A Conversation with Andrea Peña, 2026 CHANEL Next Prize Laureate

You are the first Colombian and Canadian artist to receive the CHANEL Next Prize. What does this dual geographical recognition mean to you?

I’ve always existed between geographies, between countries, between places. Never fully belonging to a culture here nor there. Growing up as a child between Bogota, Vancouver, Montreal, and San Francisco, I was constantly in a space of needing to understand myself inside these changing landscapes, incorporating other cultures and ways of seeing the world into my person. So this dual recognition, as a Latin and North American artist, is for me so much about holding the tension and complexity of socio-cultural hybridity. It represents the fluid contexts that have shaped me and my work. Colombia for example has shaped my relationship to memory, to ancestry, to the body as something historically charged inside a collective awareness. Being Canadian situates me within a different and much more Western set of institutional systems, both culturally, in aesthetics and in everyday life. So im fascinated by this form of building bridges between the Americas, where identity is not fixed but constantly being negotiated.

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"I think my work is recognized as radical perhaps because I attempt to work with courage to create works that create these destabilizations, and I'm comfortable with challenging an audience."

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Your practice brings together choreography, industrial design, and Colombian ancestral memory, three worlds that might seem unrelated at first glance. How did they come together in your work?

Intuitively for me these were never separate, they’re rather different ways of understanding materiality, structure and embodiment. Industrial design taught me how to construct systems, how to think through material, space, and constraint. How to understand or see choreography in our everyday lives, think about the ways factories for example build production systems that demand bodily repetition from workers or how every time you get in the car your body has to negotiate the design and space of this object. These situations in our built environment are all choreographic gestures. On the other hand, my connection to Colombian ancestral memory insists that the body carries histories that cannot be abstracted and as per my maternal Muisca heritage, (an indigenous community from the Altiplano Cundiboyacense), we see materiality as a living being that asks the artisan or craftsperson to shape and give it life as an object of use. So, both the human and non-human (i.e. objects) are very alive in Muisca cosmology. We cohabit this earth with sentient beings in the material realm as well, and it’s this form of co-relation or cohabitation that I am interested in exploring choreographically, where the priority is not the steps but the ways of bodies existing through space and time. And so choreography becomes the site where these forces, material, human and temporal. meet and intersect, where I develop or design systems to be disrupted and reconfigured through the lived experience of each artist. A place where body AND materiality together take the stage to create new imaginaries. Take the work SACRA for example that I’ve made as a commission for BalletBC. This work puts 20 dancers connected through climbing harnesses to negotiate each other's weight in real time. This is not a choreography you can simply “do” as an interpreter, you have to listen, make decisions and read a situation in real time. And on the other hand, the work conceptually explores the idea of what I call the body of labour - as choreographic languages that predominantly are forced on bodies of the global south through extraction of labour.

The CHANEL Next Prize recognizes artists who "push the boundaries of contemporary practice." Where do you locate those boundaries within your own discipline?

Boundaries appear the moment a form becomes fixed or legible. My works are not stable, they’re constantly shifting depending on context. I’m interested in pushing against the readability of the body, creating situations where it resists interpretation or slips out of expected frameworks. It’s not only about breaking boundaries but more importantly about destabilizing the conditions that produce them. As a queer artist I am interested in queering not only the body but the conditions for bodies, queering space, queering interactions, relationships and forms of co-existence. There is a fabulous book, “Queer Phenomenology” by Sara Ahmed that speaks about how queer bodies live through experience. I think my work pushed the boundaries of what constantly wants to be defined, and sits at the palace where things are left undefined, in order to give a palace for new, vs. known. On the other hand, I also think today, dance is losing its capacity for critical thought. Dance is becoming more and more influenced by trends on social media, “easy to consume dance”. It is so important to continue researching and pushing the ideas of our medium, and not only catering to IG aesthetics in dance. We have a responsibility as artists to talk about the hard stuff, the things in society we cannot make sense of, the issues of our human condition. I personally feel this responsibility to create spaces for critical thought, places that allow us to experiment with different social values as ways of exploring new possibilities for what it means to be human. And so, I think my work is recognized as radical perhaps because I attempt to work with courage to create works that create these destabilizations, and I'm comfortable with challenging an audience.

