Hamlet de los Andes

A Bolivan Hamlet tries to reconcile a modern world with his ancient traditions.

In this adaptation by one of the most important Ensembles in Bolivia, three actors and a musician play 15 characters in a physical and politically-charged production that exposes the plight of the thousands of Bolivians who leave their rural homes for the city in hope of a better life. Deeply affecting, Hamlet de los Andes combines Bolivian music and visually-stunning theatre with Shakespeare’s themes of personal betrayal and state corruption to create a darkly comic and original new work.

Hamlet de los Andes is a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s original. Their take on Hamlet is a “Bolivian” one, drawn from a distinct reading by the company and the director. They have put it together contextualizing it in the struggle and uncertainty of trying to reconcile a modern world with an ancient tradition, and restructuring it in an abridged version, relying on just three actors and one musician. The storyline and the events have been simplified and the characters reduced. Their Hamlet is a modern- day man who has lost his self-awareness. He faces the impossibility of recognizing and coming to terms with himself after the fall. Who is Hamlet? Is it me or is it you? Is Hamlet the Teatro de los Andes itself? Is it the most recent bit of Bolivian history? By means of a proposal packed with metaphors and intertextuality, Teatro de Los Andes’ Hamlet experiences the uprising of the being, of art, of the homeland, of the world.

Hamlet is their first production where Theatre of the Andes have teamed up with a guest director, Diego Aramburo. To start with, the company identified the themes that interested them, and those which they wished to treat in depth. They then put the text aside
and began creating improvisations and images from those themes, and from others suggested by the director, leaving the original story of “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” aside. After they had generated a lot of material, the director made his selection, and, as they created a montage of his selections, the reworking of the text happened in parallel.

October 12, 2016 at 7:30 PM

A physical production that showcases Teatro de los Andes’ talent for creating memorable tableaus.

Civilian Theatre

Purists might be distressed at the liberties taken, but the more open-minded will enjoy the opportunity to see what Shakespeare’s classic means to a culture rarely exposed to British eyes.

Philip Fisher, British Theatre Guide

About the artist

Teatro de los Andes’ work is essentially defined
by collective creation. “Group theatre” is their philosophy, in the exact meaning of the term. Each and everyone takes responsibility for the work in every aspect, be it artistic, technical, structural or organisational. In this way the production as
a whole is developed with all elements evolving simultaneously: dramaturgy, music, set and costume design.

Teatro de los Andes was founded in 1991, in the town of Yotala, located close to Sucre in Bolivia, by Cesar Brie, Naira Gonzalez and Giampaolo Nalli.

They live in their theatre-residence where they prepare and present their plays. Here they also receive other artists and organise meetings and workshops. Each actor is the creator of a theatre they call a theatre of “humour and memory.”

They seek to form a poet-actor in the etymological sense of the word: maker and creator. To achieve this they train physically and vocally everyday, working on forms of improvisation and composition.

One of their motivations is to take theatre beyond the stage to people in towns, squares, neighbourhoods and communities.

Teatro de los Andes has produced over 24 different plays presented in over 1620 performances and attended by over 390,000 people in Bolivia, Central and South America, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, India and Europe.

At their residence they give training workshops in actor development and staging on a national and international level.