Andrea Peña & Artists: Bogota – Sadler’s Wells East, London

Choreographer: Andrea Peña

Making their UK debut with Bogota, Andrea Peña and Artists deliver a masterclass in storytelling dance. Performed by nine naked dancers with outstanding athletic and technical dance skills, Bogota is an amalgamation of indigenous Colombia and the company’s futuristic imagination of a queer, postcolonial modernity.

Musing on ancestry and ancient mythology, Peña, now living in Canada, reverts to her original land of Bogota City. Contrasting death and rebirth, colonisation and freedom, oppression and queerness, the future and the past, duality is central to Peña’s work, reflecting her own duality between her two homes. Bogota is an exploration of diaspora, paying homage to the complex histories of those who came before us and celebrating the hybridity that evolves from life’s continuous transitions.

A prerecorded speech opens the performance and sets this narrative,  helping to land Bogota’s profoundness to the sold-out auditorium. After this short monologue, the breathtaking physicality of the performers takes over. The company execute Peña’s hybrid vision effortlessly, navigating the tightrope between beauty and the bizarre with athletically bold, yet exquisitely detailed movements.

The company leans into Latin America’s baroque movement, subverted as a form of artistic resistance to European influence. They capitalise on vigorous, emotional movement that is classically Baroque but, staying true to Peña’s hybrid intentions, incorporates circle motifs and rhythmic hips that allude to traditional Colombian dance.

The skeletal set and the performer’s nudity emphasise the grotesqueness of Baroque. This makes for an intensely vulnerable production befitting the company’s explorations of Colombian human ecology moulded by histories of labour. Bogota’s agricultural and industrial systems are mimicked through repeated systems of movement, a decision that rejects Western dance norms. With every muscle manipulation and probing bone highlighted by the highly technical movements, the artists cannot hide, and the audience cannot look away.

Although Peña provides some guidance through the opening monologue, the opportunity for individual interpretation of the performance is not lost. For example, the dancers are not entirely naked, and the use of costume, with layers compounding over the 90 minutes, is thought-provoking. Even with a post-show talk, the beauty of such minimal words used in dance performance beckons the audience’s interpretive imagination.

Brought to the UK to open Dance Umbrella, a month-long festival celebrating dance from across the globe, Bogota situates Andrea Peña and Artists as a trailblazing company of risk-taking creatives, fluent in dance choreography and with a futuristic theatrical vision that should not be missed.

Runs until 3 October 2025