Mapa Teatro

Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf Abderhalden are Colombian artists whose father immigrated to Colombia from Switzerland. They founded Mapa Teatro in 1984 in Paris after having completed their training at the Jacques Lecoq Theater School, the Laboratory of Movement Studies, and Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux’s Theater Training Workshop.

The company has developed its work within the realm of the Living Arts, a propitious field for the transgression of disciplinary boundaries, the fusion of languages and readings, and the articulation of local and global issues. Mapa Teatro has created a space of migrations, where myth, history and current reality continuously shift. It is a space for the movement and interaction of different genres (theater, opera, radiophonic works, video-sound installations, urban interventions, and plastic actions); authors and epochs (Aeschylus, Müller, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane); geographies and languages (La noche-nuit in French and Spanish, Muelle Oeste in Russian, Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes in Tamil, De Mortibus in English, French, and Spanish); the word, the image and movement (Psicosis 4:48); the real and the virtual (La limpieza de los Establos de Augías); and the stage of the real and representation (Proyecto Prometeo, Testigo de las Ruinas).

Hence their interest in translating dramatic writings into Spanish (Shakespeare, Beckett, Koltès, Müller), in scenically transposing classical works and myths into the contemporary world (Horatio, Orestea ex Machina, Ricardo III, Prometheus), and in transposing text into image and sound (La limpieza de los establos de Augías, Prometeo, Flauta Mágica, Psicosis 4:48).

In the last few years, Mapa Teatro has emphasized the collective dimension of creation and meaning-making. Through “laboratories of the social imaginary,” Mapa Teatro has generated processes of artistic experimentation that unfold simultaneously in the realms of the real and the symbolic, creating temporary, experimental communities by inviting diverse groups of people to come together and constitute themselves as a collective subject.

In 2000, after years of traversing different theater stages and unconventional spaces, Mapa Teatro began to develop its aesthetic propositions in a house in downtown Bogotá. This non-conventional space, conceived as a laboratory for artists, is an autonomous, self-managing space; in addition to serving as the site where Mapa Teatro’s own projects are developed and performed, it hosts performances and artistic projects by other artists as well as artistic residencies.