Spain On Stage: Dance and the Imagination of National Identity

This project aims to propose new narratives of Spanish dance history analysing the components, processes, and contexts involved in the configuration of the dancing body through its negotiations with national identity at the turn of the 20th century.

It will recuperate, study, and reconstruct a corpus of choreographies and dances conserved in footage and film fragments between 1894 and 1936, the period between the crisis of the colonial system and the military coup that caused the Civil War and the following four decades of dictatorship.

The study will articulate new theoretical tools to rethink the place of Spanish dance between the colonising and the colonized, understanding the body as a living archive through intersectional and transcultural perspectives.

A research team from CSIC will apply a ground-breaking interdisciplinary methodology based on three main areas: archive-based research; practice-in-research and movement analysis; and dance motion capture and 3D animation.

Thus it will provide a theoretical and practical understanding of the evolution of the languages, codes, and gestures in order to integrate that reading into a revised history of Spanish dance.

The versatile results will include an open-access dance motion capture database and the basis for a Virtual Spanish Dance Museum through an immersive Virtual Reality platform, serving future research projects, dance companies, educational institutions, and the general public.

Finally, the results will contribute to enjoying these recovered treasures of European intangible heritage and preserving them for the knowledge of future generations.