Activities will take place at the Auditorio de Tenerife from next Tuesday (June 30) through to 24 July.

The Auditorio de Tenerife presents MAPAS 2026, a programme with six large-format international dance productions, an outdoor performance, and the Tenerife International Dramaturgy Meeting, held on 30 June and 1 July. The details were announced by the Councillor for Cultural Affairs of the Tenerife Island Council, José Carlos Acha, and the Artistic Director of the Auditorio del Tenerife, José Luis Rivero.

José Carlos Acha noted that ‘we are shaping a new MAPAS, a cultural development project that, in this edition, will comprise a dramaturgy meeting and a programme of attractive titles, with companies and choreographers of recognised standing, staged in the Symphony Hall from 30 June to 24 July. With the aim of promoting access to culture, Auditorio is continuing its low-price policy, with a general admission price of 15 euros, 5 euros for under-30s, and full and partial passes also available for 75 euros and 39 euros respectively, the latter covering three of the six productions,’ the councillor explained.

José Luis Rivero described this new MAPAS as ‘a project reimagined after the pandemic and created to support the Canary Islands’ performing arts, combining dance with theatre through a dramaturgy meeting that will serve as a forum for thought within the sector. All of this creates an ecosystem inspired by other projects such as La Salita and converging in MAPAS,’ the artistic director explained. ‘In this edition, MAPAS brings together the largest showcase of world-level dance happening today, with major international companies, including Bogotá, which will have its Spanish premiere,’ Rivero added.

MAPAS opens with Bogotá by the Canadian company Andrea Peña & Artists, with performances on 30 June and 1 July at 7.30 p.m.  Premiered at the Venice Biennale, the piece delves into the political, historical and cultural layers of Bogotá’s Colombian heritage, the choreographer’s native city.  Performed by nine artists, it examines death and resurrection, blending ancient mythologies, magical realism and baroque architecture to create an alternative reality where the queer body, Colombia’s political history and post-industrial and post-colonial worlds meet in an intense aesthetic and physical experience. Visceral, transgressive and magnetic, Bogotá is pure chaos.

Ahead of the second performance of Bogotá, on Wednesday 1 July at 6 p.m., the outdoor space at the Auditorio de Tenerife will host Mover montañas by Alberto Velasco. Admission is free and subject to capacity. In 2024, the work received the Jury Award for best new show at the 25th International Festival of Theatre and Street Arts of Valladolid. In the same year, it was a finalist for best dance solo at the Critics’ Awards of Barcelona. In this solo, Velasco explores folklore and its endurance, advocating for the preservation of the sounds and movements that form part of our cultural tradition.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by Ex Machina, with design and direction by Robert Lepage and co-design, choreography and starring role by Guillaume Côté of the company Côté Danse, will be performed on Saturday, 4 July at 7.30 p.m. and Sunday, 5 July at 6 p.m. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark draws the audience into a world of illusion and appearance, where ghosts and humans live together in a minimalist stage design. Light, shadows and transparency are essential elements. This metaphorical reading of Shakespeare’s work proposes tracing the thin boundary between reality and absence through the labyrinths of the mind and the movement of the body.

The Symphony Hall welcomes La Quijá on 7 July, an original work by the Extremadura-born choreographer and dancer Paloma Muñoz. Inspired by a devastated, rugged, and dry landscape, and by the need to return to origins and to the body as the driver of creation, it seeks poetry in movement. This is an inward journey towards the very substance residing in our bones so that dance may emerge from the marrow. It returns to the collective body in search of a personal and shared encounter. A show within Cèl·lula, a project for the production, creation and transmission of dance within the structure of the performing-arts centre Mercat de les Flors.

The renowned Swedish company GöteborgsOperans Danskompani will present two shows: Hammer and the double bill ima and Wild Poetry. Created by acclaimed Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman, Hammer is daring, unpredictable, and original. It will be staged on Saturday, 11, at 7.30 p.m., and Sunday, 12, at 6 p.m. This striking large-scale dance piece, featuring some thirty dancers, reflects on modern egocentrism. Sold out around the world, the two-act production uses humour to examine today’s society and could encourage audiences to shed false façades and choose real life over the world of likes. It stands as the company’s biggest success.

