At PuSh Festival, Andrea Peña's BOGOTÁ redefines dance
The Colombian-born, Montreal-based choreographer takes a radical approach to movement
BOGOTÁ. Photo by Felixe Godbout Delavaud
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and New Works present BOGOTÁ on January 31 and February 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse
AS A MILLENNIAL dance artist with a background in industrial and fashion design, Colombian-born, Montreal-based choreographer Andrea Peña is determined to put a new spin on the art form she specializes in.
“It’s strange, I’m less drawn to dance than I am to creating a universe and it just so happens that my medium is the body,” Peña says in a video interview with Stir. “There has been a lot of incubation with the artists about our current practices, how we are trying to challenge or redefine what choreography is today. How is the new generation—we’re all in our 30s—rethinking what choreography means today and tomorrow? Dance has been my language my whole life, but I see our works more as performative events or performative universes.”
Vancouver audiences will have a chance to witness how Andrea Peña & Artists (AP&A) is shaking things up on the stage when the company brings BOGOTÁ to the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Peña moved to Vancouver from the Colombian capital when she was 13, training with the Pro Arte Centre. She lived in San Francisco and apprenticed with Ballet BC before heading east for a job with Ballets Jazz Montréal. She describes BOGOTÁ as taking a radical approach to dance. For instance, the ensemble work features a three-storey-high piece of scaffolding and another that’s one-storey-high that the nine dancers manipulate and move upon.
“I really wanted to understand the intersection of design and the body, and I wanted to push the idea of design beyond lighting design and set design to how objects and the body merge,” Peña says. “So we’re not just seeing steps and rhythms, we’re seeing bodies climbing in baroque shapes and pushing it; we see bodies running up and down the scaffolding. I’m trying to bring choreography into a conversation with objects and design.”
There’s another section in which two women wear harnesses attached to each other by the waist. “It’s all about weight,” Peña explains. “They’re dragging and pushing and pulling each other through their pelvic weight; it’s a dynamic effort, not traditional dance language. Those sections are sort of the way the work is trying to propose different perspectives on choreography where the body and design really intertwine with each other.” (Peña will be working with Ballet BC to incorporate the technique.)
Andrea Peña. Photo by Bobby Brown
With the dancers actively involved in the work’s dramaturgy, BOGOTÁ features Peña’s raw, highly physical movement. Thematically, it draws upon Colombian history and culture.
“I was really curious about the notion of rebirth, about death and transformation,” Peña says. “There’s a whole history of transformation, rebirth, in my own culture coming from Colombia looking at the genocide and colonization that happened to my ancestors. We’ve had civil war, so this is a culture and a country that has been faced with those notions of death and rebirth. I was looking at these questions through my ancestry and asking, ‘How can this work be a universe that makes space for post-colonial imaginaries?’”
Colombian mythology comes through as well, with one section featuring a dancer batting at a black piñata during the playing of the country’s national anthem.
“It has to do with magic realism in our literature,” Peña notes. “The dancer starts hitting it with effort and physicality but again this is a fragile object that I had for many years at my birthday parties. It hints at the complexities of the innocence of a child and how we regained our country from Spanish colonization. This object speaks of celebration and joy. All these axes are intertwined in the work.” 
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