Ciudad Bailar. Exagerar was a fully programme of public activities conceived by Massimiliano Casu in Matadero Madrid during eight months (November 2020 — July 2021), and which treated the dance as an catalytic element of other realities, other bodies and other identities.
Throughout that time there were dance workshops, laboratories and performances that allowed both the swing of ideas and the celebration. Along with this, a series of round tables, interviews and dialogues were also held in the Intermediae warehouse. Some of those talks were the ground of Radio Ciudad Bailar [Dancing City Radio], based on eight podcasts that tried to continue spreading out the proposals revealed there and which were produced by Rubén Coll and me.
We took the NPR Planet Money podcast program as inspiration and, because of the confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a peculiar working method was developed. It gathers three layers of speech: our contextualizing voices — recorded with a large-diaphragm condenser microphone —, the voices of the speakers introducing themselves — recorded with a small-diaphragm supercardioid condenser microphone — and the voices collected during the talks — recorded with dynamic voice microphones —. Then, voices had three different levels of fidelity: from the highest — Rubén’s voice and mine — to the lowest, due to the documentation of those times
A plentiful archive, a good mix — full of the artist’s presentations, the contextualization with the voice and the music — which became a kind of relief during those days of uncertainty and that can be heard in its entity in the Ivoox created on purpose.
Here one of the episodes, Krump vs Twerk: