Orestea ex machina

Based on Aeschylus' Oresteia, Mapa Teatro's 'Orestea Ex Machina' presents a world where gods don't come down to earth to solve humanity's conflicts and contradictions. Their divine absence, the empty space left by them, is the ground from where this rendition questions Aeschylus' piece and where Mapa Teatro installs a symbolic machinery of death, vengeance and justice - machinery already envisioned by the Tragic poets - in order to tell humanity, across time and space, about the dynamics of life and history. 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