As an essential archetype of Culture, Dance draws its sap from the immediate social, cultural, economic and political environment that sustains it and also from everything that happens in the world. It is not in vain that the planet is identified with the liquid concept of “global village”.

In this sense, the relationship of Dance with the territory, near or far, concrete or symbolic, is structurally imperishable. They nourish and feed each other openly and permanently. The territory constitutes the breath and the stimulus of Dance. Even the smallest detail that happens, crosses or permeates in one way or another a continent, country, city, neighborhood or house generates the tension that will be immediately incorporated into the creative imaginary and transformed into artistic gesture.

However, land use planning influences the shaping of creative paradigms. From it derives the possibility of having different sensibilities and attitudes. A territory imagined from proactive democratic principles, which assumes education and culture as the organic basis of a responsible society, creates and forms free and solidary citizens who assume and admit the complexity of the vast world that begins in their neighborhood. This is not what happens precisely in those territories conceived as allies of systems that aim to reduce the singularity of individuals and communities.

There is no doubt that urban planning can be the expression of democratic thinking, but it can also translate more coercive tendencies. And, of course, its action and influence on the territory marks the lines of both, orients and defines them.

Dance as a cultural expression is not alien either to the participatory imaginary or to architecture and urban planning. Nor is it capable of avoiding the impact of adverse environments. In its syncretism, the two opposing concepts cohabit. Consequently, it can intervene in the construction of that architecture and urbanism of coexistence, integration and inclusion. Dance, therefore, injects its good sap in the conception of an open territory that we all desire, to create a responsible citizenship with the values of a city, founded on the development of creative, analytical, solidary and respectful people with the environment and its diversity.

El Arbi El Harti

Director María Pagés Foundation