Andrea Peña & Artists: Bogotá review – writhing, sweaty dancefloor revolt is exhausting

It’s as if you’ve turned up at the party when they’re all already too far gone. Dancers strewn across the stage, moving in sporadic tugs and jerks, or writhing flesh-to-flesh or just flat out on the floor, dressed only in nude-coloured pants and knee pads. Sweat and exhaustion is the mood.

This is Andrea Peña’s Bogotá. Peña, from Colombia and now based in Montreal, has a background in design but is now an award-winning choreographer. And hers is the opening show of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival, which is bringing new voices in dance to the UK.

Bogotá is inspired by mythology, spiritualism and magical realism. It’s about how bodies hold memory, grief and post-colonial identities – or that’s the blurb anyway. The setting is a kind of “no place”: some scaffolding, plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling, stuff you might find backstage. In the opening voiceover, Peña says something about building bonds and imagining new futures, but it’s difficult to bond when the mood is alienation. This is more like revolt than rebuilding, moving towards anarchy. At one point, the powerful dancer Frédérique Rodier stands atop a speaker stack giving the middle finger to the sound of an operatic chorus. It might be an “up yours” to colonialism (I’m guessing the struggle for Indigenous land and rights in Colombia is part of this, but we’re grasping in the dark really).

When they actually dance, in surprisingly organised sequences, the movement has raw energy, punch and power, and sensual stretch. There’s one point where they gather as a pack at the front of the stage, moving as one like a nest of vipers.

There’s a strand of contemporary dance where the dancers are really going on a journey, it’s a trip, a ritual of transformation. You can see it when they come to at the curtain call, dripping with sweat, eyes blinking in the light. But is it enough to be a witness to that? What’s in it for us in the audience?

And yet. There is something bold, visionary even, in committing to an alternative world on stage, where you have to let go of time and any other expectations – whether that’s satisfying viewing or not.

• At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 3 October. Dance Umbrella festival continues until 31 October