A cast of 9 semi-nude dancers arrange themselves amidst an assortment of utilitarian props and structures: two are prostrate on the stage floor, another lies across a pile of bulky black speakers, while another hangs from a metal scaffold-like structure draped with green netting. From these positions, they begin to slowly writhe, morphing between positions that are at times contorted, vulnerable and sickly, at others sensual, strong and seductive.
This is the opening of Bogotá, one of two new works commissioned via callouts for the 2023 Venice Dance Biennale. Aiming to discover new talents from across the world, one commission goes to a choreographer based in Italy (its ‘home’ turf) and another to a choreographer from abroad (‘away’), offering them production budgets, travel expenses and a world premiere at Venice Biennale.
Created by Colombian, Montreal-based choreographer and former Ballet British Columbia dancer Andrea Peña, Bogotá is naturally the Biennale’s international commission. Its opening, in which the performers continuously fluctuate between contrasting states and emotions, acts like a statement of intent for the rest of the piece. At one point, the entire cast intertwines their limbs around the poles of a wheeled metal structure, laughing maniacally as one performer pushes it across the space. Shortly after, they disentangle themselves, falling onto the floor, from where they determinedly jump upwards as if trying to reach something, their forceful skyward motions immediately followed by helpless downward crashes. Scenes such as this speak to the complex and dissonant nature of the human condition – the duality of the power and vulnerability of the human body, and how the emotions of pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, strength and softness are two sides of the same coin. As Walt Whitman put it in his seminal 1855 poem Song of Myself, we all ‘contain multitudes’.
Bogotá itself also contains multitudes: while ‘the connection between opposites’ is the strongest, most universal theme to emerge, it also aims to address death, resurrection, and Colombia’s legacy of colonisation through Peña’s ‘queer, post-industrial and post-human lens’. At first, I worry I don’t have enough context to identify these references. This said, witnessing the cast’s almost imperceptible transition from nudity to wearing an odd assortment of sportswear makes me think of the Eurocentric notions of shame, ‘propriety’, and ‘civilisation’ that were imposed on indigenous communities around the world.
Later, one male dancer’s restrained and light-footed solo of leaps and delicate hand flourishes also reminds me of dance styles such as ballet or Baroque court dancing. Contrasting more uninhibited events that have come before it, and that still occur on the other side of the stage – concurrently an intertwined pile of dancers slide over each other’s sweat-soaked bodies, mouths open and expressive as they grab at each other’s arms, hips, and torsos – it is perhaps another reference to the historic imposition of European standards of art and beauty.
