Expositions

Exposition collective

Caroline Monnet, Pidwike

Danses interdites

Echoing Rossy de Palma’s career and commitments, the exhibition brings together works by artists that bear witness to forbidden dances or acts of emancipation, through images, movement, bodies, or words. Installations and screenings are complemented by performances at the festival’s opening.

This program is intended to resonate throughout 2026, in Paris (MansA) and Barcelona (Loop Barcelona Festival). Le Nouveau Printemps marks the first installment.

Rossy de Palma arrived in Madrid in the 1980s. The city was emerging from a long dictatorship, and the young woman discovered the liberating power of music and cinema.

Under Franco’s regime, several dances were devalued, censored, or banned. They were perceived as immoral, foreign, or subversive, associated with other cultures—foreign or non-Catholic—or with local and regional identities threatening national unity.

In France as well, regional dances were sidelined in favor of national unity. As early as the Revolution, in 1793, the Farandole was banned in Provence. The clergy banned the Bourré in the regions of the Massif Central, in Auvergne, in Limousin, but also in Brittany, where they were concerned about “fest noz” and went so far as to ban the Round in public squares in the Pagan region (northern Finistère). Clandestine dances were then organized, representing cultural resistance to state or religious oppression.

Every era, every region of the world seems to have been caught up in this logic: dance is a cultural expression. It constitutes the essence of individuality and collective power. As such, it embodies a threat or the possibility of resistance to power, whether national or colonial. In doing so, dance is also one of the resources of folklore: a culture massified for the sake of a single narrative, an ideology, or an economy. A pure expression of freedom or a tool of domination, the ambivalence is complex.

The body of work gathered here is infused with a feminist and queer perspective. From Salome to Scheherazade to the tragic events in Iran, female figures who dance under the male gaze—and all that it represents in terms of domination—haunt mythology right through to contemporary works. The artists’ gestures emerge as narrative strategies through which individuals and groups reclaim control over their own stories. These are thus images or scenes that seek to rebalance the disparities within the relational structures between the self and the norm, or the subject and history. Following the principle of “forbidden dances,” which, by manifesting themselves, reveal the prohibition itself, the dual motif of movement and its impediment, of constraint and freedom, emerges. In limbo, the body oscillates between its embodiment and its disappearance. The joy of moving and existing on one’s own terms emerges.

Far from being exhaustive and open to contributions, the program aims to be cross-disciplinary and transregional. A tribute to the forces of the Spanish Movida of the 1980s, the films and performances celebrate dances and gestures for their effervescence and free expression, envisioning the formation of an international movement of claims by beings and multiple identities.

The group exhibition Forbidden Dances can be seen at several venues: José Cabanis Media Library, Garage Bonnefoy, Bonnefoy Cultural Center, Les Herbes Folles, IPN Artists’ Studio.

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Additional screening sessions:
- Double Takes: Danses Interdites, a program curated by Filipa Ramos, writer and curator, artistic director of Loop Barcelona, in partnership with Loop Barcelona and with the support of KADIST.

- Let’s Dance!, a program presented by Pascale Cassagnau,curator and collection manager, with the support of the National Center for Visual Arts.

An exhibition initiated and produced by Le Nouveau Printemps, in co-production with the National Center for Visual Arts and La Place de la Danse – National Choreographic Development Center Toulouse Occitanie, and in collaboration with MansA – Maison des Mondes Africains, Loop Barcelona, and Kadist.

Dates