Muelle oeste = West pier = Quai ouest

In 2001, Rolf Abderhalden of Mapa Teatro was invited by the French Academie Experimentale des Theatres and Anatoli Vassiliev to stage Bernard Marie Koltès' 'Quai Ouest' with Russian actors in the framework of the World Olympics of Theater celebrated in Moscow. The following year, he staged another version in Bogotá. 'Muelle Oeste' tells the story of a random meeting of eight dispossessed people in a warehouse on a pier in a major Western port city (Koltès was inspired by a visit to New York City). Each one of the characters in this underworld is, in their own eyes, subjected to the trading of their needs and desires, holding on to the tatters of their civilized ways. In this production, the architectonic richness of the Teatro Colón in Bogotá provides the conditions of possibility to represent, spatially, each of the eight points of views at play in 'Muelle Oeste' - eight worldviews from eight characters who, uprooted from their homelands, their communities and their ways of life, will negotiate with whatever they got left in order to fulfill their unavoidable fate. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

One of the foremost artistic companies in Colombia, Mapa Teatro (www.mapateatro.org) has been producing theater, performance and art installation projects since 1984. Founders and directors, Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden have created a wide ranging repertoire of theater, opera, mixed-media performance, and site-specific installation. Their work proposes richly textured visual metaphors in which they consider often complex psychological, social and political relationships. Committed to experimentation, and less interested in the actor as an 'agent of fiction, ' they describe their project as 'a laboratory of social imagination, ' that offers a space for presenting community issues and human concerns in media and performance. This combination of real-life situations and sites along with highly stylized aesthetic staging produces a tension between real action and (re)presentation. Mapa Teatro draws from live events captured on video such as the demolition of a neighborhood in Bogotá, ritual practice, and texts that explore the relationship of postmodern subjects, myth and metaphor. Mapa Teatro has performed by commissions, festivals and collaborative projects world-wide. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics