A Gritty and Chaotic Retelling of Colombia’s History.
Kicking off the festivities of London’s Dance Umbrella Festival 2025 is a work from across the Atlantic. Bogotá, by Andrea Peña, promises to be a theatrical deep-dive into the storied chronicles of Colombia’s past, pre and post contact with the Europeans.
The work sits somewhere between a historical analysis of Latin American history and an FKA twigs concert — the scaffolding definitely has some streaks of eusexua. This industrial aesthetic is particularly arresting in the beginning of the work. The theatre is filled with the sounds of the forest and distant indigenous pipes, a thick mist blankets the trepidatious bodies of the semi-nude dancers, a recreation of the natural past in our metallic present. Before the dancing begins a voiceover from Peña recognises the ancestral lands that this work will transport us to, as well as calling on the spirits of the ancestors to guide us through the work — her grandfather is Indigenous Colombian. Land acknowledgments, which are largely not practiced in Europe, serve to centre the past and present voices of the colonised, immediately framing this work within that still ambiguous definition of the ‘post-colonial’.
The soundscape becomes increasingly futuristic, with electronic drones and bass lines buzzsawing through the serenity of the Amazonian birdsong. The dancers begin to undulate with a fleshy muscularity, they melt into clamboring duets and drag each other about the floor in their g-strings and jockstraps. There’s a conflict within the bodies of the dancers: alternating between a sinewy tension and a liberated release. The dancers become a moving frescoe of bodies as monastic chanting enters the mix, perhaps alluding to the first Christian missionaries to the ‘new world’. Their faces become etched with contorted grins and grimaces as they begin to laugh and wail.
There’s more full-bodied phrasing as the work continues, dancers sweat it out under glaring halogen spotlights, they square up with shadow boxing, and sprint laps of the space. This Bauschian interest in laborious movement and repetition can sometimes render the tension that Peña builds slack, especially within a runtime of 80 minutes. But there’s some really effective imagery in the work, particularly in one scene where a figure of Western machismo, dressed as a skimpy torero, smashes a piñata under the watch of a trembling Christ figure, leaving Peña herself to descend to the stage and wipe the papery rubble with a Colombian flag, her ode to the cleaning ladies earning their keep for their first-generation children. To some these images may seem on the nose, but the punkiness of Bogotá, as well as its proclivity for the ambiguous, keeps things compelling rather than blatant.
There is no doubt here that Andrea Peña has an eye for aesthetics with her hulking union of the architectural, the sonic, and the somatic. Like her compatriot forefathers there’s a touch of magical-realism within her style. Though not always gripping in its movement and transgression, Bogotá serves as a punchy mission statement from a choreographer who is happy to leave the audience with more questions than answers.