Without Your Body the World Stops

Dance Workshops Between the Museum and the Neighbourhood

November 2020 – February 2021
Place
Sabatini Building, Workshops and Mbolo Moy Dole, c/ Dos Hermanas, 14 (Lavapiés), Madrid
Registration method:

Deadline ended

Aimed at:

Migrant women, feminists and domestic workers

Times:

Museo Reina Sofía: Saturdays, from 5pm to 7pm

Mbolo Moy Dole: Sundays, from 11am to 1pm

Coordinated by:

Territorio Doméstico

Organised by:

Museo Situado

Force line:

Action and Radical Imagination

Participants in one of the workshops, 2020. Photograph: Arancha Ríos Perdomo
Participants in one of the workshops, 2020. Photograph: Arancha Ríos Perdomo

Museo Reina Sofía and the cooperative Mbolo Moy Dole organise two weekly dance and theatre workshops conducted by teacher Deisy Mesías García, whereby female domestic workers approach movement in a way that expands beyond its functional value and work.    

It aims to move and decontract the body, working with it as a plastic, expressive and communicative element, producing a reencounter with creativity and with the pleasure and enjoyment of dance. The disciplines employed — contemporary and Afro-contemporary dance, Latin rhythms and theatre — grant the necessary tools to make struggles and denouncements materialise via a coordinated shaking of bodies, connecting the women involved not just with themselves but also with other participants as they support one another in the collective empowerment of their lives. In parallel, the musical rhythms selected connect these women to their places of origin, to family, to their backgrounds, helping them to share experiences and biographical trajectories.    

The workshop is coordinated by Territorio Doméstico, a collective that forms a space of encounter, care and the struggles of predominantly migrant women’s struggles, seeking recognition for their diminished rights as domestic workers and searching for the visibility of care work. The collective’s slogan “Without Women the World Stops” bears a direct relation to the title of the activity, in this instance granting a central position to the body and the experiences and marks recognised within it. The workshop’s teacher Deisy Mesías García has spent the past three years working with the collective, using disciplines from her training: corporality, movement and creativity.   

Deisy Mesías García is a professor of Performing Arts specialised in contemporary dance in the ASAB Arts Department at the Francisco José de Caldas District University in Bogotá. She has lived in Madrid since 2011, studying an MA and carrying out PhD studies in Performing Arts at Rey Juan Carlos University. Furthermore, she works as a choreographer and dancer with different theatre and dance companies in Madrid and Bogotá, complementing her work with research and teaching and running classes at different universities and schools. She also focuses her activities on carrying out social projects with vulnerable people, developing a methodology of corporeal reconciliation.


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