Last January, Madrid City Council hired dancer and choreographer María Pagés to direct the new Matadero Dance Nave. The winner of the 2002 National Dance Prize and the 2022 Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts was chosen by the council to lead the largest cultural project in years; and most importantly its cultural delegate, Marta Rivera de la Cruz. Ten months after the appointment, officials presented the Center this Thursday, during an event during which the press was not able to ask questions.
Although the presentation made no mention of the budget, salaries or allocation – which was direct – of the Center, elDiario.es accessed the figures through the public sector procurement platform. The price of the artistic direction, made up of María Pagés and her partner, the playwright El Arbi El Harti as deputy director, is 150,000 euros per year excluding taxes, to which is added a maximum of 15,000 euros for costs. The contract is for a period of two years, renewable for two additional years.
According to El Periódico de España, the distribution of each person’s remuneration is 85,000 euros per year for Pagés and 65,000 euros for El Harti. These figures exceed those granted to the management of other public projects such as the National Drama Center (the annual salary of its director, Alfredo Sanzol, is 94,728 euros) and the National Classical Theater Company (79,586 euros).
The Matadero Dance Center has 38 active people, 20 newly hired and 18 staff from Madrid Destino, the management company for the city hall’s cultural spaces. To develop the space in Nave 11 and Nave 16, work worth 2,164,000 euros was undertaken, which now covers an area of 3,000 square meters. 1,200 of them correspond to the exhibition hall, and a maximum capacity of 449 seats with the usual distribution, with the possibility of extending up to 634 seats if the side stands are deployed.
Space for all dances and international vocation
María Pagés defined the center as “everyone’s home” and thanked the city’s mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, Marta Rivera de la Cruz – both present at the event – and the rest of the team of the city council for their commitment to the creation of the center “the house of dance for Madrid residents”. “With this, we place the city, the countryside and dance at the center of contemporaneity,” he defended. The dancer defined the programming as “hospitable, innovative, transversal and authentic”.
The director explained that there will be seven axes on which the activity of the Nave Matadero Center is based: national and international shows, artistic and technical residencies, co-production of shows, collaboration and artistic exchanges, training programs, space for reflection and awareness. , workshops and seminars. At the same time, he posited that one of his goals was to “make new audiences fall in love.”
The program is made up of 140 functions (108 from national companies and 32 from international companies and three from Spanish creators from around the world) developed by 5 companies (48 national, seven emerging and eight international). They will be responsible for representing the 66 shows performed by 600 artists. The Andalusian Flamenco Ballet will be the one who creates the center, with the work Pine forestdirected by Patricia Guerrero. Others will follow like Stolen Dances and Fandango! By David Coria; Matarife Paradise by Ana Morales and Andrés Marín, Loop by the Aracaladanza company directed by Enrique Cabrera and Deaffrom the Jone San Martín company.
“We encourage plurality, we promote alliances between artists and institutions, we offer spaces for training and reflection, we promote emerging talents and welcome established ones, we make all choreographies and languages available to artists,” described the manager, who concluded. his speech with the message: “Let’s dance on the world”.
Martínez-Almeida, for his part, said that the goal of the Center was “to encompass all dances, an approach to the world of dance without leaving anyone behind.” “We also want to be a window on the world,” he stressed, aware that “culture is a brand of the city” and that it must be “in capital letters” with the “search for excellence as distinctive element.
