Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Play script (Spanish)

Video documentation of Mapa Teatro's production of Antonio Orlando Rodríguez's theater piece 'El león y la domadora.' In this play, two characters - immigrants, dreamers - leave their homeland in search of prosperity and fortune. But, as with any migration fueled by a dream, their lives are torn between the reality of all that was lost and the illusion of all that may come. 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.