Coordenadas Fest proposes a new way of conceiving the performance space and rethinking the relationship between dance, architecture and heritage. It is an event for exploring languages of movement while enjoying dance in unique spaces. This is the second year of this collaboration with Casa Árabe, which is considered to be one of these special spaces within Madrid’s architectural landscape. Casa Árabe, formerly known as the Aguirre Schools, was declared a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) on February 18, 2025, under the category of a “ Monument.”This declaration acknowledges the building’s unique nature as a historical heritage building, granting it a special level of protection. 

On Thursday, October 16, Casa Árabe is hosting a performance titled El mundo atrás (“The World Behind,” lasting  25 minutes) by Rolando Salamé. It is a dance and physical theater piece about an exodus, not of a people, but of human beings. It explores the inner and outer journey of the displaced: what they take with them and the burden of both what is left behind and remains. The story is told by bodies in transit, in flight, or in freefall, if there is any end at all; souls straddling two worlds, one dying and the other struggling to be born. They are beings who rise time and again to follow back down an uncertain path, embodying the triumph of hope over fear, of humanity over its own brutality.

 



Photo: For your artist’s hypersensitivity 4€/kg (Artsimages. Jean-Pierre Dullier)

One day later, on October 17 at 7:00 p.m. comes the showing of For Your Artist’s Hypersensitivity, 4€/KG (lasting  25 minutes) by Romane Piffaut Dos Santos. For Your Artist’s Hypersensitivity - 4 Euros per Kilo is a solo choreography that uses tears a starting point, in a gesture that is both intimate and public. The work questions how our emotions, when made visible to others, are observed, judged and filtered by social, economic, media-based and gender-related conditioning. Inspired by Portuguese traditions of collective mourning (including what are known as “weeping women” along with fado music), the piece explores how pain can be transformed into shared expression and a political tool. At the same time, it denounces the cultural and gender-based stigmas which label certain emotions as “being too much,” as in the case of the so-called “Mediterranean syndrome,” a description which delegitimizes the feelings experienced by racialized and female bodies on both shores of the sea known as Mare Nostrum. By subverting this normative viewpoint, performance art turns crying into a form of strength and resistance: tears cease to be seen as a sign of weakness and become a mark left behind, a memory and a vital affirmation.