RICARDO FRAYHA
producer

Long before the “post-conflict” rhetoric took over the agenda of artistic creation, Mapa Teatro had already undertaken a rigorous reflection on the unfinished Anatomy of violence in Colombia. Outside the clichés that the policies of reconciliation in the art field carry with them, Mapa Teatro’s latest production (2010-2015) is, without a doubt, the most refined and powerful piece in their thirty years of artistic trajectory. In three consecutive spaces, articulated to create a triptych, the piece draws a chilling allegory of the devices used by the perpetrators of violence in Colombia since the second half of the twentieth century. In each of these spaces, a singular party is staged, each one revealing the fragile threshold between celebration and violence that has spanned the history of our country. The dramaturgy in The Unaccounted: a triptych is a true montage, in a cinematographic sense. It overlaps stories of powerful dramatic force with archives and audio-visual narratives of immense poetic power. Greatly experienced actors and musicians, live electronics and live music complete this theatrical experience that moved audiences during the XIV Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro. The uncounted: a triptych, was commissioned as an installation for the 31st Biennial of Sao Paulo, where it received the highest praise from the public and critics. "Without a doubt, the most impressive work at the Biennial of Sao Paulo," according to Portuguese curator Joao Fernandes, from the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.  Three celebrations. The first one, The Holy Innocent (2010), is celebrated on the streets of a small town in the Pacific coast of Colombia, where masked men dressed as women, go out to the streets to whip those who are not cross-dressed and masked. A celebration that transforms an afro-descendant ritual into a delirious dance. The second one, Discourse of a decent man (2012), takes place in the garden of a house amidst the Colombian tropics, perhaps in the middle of the jungle itself, where the ghost of the most infamous of drug dealers, accompanied by his diva, listens deliriously to the music interpreted by the man who in real life led one of his favourite bands.  The third one, The unaccounted (2014), in the privacy of a family’s living room, a group of children, a magician and a singer, gather around the radio waiting to hear the announcement of a revolution and a party that will never happen. 

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MAPA TEATRO

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Mapa Teatro is an Artists laboratory dedicated to trans-disciplinary creation. Based in Bogota since 1986, Mapa Teatro was founded in Paris in 1984 by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, theatre and visual artists from Colombia. Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a cartography within the milieu of the Live Arts, a propitious space for transgressing - geographic, linguistic, artistic – boundaries, and for staging local and global issues through various “thought-montage” operations. A space of migration, were myth, history and topicality exist continuously; intimate and public spheres; artistic languages (theatre, opera, cabaret, radio, sound and video installations, urban interventions, actions and performatic conferences); authors and epochs (Aeschylus, Müller, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Antonio Rodriguez, Händl Klaus); geographies and languages (La Noche/Nuit in French and Spanish; West Dock in Russian, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings in Tamil; De Mortibus in English, Spanish and French; voice, image and movement (4:48 Psychosis, Simply Complicated); memory and city (Project Prometheus, The Cleaning of Augias Stables, Witness to the Ruins, Cartographies in Motion); voice, music and live electronics (Simply Complicated, Love Story, The Magic Flute, Orpheus) simulation and reality (Exxxtrañas Amazonas, Trans/positions); document and fiction, poetics and politics (Horatio, The Holy Innocents, Discourse of a Decent Man and The Unaccounted: a Triptych). Hence Mapa Teatro’s interest in the creative processes and events “in vivo”; in the translation and transposition of writings and scenic scores; and in the operation of putting together documentation, archives and fictions. In recent years, Mapa Teatro has focussed particularly on the production of poetic-political events through the construction of ethno-fictions and the ephemeral creation of experimental communities, Mapa Teatro generates processes of artistic investigation and research, which are developed in diverse spheres and scenarios of a Colombian reality. They are laboratories of social imagination.

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THE UNACCOUNTED: A TRIPTYCH

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Direction: Heidi e Rolf Abderhalden | Performed by: Heidi Abderhalden, Agnes Brekke, Julián Díaz, Jeihhco, Danilo Jiménez, Santiago Nemirowski, Lesley Ramírez, Melanie Ramírez, Sofía Rodríguez, Mariana Saavedra, Darío Sinisterra, Sebastián Zúñiga, Juan David Castaño Vargas | Dramaturgy: Mapa Teatro | Dramaturgy adviser: Antonio Orlando Rodríguez, Darío Villamizar, Marta Ruiz | Music and sound design: Juan Ernesto Díaz | Set design: Pierre Henri Magnin | Light design: Jean François Dubois | Video editing: Luis Antonio Delgado | Live video: Ximena Vargas | Technical director: Jean François Dubois | Stage manager: José Ignacio Rincón | Production: Mapa Teatro, José Ignacio Rincón, Ximena Vargas | Production assistance de produção: Sandra Martínez | Coproduced by: Iberescena, Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, prod.art.br
 

Production in Brazil: Performas Produções Artísticas and prod.art.br | Production directions: Andrea Caruso Saturnino and Ricardo Muniz Fernandes | Production coordinator: Ricardo Frayha | Executive production: Carol Bucek | Technical direction: Julio Cesarini | Sound technician: Everton Gomes | Video technician: Rodolfo Paganelli | Light technician: Grissel Piguillem Maganelli

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Realisation: Sesc São Paulo

FIT Festival Internacional de Teatro de São José do Rio Preto

São José do Rio Preto, SP, Brazil

13 to 15/07/2017

Sesc Pinheiros

São Paulo, SP, Brazil

20/07 to 23/08/2017