We sometimes forget that dance answers society’s need for order and communality—that’s where Andrea Peña works. A rigorous, precise choice of body movements in a space that is as much a protagonist as the performer, with each item on stage being given meaning. “Things have a life of their own… all you need to do is to wake up their soul” said gypsy Melquíades to José Arcadio Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Andrea Peña is a young Colombian-Canadian choreographer. She worked with prestigious Ballet BC and Ballet Jazz of Montreal, is an Industrial Design graduate, and in 2014, founded her own multi-disciplinary company AP&A (Andrea Peña & Artists). Peña won the Dance Biennale’s international open call with her project and upcoming show Bogotà which will premiere on July 13 to 15 at the Arsenale in Venice.

You rightly stated that technology has always been used in dance and in the arts. I remember in 1980 the stir caused by Stelarc in his performance art; all managers already in those years were studying body language and Watzlawick. What is there that is really new that technology can offer the dance world today?
I personally see technology not as a medium that offers solely aesthetic possibilities, but as an intelligence, and this is where I find room for play and investigation within my practice. I think of the term technê, which has its philosophical root in craft, practice, as founded in the form of knowledge; as a form of “knowing-how”. Technê here denotes a type of intelligence, a technique, technology in the “how” we know, and it’s this fluid and hybrid definition that guides my relationship to technology, to reframe not the technological apparatus, but rather the “knowing-how” of a technology, (its intelligence). I’m thus curious to use technology within dance as a way of revealing the intelligence inside of a system or a thing.
Recognizing that technology is predominantly opaque in our society, how through dance/art do we use technology as a way to demask its opaque veil, and reveal the possibilities and internal complexities of an apparatus or technological system. In a way, de-masking technology to get away from smooth beauty. Smooth beauty is the artificial deceit of beauty that we are consumed by in our contemporary society, and which keeps us dormant in the possibility of our engagement with complexity. I think technology can offer dance new ways of thinking rather than new ways of representing or decorating.

Your research Performing Digital Intimacies has us very interested. Can you tell us how the project unfolded and how you have used this research in your work?
This work is really one of those precious moments that was revealed through the constraints of the pandemic. I was invited by the PHI center in collaboration with Shared Studios to develop a project in inflatable digital portals, located across 24 cities in the world, focused on Montreal, Berlin, Ede and Mexico City. These portals for me were digital opportunities for connection through the body. In a time when many choreographers were working on translating choreographic works on film, I was curious to use this digital streaming technology as a tool for bodily and human encounters.
I was curious about creating intimacy in a time where physical intimacy, new encounters and human connection were diminished. The New York Times released an article 36 Questions that Lead to Love, that would guide you and another person closer to each other. With the use of technology and code, I set up a system that would auto generate a selection from the thirty-six questions to one of the two participants, each in a city, and ask them to answer the question either verbally or through movement to the stranger on the other side of the screen. These were full body screens inside small inflatables that would stream a full view image and the sound of the other person across the globe. Answering these intimate questions both verbally and physically, guided by the commands of an external algorithmic voice, allowed two strangers to get to know each other in a context of digital-play. It was a physical and emotional connection between AP&A artists in Montreal and strangers across these three cities. People were extremely moved through the thirty-minute experience, they played, laughed, cried and danced together revealing pockets of their own intimacy to someone across the world.  This research for me has been pivotal in the experimentation with choreographic systems, in this case guided by an algorithm, that give agency and space to the individual interpretation. It is my way of using technology as an intelligence that makes space for human connection, in this case, rather than an aesthetic.

Smooth beauty is the artificial deceit of beauty that we are consumed by in our contemporary society, and which keeps us dormant in the possibility of our engagement with complexity.

In your admonition to “Returning, individually and collectively, to our essence as humans” a turning point seems implicit: have we really ever been human in a positive, or has violence always been inherent in humankind? The artist choreographer, the performance creator, dance in general how can they intervene and contribute to this return?
As humans we are built from polarities and it’s these polarities that allow us to understand the depths and resonance of each, however we forget to continuously return to the vast range within these polarities as that which makes us human. Constantly wrapped in artifice, we forget our vulnerability, humility, fragility, resilience, purity and insecurities as the complex core elements that define human. For me that’s where the choreographic practice holds potential to reveal that which makes us humans. Artists who bring themselves to a work, allow an audience to witness them as vessels of their own and a larger human fragility and vulnerability. The choreographic practice then is about carving practices of time, space and movement to allow for the sacred and profane of humanness to co-exist within the individual and collective of the performers as much as the community that is created with each public who witnesses and share the experience of the work.
I am fascinated with the term pluriverse, by philosopher Felix Guattari, who offers pluriversality as a departure from our desire to construct a uni-verse towards an understanding of coexistence through plurality. Where uni-verse denotes a singular goal towards commonality, pluriverse denotes the capacity for plural or multiple universes to co-exist. It’s here where I find choreography has room to shift, where the role of the choreographer has room to be challenged and questioned. Where works have the space to engage with making space for complexity rather than singularity. Where a piece can be seen as a vessel for the pluriverse experience that contains a harmony of multiplicity through difference within the interpreters themselves.
In my works we attempt to investigate not emotions but rather sentiments, as the attitudes towards emotions, places where we can contain not a singular emotion like melancholy, joy, desire but rather the physical and lived states of these emotions as visceral layered experiences that contain multiple emotions at once. A pluriversal state of sentiments and perspectives shared through the varied perspectives of each interpreter.

