RICARDO FRAYHA
producer

Every year, on the 28th December, the party of The Holy Innocents takes place in EN GUAPI: men wearing grotesque masks, dressed up in women’s clothing and accessories, a whip in their hand, run up and down the streets whipping whoever gets in their way. Men, women and teenagers - mostly Afro descendants - and a couple of white tourists, try to either escape or avoid the whippings, but strangely, many of them throw themselves on the floor to be whipped. This is a party, a celebration, but for those who have never been here before, it could very well seem something else: a punishment? A collective catharsis? A nightmare? A paramilitary massacre? Based on this real event, its documenting and fictionalisation, Mapa Teatro creates a bizarre and delirious theatrical and cinematographic staging that escapes all theatrical categories. The spectator is witness to a party, which juxtaposes reality and fiction, confuses times and places, puts victims and victimisers head to head, contradicts stories and testimonies, unmasking the theatricality of the armed actors in Colombia. The Holy Innocents is the first part of Mapa’s triptych: Anatomy of violence in Colombia.

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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 HOLY INNOCENTS

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Dramaturgy and direction: Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden | Dramaturgy adviser: Matthias Pees, Martha Ruiz | Performed by: Heidi Abderhalden, Agnes Brekke, Andrés Castañeda, Julián Díaz, Jose Ignacio Rincón, Santiago Sepúlveda, Claudia Torres, Ximena Vargas | Marimba and live voices: Genaro Torres, Dioselino Rodríguez | Sound design, original music and live electronics: Juan Ernesto Díaz | Visual design: Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden | Costume: Elizabeth Abderhalden | Set and prop design: Rolf Abderhalden, Pierre Henri Magnin | Set technical director: Jose Ignacio Rincón | Lighting design: Arno Truschinki, Jean François Dubois | Video image: Lucas Maldonado, Heidi Abderhalden | Sound recording assistant: Alejandro Valencia | Editing: Luis Antonio Delgado, Santiago Sepúlveda | Live video: Ximena Vargas | Stage manager: Santiago Sepúlveda | Production: Ximena Vargas, José Ignacio Rincón

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Production in Brazil: prod.art.br | Production directors: Matthias Pees, Ricardo Muniz Fernandes | Executive producers: Jussara Rahal, Ricardo Frayha | Technical direction: Julio Cesarini

Realisation: Sesc São Paulo

Sesc Pompeia

São Paulo, SP,  Brazil

01 and 03/05/2011