Bogotá

Auditorio de Tenerife has included the show Bogotá, by the company Andrea Peña & Artists, in its Mapas programme.

Bogotá is a work inspired by Bogotá, but is not about Bogotá per se. This new universe fashioned by AP&A is steeped in the political, historic and cultural nuances of artistic director Andrea Peña’s Colombian heritage and manifested as a post-Andean Baroque, performative event.

Featuring 9 performers, the work is a contemplation on death and resurrection, moving beyond a traditional or linear definition of death, focusing instead on spiritual, corporal, societal and cultural transformations ever present in the landscape of Bogotá City (The Lady of the shining mountain).

Exposed within a dry and brutalist design universe, bodies and materials become political landscapes who undergo voluntary processes of transformation and rupture. Through evolving stages of rebirth and resurrection, this is a tribute to the resistance of people’s resurfacing within the post-colonial era.

With a theatrical vivacity that is typical of the baroque (gilt and grotesque), Bogotá queers death in a way that questions our post-human capacity, awareness and resilience. In this contemporary landscape, mutations of ancient mythology, magical realism, and baroque architecture mesh to create an alternative world where the queer body, Colombian political heritage and the post-industrial, post-colonial worlds come together, channeled through a raw, aesthetic and physical experience of design and brutality. Visceral, transgressive and magnetic Bogotá is a chaos and resurrection you want to taste.

The piece premiered at the Venice Dance Biennale in July 2023.