Lara Brown

Madrid, ES
Multidisciplinary Residency Program | November 2025
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About the work 

Walking around, getting to know the area. Walking as a way to train myself to wander around attentively, listening to how the environment might hold some answers or questions related to my practice or what I’m thinking about, in this case, the biography of the dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia and the meaning of a dance that no longer exists and was never recorded.

I am inspired by one of Carmen Tórtola Valencia’s practices, which consisted of dancing outside the stage, as a kind of happening. On the beach, on the deck of a boat, in a church in the middle of the countryside, and I understand the ADDK environment as a place/opportunity to dance and move when it crosses the senses, without the need to announce it, without the need for anyone to be watching for the dance to happen. At the same time, I also carry out my movement practice inside the Centro Negra, where the rock crosses the space and acts as a wall, using these spaces as a place to gather through dance what I have studied and experienced during the day.

I approach Carmen Tórtola Valencia’s Serpent dance through a movement practice that appears there, which is declared infinite and unpredictable, and I approach one of the hypotheses I propose at the beginning of this research, which states that Tórtola’s dance is made up of organic movement, rather than choreographed movement. I transfer the dance to writing and drawing. I study and take advantage of the silence and temporality to which I have become unaccustomed due to living in an urban environment, in order to study, to read all the readings, papers, articles, and short stories that I had pending in relation to this research.

I organize the information, like a map, and begin a possible formulation for one of the parts of this work, which is the graphic support, imagining a comic book in which to present both the characters/people who participate in the biography of Carmen Tórtola Valencia and the social context in which she lived, and to reflect through it on the idea of the dance archive.

In collaboration with Acción Cultural Española.