Los Incontados: un tríptico – Holland Festival

Guerrilla groups, paramilitary groups and drug cartels - the conflict between these groups has disrupted daily life of Colombian citizens since 1964. In Los Incontados: un tríptico (a condensed version of the Anatomía de la violencia trilogy) the Colombian theatre company Mapa Teatro explores the fragile boundary between celebrations and violence. In three parts, including an old Afro-Colombian ritual and a farewell to the longest-lasting revolutionary dream of Latin America, the civil war is viewed from different sides. For the past thirty years Mapa Teatro has created a unique universe in which it has reinvented genres and art forms, and in which myths and history, opera, theatre, cabaret, radio and video have been merged. Los Incontados presents one of South America's most renowned theatre companies at its best. download the programme book

A colourful and sometimes exuberant group of people throngs the stage in Los Incontados: un tríptico, a show full of masked partygoers, a magician, musicians and children. Even Pablo Escobar

makes an appearance. In this surreal triptych, the Colombian theatre company Mapa Teatro examines the link between celebration and violence, traits so inextricably bound to Colombian history and culture. Mapa Teatro, one of the most renowned theatre companies of Latin America, makes use of audio-visual archive materials, stories and documents to create a colourful, theatrical and freely-associative portrait of Colombia, which for more than fifty years was in the grip of an armed conflict between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the Colombian army and drug dealers.

The Unaccounted: a triptych is the condensed version of the trilogy Anatomy of violence in Colombia, which the company has been working on since 2010. In The Holy Innocents, the first section, the Los Santos Inocentes festival is central to the performance. This festival is celebrated each year on the 28th of December in Guapí, a small town on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Grotesquely masked men, wielding whips and dressed as women, go out into the streets to punish all those not dressed like them. It is a frenzied and violent festival, liable to give unwitting outsiders the impression that they have strayed into a nightmare.

On the 2nd of December 1993 the drugs baron Pablo Emilio Escobar was shot and killed by a Colombian police unit. A speech he had written for the day he hoped to be elected president of Columbia was supposedly found on his body. 18 years after his death the CIA has declassified this text, according to the second part of the trilogy, Discurso de un hombre decente (2012), which takes this document as its starting point. In Discourse of a decent man, the ghost of the notorious drug baron haunts the garden of a house in the middle of the jungle, listening to music by his favourite band. On stage the music is actually played by the man who once was the leader of one of Escobar’s favourite bands. He has not only accompanied ‘the boss’ during his weekly speeches in the working-class neighbourhoods of Medellín, but also played at Escobar’s private parties in the luxurious Hacienda Nápoles and was injured in a car bomb attack on the stadium where the band was about to perform.

In the last piece, The Unaccounted (2014), a group of children has gathered round an old-fashioned radio. This is the image that opens the show: in the privacy of a sixty-year-old living room, decorated with balloons, children are waiting for a revolution to be announced, a party that will never happen. In Los Incontados: un tríptico, Mapa Teatro uses an almost cinematic montage technique, while the set design places the different worlds one behind the other, floating between fantasy and reality. The images, increasingly cascading through each other, summon up the history of a country where the finest of lines separates a celebration from an outbreak of violence, and where there is hardly any difference on the stage between the sounds of party poppers and machine guns.

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concept, dramaturgy and direction Heidi Abderhalden, Rolf Abderhalden dramaturgical consultant Antonio Orlando Rodriguez, Marta Ruiz, Dario Villamizar direction assistant Santiago Sepúlveda performed by Heidi Abderhalden, Agnes Brekke, Andrés Castañeda, Julián Díaz, Jeihhco, Danilo Jiménez, Santiago Nemirowski, Santiago Sepúlveda voice Nicolás Cancino with the Carmenza de Sánchez Institute Martial Band as special guests Felipe Castro, Orlando Duque, Kevin Hernández, Sebastián Méndez, Lesly Ramírez, Melanie Ramírez, Sofía Rodríguez, Mariana Saavedra, Darío Sinisterra, Sebastián Zúñiga music and sound design Juan Ernesto Díaz sound technician Alexander Rodríguez, Vladimir Sepúlveda, Juan Sebastián Guarín visual design Heidi Abderhalden, Rolf Abderhalden costumes Elizabeth Abderhalden technique Jean François Dubois, Jose Ignacio Rincón technical assistance Juan Sebastián Suárez, Natalia Duarte assemblage assistance Ancízar Aguirre, José Forero, Alirio García set design Pierre Henri Magnin, Escuela Taller de Bogotá lighting design Jean François Dubois video editing Luis Antonio Delgado live video Ximena Vargas, Natalia Duarte production José Ignacio Rincón, Ximena Vargas production assistance Sandra Martinez thanks to Consuelo Avella, Alejandro Valencia, Claudia Torres, Adriana Urrea, Juan Andrés Valderrama, Instituto Carmenza de Sánchez, Diego Briceño, Jaime Calle

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This performance is made possible by

Otemba - Daring Women

ROHTKO