The double bill will be performed in a single showing on 14 July at 7.30 p.m. The programme will open with ima, by Sharon Eyal, a choreographer whose works create a hypnotic dance language with a strong attitude and a pulsating, mesmerising energy. Eyal and GöteborgsOperans Danskompani are a match that has toured worldwide. Their previous collaboration, SAABA, premiered in 2021 and has since made guest appearances to great acclaim in London, Paris, Sydney, and Seoul. For ima, Eyal has again collaborated with Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s former chief designer, who created the costumes for SAABA.

Wild Poetry, with its 16 dancers onstage, is a work by choreographer Hofesh Shechter; it blurs the line between parody and sincerity. The dancers are in perpetual movement, sometimes as a phantasmagorical group and sometimes as individual stars, transforming the experience through new expressions, like a raging sea from which new images emerge. The UK-based Shechter company is renowned for composing atmospheric musical scores to complement the unique physicality of its dancers’ movements.

This edition of MAPAS comes to a close on 24 July with Bodies of Water, a choreography by Spain’s Iván Pérez for the German company Dance Theatre Heidelberg (DTH), which he leads as artistic director. Featuring ten international dancers, the performance explores the deep physical and emotional bond between humans and water. Through a choreographic journey of great sensorial intensity, Bodies of Water, which premiered in January, immerses itself in the transformative power of water and poses fundamental questions: What invisible connections give shape to our existence? How can bodies of water, for which the show is named, be used as sources of inspiration for movement and dance?

Auditorio de Tenerife offers two subscription options: the full pass for the six Symphony Hall performances, priced at 75 euros, and the partial pass, priced at 39 euros, which gives access to three performances selected by the user. Single tickets cost 15 euros, and tickets for under-30s are priced at 5 euros, with the usual discounts for students, unemployed people and large families, among others. Tickets can be purchased on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com, at the box office from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and by telephone on 902 317 327 during the same hours.

International Playwriting Symposium

Over two days, on 30 June and 1 July, the Tenerife International Playwriting Symposium will hold morning and afternoon sessions focused on four central themes in contemporary playwriting: the use of works and respect for authorship; exhibition formats; the value and promotion of playwriting from the Canary Islands; and the relationship between new trends in playwriting and the fundamental aspects of theatre.

The event proposes a range of activities to explore playwriting through formats such as talks and discussions, all led by different Canary Islands moderators, with the aim of fostering a space for encounter, conversation and critical reflection where everyone involved in the creation and dissemination of playwriting has a voice.

During those two days at the Auditorio de Tenerife, participants will include, among others, Alberto Conejero, Colectivo Magentea, the Association of Theatre Playwrights and Authors, Centro Dramático Galego, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Lucía Miranda, Irma Correa, Carolina África, Quino Falero, Leandro González, José Luis Rivero, Conchita Piña, Ana Fernández, Mario Vega and Luis O’Malley.

In addition, the symposium has programmed the seminar La autoficción: el desvanecimiento del yo (Self-Fiction: The Dissolution of the Self), coordinated, organised and directed by Sergio Blanco, whose subject is scenic self-fiction and its various forms of practice, including self-representation, autobiography, self-fashioning, self-narration, self-reference, self-embodiment and self-storytelling.

In this way, MAPAS enhances this season’s offerings of the Auditorio de Tenerife with a mechanism of contrast and continuity. It presents a concentration of international languages that engage in dialogue with the creation of territory. This approach strengthens our understanding of the ecosystem concept. It is not only about presenting international excellence but activating a framework for interpretation in which Canarian dance-and the accompanying processes over the year, including artist residencies may align in direct contact with some of the most relevant approaches of the contemporary scene: extreme physicality, expanded playwriting, hybridisation with theatre, and tradition reformulated as contemporaneity

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