Compañía Nacional de Danza

We have already started with the workshops of our project CND Estudio Abierto! A unique experience offered by the National Dance Company composed by a cycle of workshops with our dancers, repeaters and teachers aimed at professionals and non-professionals of dance.

Erez Ilan, a shy but passionate ballet dancer, has been a part of the Compañía Nacional de Danza’a (CND) dance team since 2008; an opportunity extended to him by Nacho Duato, then CND director. Starting at a very young age, Ilan trained at The School of Ice Skating and Ballet and at The Thelma-Yellin High School of Arts, both in his native Israel. At 18, he took the leap and crossed the Mediterranean to explore Europe and to work at the CND. His dedication and talent paid off, earning him a place as soloist in 2017, a role he holds to this day, marking both a personal triumph for himself and the CND directorship’s validation of his work.

Álvaro Madrigal, Sevillian by birth, is a versatile dancer. He is not pigeonholed as a classical dancer or a contemporary dancer, which allows him to enjoy the entire repertoire of the National Dance Company. Álvaro respects classical dance a lot to define himself as a classical dancer and the same with respect to contemporary dance. He defines himself as an emotional dancer, someone who needs to feel something when he is dancing.

The Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) has been the first institution to join this CND project, which consists of the development of a series of choreographic creation workshops in which, for a week, different groups of dancers from the CND share their own creations with the university community through group dynamics and movement explorations. Two weeks later, dancers and university students begin to select materials to create their own dance piece that will be offered at the UC3M Auditorium. After the sample of the scenic work, the choreographic workshop concludes with a discussion in which the students participating in the project, the dancers and the university public talk and ask questions about the creative process, their concerns, what they experienced and felt and their way of understand dance after the experience. The first workshop began on Thursday, October 31 with the dancers Isaac Montllor and Nora Peinador accompanied by Ana Catalina Román and the second with the couple of CND dancers Cristina Casa and Ion Agirretxe started on Thursday, November 7. The CND at the University was born within the social project Somos CND, which has among its objectives to bring dance closer to different groups in society through training activities and artistic creation and research projects of an interdisciplinary nature. Any interested university can propose its collaborative project to the CND contacting with aida.perez@inaem.cultura.gob.es Video of the first workshop at the UC3M