We have planned our first international outreach project as part of our collaboration with La Caldera Les Corts, enabling figures from the world of contemporary dance to visit Catalonia and putting on a programme of events so as to bring these international names together with Catalan creators whether in the context of training, exhibitions, master classes, communication or laboratories. It is within this framework that from 28th October to 15th November this coming autumn, L’animal and La Caldera are inviting the distinguished US movement researcher and creator Lisa Nelson to be their guest.

Since both organisations were interested in the legendary US choreographer Lisa Nelson, they held discussions with a view to inviting her to spend a week at L’animal a l’esquena with creators connected to this arts centre in Celrà and regular members of the company Mal Pelo. Later some of these artists and other international guests invited by Lisa held a week-long creation laboratory at La Caldera, the results of which will be presented as part of the Corpografías programme. To complete this immersion in her world, Lisa will share her working methodology Tuning Scores as part of the Sporá Prógram season.

Laboratory at L’animal a l’esquena
28th October to 2nd November
Lisa Nelson is one of the figures who have most inspired L’animal a l’esquena. Since 2002 she has come regularly to L’animal with various projects of her own. This time she will be here to work with a group of people with whom she has a long shared history, having worked together in many different situations and in different sets of people, all closely related to the creative nucleus of Mal Pelo. Lisa will come to share her tools for work and reflection in a context where the focus is on the imagery and practice of Mal Pelo.
La Caldera activities:
Corpografías Laboratory. Observatory at the cusp of space.
From 4 to 9 November at La Caldera Les Corts.
It will be a materialization of a multi-disciplinary and multicultural collaboration of improvisational dance artistsarmed with the communication tools of the Tuning score. The tools expose how each dancer/performer senses and makes sense of movement, provoking a dance of consequences, a theater of opinion, revealing the fleeting confluence of attentions and intentions that illuminate the body’s circumstance in this moment of urgency on the planet.

Sporá Program Workshops. Tuning Scores Laboratory: composition, communication, and the sense of imagination.
From 11 to 15 November at La Caldera Les Corts.
The Tuning Scores began with the question: what are we looking at when we look at dance? They have evolved into an aesthetic game that offers communication tools to players to engage in real-time editing and instant playback within a shared image space. Drawing on automatic and learned patterns of survival, the scores makes apparent how each player/observer senses and makes sense of movement, from inside and out. By exposing the multi-sensorial dialogue that underlies choice-making, the practice provides a perspective on fundamental elements of presence, (dance/movement) behavior, observation, imagination, desire, memory, and communication.


Lisa Nelson has maintained a decades-long artistic conversation with Maria Munoz and Pep Ramis of Mal Pelo. She has received special encouragements from a NY Bessie Award in 1987 and an Alpert Award in the Arts in 2002. She is currently creating a real-time video editing program and 3D graphic computer game based on Tuning Scores with Contredanse Editions in Brussels to be released in May 2020. Since 1976, Nelson has co-edited and published the dancer-written Contact Quarterly dance and improvisation journal, documenting emerging concepts and practices over 44 years, that has become a singular archive of movement experience and exploration. She lives in Vermont.
Lisa Nelson, choreographer, improvisational performer, videographer, and collaborative artist, has been excavating the dialogue of the senses in the performance and observation of movement for decades. What is it to look at dance? To watch? To see? Shooting and editing video throughout the 1970s exposed the profound role the sense of vision plays in the act of dancing and became a model for her approach to real-time editing, communication, and dance performance she calls Tuning Scores—tools for reimagining the illusion of a stable world.