In addition to being a dancer and choreographer you are also an industrial designer. How can dance and design mutually benefit from this fusion?
I’ve started to consider myself as a movement designer. In trying to encapsulate what I do, I realized that the hybrid and merge of choreography and design is at the axis of the ways AP&A makes work. For many years I was negotiating these two practices in trying to understand how they could have a conversion, and it was through my Masters of Design, that I began to carve a written practice to understand the relationship of both, and like you suggest how they mutually benefit.
Choreography greatly benefits from this immersion within design, as it no longer becomes (for me) about a choreographic ideal as in clear delineation in the body within a choreography that can be replicable but rather I see myself as a choreographer or I would add designer of movement frameworks that guide an interpreter towards their choreographic expression. Design offered me the ability to see systems rather than the fixed form, interrelations rather than representation, and process as an iterative laboratory with tools to think of the work across various mediums and brainstorming platforms. Design has allowed my choreographic practice to be a practice of facilitating the harmony between all the mediums.
On the other hand, I think design has the most to learn from choreography. My masters studies the choreographic gestures that are imposed on our bodies through the built environments we inhabit. It is looking at the industrial designer, as a choreographer, that does not directly choreograph onto the body but does so through the choreographic parameters embedded in the form, function and utility of an object. I think here design has much to learn from the history of embodied and somatic practices, that have been studying not only the body’s relationship to time and space, but to the singular expression of a body through an organization of movement. Here is where design has fallen short, we have forgotten to observe, question and address how a design might alter and limit the expressibility of the body.

Born in Colombia and transplanted to Canada, you are a bi-cultural artist. In your opinion, does it still make sense today in the dance world to talk about cultural identity or has the latter been engulfed by multiculturalism?
As we find ourselves in postcolonial times, a space that has been carved to revisit history in order to engage with the imaginary of new futures, I think we are also shifting the ideal of culture and finding new ways to anchor within it. Within postcolonial arts practices I’m very interested in the futuring practices that artists from marginalized cultures engage with as forms of re-imagining their personal and ancestral past in order to create new futures, practices such as Indigenous Futurism, Afrofuturism, Chicanafuturism… and more. Practices that warp time and space between the ancestral and the future, as was of making sense within our current epoch. I believe if we commit to a humble engagement with multiplicities of cultures, we stretch our capacity to engage with complexity. As a bi-cultural artist with indigenous Colombian heritage, situated in Canada and working overseas, I’m humbled and inspired by the notion of hybridity. How can hybridity make space for everything that is in between? Hybridity as a new form of human, as we all carry complex lineages, as mutations that create new hybrids.
Within dance and the performing arts, there is a vast spectrum of work within “the cultural” of identity. I think it’s our role to learn to continuously engage with this spectrum as ways of blending the conversations between the center and the periphery. There are still cultures who lie in the periphery, and those who lie in the center. How can we blend, merge and challenge these divides in order to dissolve the polarity between the periphery and the center? These are themes we work on a lot with the artists of AP&A. How to make the periphery the center? How to de-center the center? We aim to engage with hybridity as a place that makes room for possibility to explore the role of culture within a work and its physical and material manifestations. Many, many questions… I’ve always figured: “more questions than answers!”

Magical realism became for us a tool to explore the futuring of the ancestral within the post-industrial and post-human epoch of now.

Bogotà. The show with which you won the international call for a new choreography evokes the Marquez-style Magic Realism of your homeland, Colombia. How did it come about and what does this creation, which director McGregor calls “radical and innovative”?
Bogotà is a work inspired by Colombia’s complex history, but one that takes this history and situates it in universal sentiments of today. Bringing for the first time to a creation of AP&A’s my cultural heritage as the source, it has been a gift to return and revisit the ancestral knowledge of my people, and question what is its place and representation in our contemporary society today. Magical realism became for us a tool to explore the futuring of the ancestral within the post-industrial and post-human epoch of now. We are playing with spirituality, imagery, tales, traditions as practices and ideas to create and develop new universes that reflect alternative, critical and more vulnerable versions of our own? Magical realism in the work of BOGOTÁ, takes shape across the barren industrial scenography on stage (scaffolds, industrial bags, piles of lamps and speakers); in the costumes and styling of the artists (each inspired by merging mythical Colombian tales and creatures with contemporary subcultures); and interwoven into the choreographic systems and symbolism held within the performers bodies (ie. mermaids, queer baroque, pre-Columbian figures, political statements). All interrogated from a queer-ing perspective, through queer bodies. The work is not performed or created by Colombian artists, but rather Canadian-Lebanese, African-American, French, First Nations, Asian, Russian,  artists who bring their rich histories and unique singularities as a meeting place within the ideas of the work. Through this work they humbly offer themselves as vessels that make space for the healing of Colombian peoples and the expression of Colombian ancestral forms of today.