / Le Quartz, Brest (October 2018), MACBA - Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona (October 2018).