Dance Workshops at the National Polytechnic Institute (ca. 1968-1988)

Abstract

This article focuses on the dance workshops that were established at the National Polytechnic Institute (Instituto Politécnico Nacional, IPN) after the student movement of 1968. In order to study them, the following questions are raised: What were the artistic workshops at the IPN and how did they function? What importance have they given to dance? What dance programs have been implemented during the period covered by this study? To understand the purpose and functioning of the workshops, it was necessary to refer to Antonio Santoni's notion of workshop and to work with two types of sources, documentary and testimonial; the former were obtained from the IPN's historical archive and the testimonial, thanks to the interviews granted to the author by seven dance teachers of the Institution. In order to explain the findings, this section is divided into three sections: in the first, the background and processes that allowed the emergence of the workshops are analyzed; in the second, the autor reviews the processes and progress of the dance workshops during the period 1969-1979; and in the last section, the focus is set on the emergence of the coordinations and the dance programs that were created.