Behind The Green Table of Kurt Jooss

This encounter sees choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972), alongside Lola Hinojosa, expand her reading of Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war dance piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and the point of reference for the exhibition Reconstrucción de una danza macabra (Reconstruction of a Macabre Dance), a new stage production framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fissures programme. The encounter will be followed by the unveiling of the show.

The core strands of Olga de Soto’s work are the history of dance and its perception, and the artist belongs to an international generation of choreographers and dancers such as Jérôme Bel, Félicette Chazer and Boris Charmatz, who reflexively examine the genealogies of dance and move beyond the very activity of dancing with a discursive sense and documentary gaze — the body not only dances but also becomes the acting subject of history.

Here, De Soto revisits and expands upon research undertaken over a decade previously on Der grüne Tisch, a ballet Jooss premiered in Paris just a few months before Adolf Hitler rose to power. The piece, composed in eight scenes for sixteen dancers and drawing inspiration from medieval macabre dances, is considered among the most politically committed in the history of twentieth-century dance. In her research, De Soto explores the possibilities of the dance archive as creative material, along with other aspects such as trace and memory.

Participants

Olga de Soto is a choreographer, dancer and dance researcher. Her choreographies, performed in a score of countries, most notably include anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centro Pompidou, Paris, 2004–2009), histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), Une Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010) amd Débords (Festival d'Automne, Paris, 2012). Furthermore, she has collaborated with Michèle Anne De Mey, Pierre Droulers, Boris Charmatz and Jérôme Bel, among others, and was honoured with the SACD Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Award (Belgium, 2013) and shortlisted for the Prix Maeterlinck de la Critique (Belgium, 2019), among other distinctions.

Lola Hinojosa is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Performing Arts and Intermedia Collection.