Graciela Martinez

Leone Sonino

"Danza Actual" is an unpublished investigation promoted by the Museo Moderno on a series of experimentations that have not been historically recognized. The proposal explores modern dance from a double approach: the expansion of limits through interdisciplinary research and female liberation, by the emancipation of bodies that took place in those years.

During the first half of the twentieth century, modern dance spread and consolidated in different training spaces in Argentina and occupied a scenic place that enabled its aesthetic renewal. In the sixties, dance assumed a more experimental position through its presence at the Di Tella Institute and other stages in the city of Buenos Aires.

With a renewed approach and a focus on the experimentation of Argentine dance, the exhibition unfolds as a "missing chapter in the history of art and the history of dance," according to Lemus on this "story rarely told in museums and art institutions." Modern dance is thus consolidated as a crossroads between the Argentine avant-garde and resistance to conservatism.

The exhibition brings together Argentine artists from different disciplines who have had a relevant participation in modern dance. Among them, photographers specialized in dance such as Alicia Sanguinetti, Eduardo Newark, Leone Sonnino, and Susana Thénon. It also includes videos by Ignacio Masllorens, Julia Parodi, and Silvina Szperling.

In addition, the proposal focuses on fundamental experiences for dance as a practice of rupture and freedom aligned with the construction of a regional seal of its own. Groups, choreographers, and dancers, who marked that modern dance, from the group Danza Actual (1962), the Dance Laboratory of Susana Zimmerman, the Center for Audiovisual Experimentation of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires, the Theater of the Alliance Française and the Friends of Dance Association, to end the historical journey with the creation of the Ballet of the San Martín Theater in 1968, a milestone in the institutionality of modern and contemporary dance.

"Danza Actual" is part of the annual program "El arte, ese río interminable" (Art, that endless river) which, together with two other exhibitions, aims to visualize the under identity of the 80s and 90s, key decades for the history of Argentine art.