Carmela Muñoz (Granada, 1988) and Esther Solé Alarcón (Mollerussa, 1984)
@carmelamunoz - @esolealarcon
Dancers, researchers, creators and educators exploring the overlap between dance, flamenco and the performing arts. Our artistic and performative practice unites memory, archives, history, politics, emotion and desire. We strive to imagine new possibilities and ways of seeing the world.
Our paths crossed in the classrooms of Barcelona's Institut del Teatre, where we both trained at the Conservatori Superior de Dansa. This academic and institutional setting brought us together as teacher and student, but now we are two like-minded friends who share an interest in a dance practice that moves and excites us.
Both of us come from similar backgrounds in different worlds that find common ground. We moved away from the hegemony of Spanish dance and urban dance, which, respectively, shaped our growth. For years, we have been dancers and performers, working for others in various contexts and on different occasions, but we have also created our own pieces, which always focus on evocative references to bodies and absent figures. Our commitment to collaborative research led us to collaborate on the project promoting “Carmela Invocaciones Boleras o la danza de las Desposeídas” as part of the Barcelona Crea 2024 grant, while in residence at Graner. As part of the flamenco-based research laboratory project led by Juan Carlos Lérida, we both worked on the project. Both the words and the practice of writing move us equally, and we collaborate by publishing our texts in “Segunda Papel Editora”.
Lately, we have been “dancing like crazy until our souls burst”, exposing our innermost selves, where questions arise and the invisible becomes tangible. Our rehearsals are filled with passion; we cross stages and train our bodies, minds and spirits with rigour and love until we reach the place that calls us to action: a ritual of invocation.
EN RESIDÈNCIA offers an opportunity to continue exploring and transforming these research-based relationships that permeate us from a situated pedagogical context, and gives us the chance to share these transmissions that concern us within a stable framework, throughout an academic year, and teach them to a group of secondary school students. This time, we want to think about, surround ourselves with and wander through our alliance around the transmission (or trans-mission) of dance, with our gaze fixed on the body as a vessel and void of materials, experiences, memories and imaginaries. We challenge the limits within which the pedagogical-artistic-performative act develops: “shaking up of knowledge”. We like to practise the “in between”, trying to occupy the spaces of friction and collision where shared knowledge and common experience flourish.
Information updated as of September 2025