West Dock

In 2001 Rolf Abderhalden was invited by the Experimental Academy of Theatres in France, together with Anatoli Vassiliev, to stage West Dock with Russian actors in the framework of the World Theatre Olympics, which took place in Moscow. The year after, he created a version to be performed at the Mapa Teatro house. 

 

West Dock tells the tale of the inexplicable encounter of eight human beings, at a river bank hangar, in a major Western port city. Each one of the characters in this underworld is, in their own eyes, subjected to the trading of their needs and desires. The architectonic and spacial posibilities of Mapa Teatro’s house, provide the right conditions to represent each of the eight different viewpoints of these character's situation, who, uprooted from their homeland, from their community or from ways of life, they will have to bargain with what they have left, in order to carry out their unavoidable destiny.

 

Bernard Marie Koltès, one of the most important French dramaturges of the 20th Century, wrote this play after spending some time in New York: “In West New York, in Manhattan, in a corner of the West End, where the old port is, there are a few hangars. There is one particular abandoned hangar, huge and empty, where I spent a few nights, hiding. It’s an extremely strange place, a refuge for the homeless, for gays, for pimps, for the settling of scores; a place the police never come to, for obscure reasons. The moment you step into this place, the moment you realise you are in a privileged part of the world. A square of sorts, mysteriously abandoned in the middle of a garden, where plants could have grown differently. A place where order doesn’t exist as we know it, but as a strange order that has been taking shape”.