Andrea Peña and Artists in Bogotá: densely layered but stimulating

Making their UK debut, Andrea Peña and Artists opened this year’s Dance Umbrella Festival with a performance that in broad brushstokes describes identity. The performance is densely layered and makes for a confronting but stimulating evening of contemporary dance. Artistic Director of Dance Umbrella Freddie Opoku-Addaie says his ambition for this year’s Festival is to examine the accepted canon of western choreography, which Peña certainly does with enquiring verve in how Bogotá, the title of the 80-minute piece, defies categorisation.

Part of what is thrilling about dance is seeing how the body moves in response to rhythm and melody, usually contained within the code of one dance genre, or instead contrasting different movement cultures. Bogotá strips the body of any artifice; the dancers moving in ways that I found challenged my preconceptions and made me feel uncomfortable, which wasn’t a bad thing here. 

Peña’s offering could be characterised by three modes for the body. The first establishes a sort of legato line throughout the piece in its sinuous windings from one dancer’s joints out and around another body, contrasting with much more confrontational movements that infect one performer, and then another. The way this physical hostility builds is intriguing, exactly as darker emotions churn below the surface in our psyche, then spill forth at moments beyond our control. 

At one point our focus becomes a portable scaffold tower. Its slow progress down one diagonal of the stage, only to return, and then back again, is a sort of pendulum, outlining a rhythm for the action to unravel, showing movement enhancing sound. The sound composition by Debbie Doe and Rodolfo Rueda was satisfying for its constant sense of renewal; new landscapes drift out of each other imperceptibly but deliver a potent hit at times of physical drama.

The last way Peña shows the body is the most striking. Departing from any centrifugal harmony prescribed by classicism, the body was remade before our eyes. My first thoughts went to a video being rewound and spliced back together. In other moments, the cast of nine dancers were like cells dividing through some sort of poetic binary fission, and presented as radical collections of muscle and bone. They were laid bare for us to reimagine how one joint interacts with the whole system. It’s a fitting concept for a piece that asks political and anthropological questions about how we become what we are, what our ancestral stories do to us, and how we transcend these. The tone is definitely not elegiac, it is instead rigorously industrial, and arresting for its directness.

It’s difficult to single out any one performer because the entire cast’s uniformity of endeavour is admirable. Physically intelligent and powerfully aware of focus, these dancers guide us through complex emotions. One memorable image is of two women tied together by a climbing harness, at first supporting one another in what feels like an alien intimate exchange, progressing to a Sisyphean ‘pull and pull’ match, trying to rid themselves of their partner. 

Matched in its drama by another episode where a dancer attacks a piñata, we detect interactions with Peña’s South American heritage. I admire the way Peña plays with theatrical convention when the choreographer entered the auditorium to walk on stage and clean the floor with the Colombian flag. Peña explained in a post-performance talk that this gesture was her reckoning with ideas of what it is to be a woman from South America amidst the machine that is western urban development. She went on to say the idea of her being chief orchestrator of the piece is a label she rejects – the cast had a direct contribution to this dance.

Thanks in part to Hugo Dalphond’s lighting design, I was struck at the feeling of volume about the space within the auditorium at Sadler’s Wells East for Bogotá. Beginning with a raised curtain, the stage has a cavernous feeling that contributes to the atmosphere of excavation, plumping of heritage and examination of what really lies beneath our more presentable top-layers. 

A dancer, appearing nearly nude, slowly writhed in an unnervingly slow resolution atop another scaffold whilst the audience took their seats. We were voyeurs. Further dancers filtered-in like an entire ecosystem was being illuminated for us to observe. Peña’s background as an industrial designer directly informs the piece. A space in flux, we don’t quite know if it’s in the midst of complete destruction, or in the process of being born. Bogotá is infused with this question of transformation, from death to birth (and not the other way around). This is dance working on several layers, deconstructing ideas and asking what is it we want to see moving forward? Who will we be?