Image: Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires
Malba, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, will open its galleries to a four-night dance program titled 'Cuerpos en expansión', bringing contemporary, hip hop, Afro and classical movement into the spaces of the Colección Malba–Costantini. The cycle runs on Mondays, August 3, 10, 24 and 31, from 8 to 9 p.m. on Level 1, with two performances in each session and four performers total.
The program is presented within 'Latinoamérica en Expansión', and the museum says the dancers will intervene the collection display through movement. The performances are organized around eleven curatorial nodes that trace Latin American modernism, ranging from the avant-gardes and social commitment to surrealism and constructivisms. Each dancer is assigned two rooms and responds physically to the works in those galleries, turning the collection into a live performance environment rather than a static display.
For the first two dates, August 3 and 10, Florencia Vecino will appear with a contemporary dance intervention in the galleries 'Relieve espacial' and 'Composición serial'. According to the museum’s program note, her work engages with the perceptual shifts suggested by Madí art and kinetic abstraction, where unstable boundaries complicate the contour of the work, the certainty of space and the fixity of the object. Around works by Carmelo Arden Quin, Martín Blaszko, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Juan Melé, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Hélio Oiticica, the performance is framed as an added uncertainty rather than an illustration of movement already present in the paintings.
Also on August 3 and 10, Tuto Style will present a hip hop-based response in 'Escena callejera' and 'Manifestación'. The museum links his approach to the relationship between body and image as parallel ways of representing movement, time and transformation. The selection of works named in the program includes Joaquín Torres García, Rafael Barradas, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Diego Rivera and Emilio Pettoruti, alongside cubism and vibracionism as points of reference. In the room containing Antonio Berni’s 'Manifestación', together with works by Yllanes, Portinari and Ouvrad, the program positions dance as a language of resistance and physical assertion.
The final two evenings, August 24 and 31, feature Lorena Colmenares in Afro dance and Mora Capasso in classical dance. Colmenares will perform in 'Fuerza centrípeta' and 'Abaporu', starting from an association between cumbia as a rhythmic backbone of Latin America and painting as a form of resistance that survives changing social conditions. The museum notes references to Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Victor Brecheret and Yllanes, and describes her intervention as a proposal that keeps dance alive across contexts. Colmenares, born in Venezuela, has lived and worked in Buenos Aires for ten years and has specialized in Afro-based dances since 2011, with a focus on dancehall and social dance rhythms.
Capasso’s classical-dance performance will move between 'Lo imposible' and 'Autorretrato'. In the first room, the museum says she will work from Leonora Carrington’s 'La Grande Dame' and Maria Martins’s 'O Impossivel' to explore the boundary between the possible and the impossible, and between memory, imagination and desire. In 'Autorretrato', she will take Antonio Berni’s 'La mujer del sweater rojo' as the basis for an inquiry into identity as something constantly transforming. Malba describes the activity as ticketed, with prior registration required, limited capacity and a cost of $20,000, with no discounts available.
