Andrea Peña & Artists 

Dear spectators,

It is with great pleasure that we join forces – l'Agora de la danse and Danse Danse – to present this evening of audacity and singularity. Based on a friendship and collaboration lasting over 30 years – we are both founding members of Danse Danse –our partnership is rooted in a shared passion for creations that challenge, move and leave their mark.

Tonight, we are honored to present BOGOTÁ, an extraordinary work by Andrea Peña, a true rarity in today's choreographic landscape. Andrea Peña is a Canadian-Colombian artist renowned for her unique approach to movement. With a background in industrial design, she creates scenic worlds where textures, lights and bodies interact with fascinating depth. In BOGOTÁ, she magnifies the singularity of her performers, working closely with them to reveal their strengths and particularities. This is what makes the show so striking.

To see an artist like Andrea Peña fully embrace the freedom to create without compromise is inspiring, and we feel privileged to share this visceral and spellbinding artistic experience with you.

Enjoy the show!

Francine Bernier — Artistic Director and Co-Executive Director, Agora de la danse.
Pierre Des Marais — Artistic and Executive Director, Danse Danse.

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Territorial Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’keha:ka Nation. We honour the continued presence of Indigenous peoples on the Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) territory, which has long served as a meeting place for exchanges between nations. With respect for the links to the past, present and future, we thank the Indigenous peoples for reminding us of the importance of living in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with nature, and we are grateful for the opportunity to present works of living art at Tiohtiá:ke.

We humbly invite you into our complex and multi-layered universe where long time collaborators of Andrea Pena & Artists (AP&A), and above all profoundly special human beings, courageously confront and undergo inner transformations of their own internal archetypes.

As we find ourselves in postcolonial times, a space that has been carved to revisit history in order to engage with the imaginary of new futures, I think we are also shifting the ideal of culture and finding new ways to anchor within it. This work serves as a form of re-imagining our personal and ancestral past in order to create new futures. Practices that warp time and space between the ancestral and the future, as was of making sense within our current epoch. I believe if we commit to a humble engagement with multiplicities of cultures, we stretch our capacity to engage with complexity.

As a Colombian immigrant it is an honor to share with you this work so close to my heritage and my land; incarnated by non-Colombian artists who commit their vulnerable humanity as an offering to the resilience and emancipation of many communities within our post-colonial era. Bringing for the first time to a creation of AP&A’s my cultural heritage as the source, it has been a gift to return and revisit the ancestral knowledge of my people, and question what is its place and representation in our contemporary society today. With this work we are playing with spirituality, imagery, tales, traditions as practices and ideas to gather and invite new universes that reflect alternative, critical and more vulnerable versions of our own.

The work is created by a community of Lebanese, African-American, French, Italian, First Nations, Asian Diasporic, Acadian, artists who bring their rich histories and unique singularities as a meeting place within the ideas of the work. Through this work they humbly offer themselves as vessels that make space for the healing and the expression of Colombian ancestral forms of today.

BOGOTÁ, in its pluriversality, hopes to resurrect universal sentiments that touch on our capacity to be altered, to be forever changed by transformative mutations of ourselves. We offer a space for the sacred and the profane to co-exist through the pain and celebration of what it means to be human. We invite you to surrender into this complex ecosystem, as a co-participant in the journey of the present and a journey to reimagine the future.

Andrea Peña - Choreographer, designer and artistic director, Andrea Peña & Artists.

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.

This powerful work employs movement as a vehicle for storytelling, embarking on an esoteric journey through a universe charged with magic realism. It uncovers passageways to transcendence, honoring the rebellion of deviant bodies and paying tribute to resilience within the post-colonial era.

BOGOTÁ

Artistic Direction Andrea Peña.

Choreography Andrea Peña in collaboration with the artists.

Interpreters Nicholas Bellefleur, Charlie Prince, Jo Laïny Trozzo-Mounet, Marco Curci, Jontae McCrory, Erin O’loughlin, Francois Richard, Frédérique Rodier, Chi Long.

Lighting Design Hugo Dalphond.

Sound Composition Debbie Doe.

Dramaturgy Angelique Willkie.

Artistic Advisor Helen Simard.

Costumes Jonathan Saucier and Polina Boltova.

Scenography Jonathan Saucier and Andrea Peña.

Technical Director Vladimir Cara.

Sound Technician Eric Huyn.

Visuals Bobby Leon, Felix Godbout Delavaud, Antoine Ryan / Kevin Calero, Andrea Peña.

Graphic Design Rico Rica.

Producer Isabella Salas.

Stage Manager Valery Drapeau.

Tour Manager Isaïe Richard.

Co-producers Agora De la Danse, Danse Danse, International Festival of Contemporary Dance: La Biennale di Venezia.

Development agent Menno Plukker Theatre Agent, Inc, assisted by Magdalena Marszalek and Isaïe Richard.

Andrea Peña has received the support from International Festival of Contemporary Dance: La Biennale di Venezia, Agora De la Danse, Conseil des arts du Canada, Conseil Des Arts et Lettres du Québec, Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Danse Danse, Maison de la Culture Notre Dame de Grace, Concordia University.