Dance Umbrella Launches Third Event In The 2025 Festival And Debut Partnership At Sadler's Wells East

Dance Umbrella, London's annual international contemporary dance festival, has announced the third event for the 2025 festival. BOGOTÁ, inspired by Colombia's political and spiritual heritage, will make its UK debut at Sadler's Wells East on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 October 2025.

Opening the festival this year, BOGOTÁ is choreographed by Andrea Peña & Artists including Nicholas Bellefleur, Charlie Prince, Jo Laïny Trozzo-Mounet, Marco Curci, Jontae McCrory, Erin O'loughlin, Francois Richard, Frédérique Rodier and Chi Long.   

Visceral, transgressive and magnetic, Andrea Peña & Artists' UK debut production BOGOTÁ constructs a brutalist landscape. With striking intensity, nine performers chronicle transformations between chaos and rebirth, incarnating the tensions of ever-unfolding and turbulent histories. Offering a raw, physical experience of mutation and ultimately resurrection, BOGOTÁ delves into inherited mythologies in order to consider how origins are embodied and mortality is expressed through the endless cycles of existence and death.  

This hybrid work employs the company's trademark use of movement as a vehicle for storytelling, embarking on an esoteric journey through a universe charged with magical realism. It uncovers passageways to transcendence, honouring the rebellion of deviant bodies and paying tribute to resilience within the post-colonial era. 

Co-produced by Agora De la Danse, Danse Danse, International Festival of Contemporary Dance: La Biennale di Venezia. 

For BOGOTÁ, the lighting designer is Hugo Dalphond; Sound Composition by Debbie Doe; Dramaturgy by Angelique Willkie; Costume by Jonathan Saucer and Polina Boltova with Scenography also by Jonathan Saucier and Andrea Peña. 

Andrea Peña, originally from Bogotá, Colombia, is a multidisciplinary artist working across art installation, choreography, and design. Since founding her practice in 2014, she has gained recognition in Canada and internationally for creating critical, alternative spaces that challenge perceptions of humanity. Her intricate, raw choreography has been presented worldwide, including in Hong Kong, Spain, India, and Canada. Peña has received numerous awards for her rigorous conceptual work, including the 2018 Banff Arts Centre's Clifford E. Lee Canadian Choreography Award and the 2018 Hong Kong International Choreography Award.

Andrea Peña & Artists is recognised for the creation of critical, alternative and spatial universes that rupture our notions of a sensible humanity. Interested in the depth of human individuality that breaches from a personal disposition as a bi-cultural artist, Peña's approach is known for its difficult choreography as a highly intricate, vulnerable and somatic raw physicality that engages in deep encounters between the physical body and a highly conceptual research approach. With a background in industrial design her work borrows from visual art practices and spatial qualities of creative making, questioning the body's material relationship to space and time.

Look out for further Dance Umbrella 2025 Festival announcements.