Andrea Peña & Artists has existed since 2014. How has the company evolved since its founding, and what remains constant in its DNA?

AP&A has evolved in scale, complexity, and international reach, but its core logic hasn’t changed. From the beginning, I wanted AP&A to function as a laboratory, building projects that test the limits of our practice. A place where collaborators worked more as a design studio than a traditional “dance company”, testing design ideas in scenography, technology and movement while working across mediums. Playing with failure as a practice, playing with not knowing and therefore pushing aesthetics outside of what we know. So often a choreographer is expected to have the answers, what if the answers are found together by the ecosystem? These are the questions that interest me within AP&A. So, what remains constant in AP&A is the commitment to hybridity, to collective embodiment, and to creating work that doesn’t resolve but instead opens questions. We ask more questions that we can answer, both as a team but to an audience. We live in a society where we consistently search for answers or defined ideas, and through recent human developments (technology, and divisions of political climates) we’ve highly reduced our capacity to think critically. So I hope AP&A continues to be this laboratory of experimentations, questions and critical thought.

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"So not only are these places where the works have been received, but they are all places that have transformed me as an artist and that continue to transform me."

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Your creations are described as immersive worlds unfolding within constructed, scenographic environments. How do you think about the relationship between the dancer's body and architectural space?

I approach space as an active force rather than a passive container. It imposes conditions on the body, where the interpreters have agency to shape how they move, resist, or adapt to these environments. The scenographic elements, whether they are architectural or material, are not decorative in a traditional sense; they function as systems the performers must negotiate. They are part of the choreographic structure, and sometimes so much so that it's difficult to rehearse when we go on tour, as these structures sometimes are quite massive. It's like asking someone to climb a ladder without the ladder. So the body in my work is constantly in dialogue with these forces, and it’s within that negotiation that transformation, and sometimes rupture that the magic occurs. Magic for me in the sense that we see real people making real life choices and not repeating an idea that was pre-determined from A to Z by a choreographer. I guess this adds to where the work is trying to push boundaries too.

The company made its UK debut in 2025 at Sadler's Wells East. What does that stage represent to you, and how do you approach international touring?

The international scene has always been my home. Because of the culturally hybrid nature of my work, each piece has the capacity to be in dialogue with audiences from all over the work and is received differently to each public it has the chance to converse with. And that's the beauty of it. It lives through the eyes and spirits of those who receive it. I have been fortunate to take my work to India, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, Panama, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Spain, US and off course Canada. So not only are these places where the works have been received, but they are all places that have transformed me as an artist and that continue to transform me. They become parts of my journey and that of my team, as we gather all the information of these precious cultural experiences in each place we visit.

The prize comes with €100,000 and a two-year mentorship program. What projects or creative risks will this support make possible?

It creates space, both materially and mentally, for risk. This kind of support allows me to slow down processes that are often accelerated by production demands, and to deepen research without the immediate pressure of output. It opens the possibility to pursue ideas that are more speculative, more fragile, and not yet fully formed.

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"When I first saw the list of 10 winners, I was quite surprised by the similarities in our practices. Artists at the forefront of their work, yet in a way that felt both humble, challenging and culturally specific to each person."

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You work between Montréal and Paris. How do these two cities feed your practice in different ways?

Montreal has been a home for radical openness. It's a city and community that allows for a lot of experimentation and long-term development. There’s immense space to fail and to rebuild. The history of this city is quite radical. I'm thinking of Marie Chouinard's works where an artist would pee on stage in a bucket. So there is a past that allows conceptually challenging work to be explored in my own way. Paris on the other hand operates differently, a place where ideas are imagined at a completely different scale and where dance crosses through many other disciplines like fashion or visual arts. This capacity for large-scale imagination, for me, creates a really interesting kind of pressure and dialogue, where ideas have the potential to be thought of with more expansion and therefore take different forms. Moving between these two cities allows me to create a hybrid rhythm in my practice, where ideas can be tested and pushed with my Montreal family, thus going from a context that feels safe to a place where I’m influenced by Paris’ international collision of ambitiously formatted ideas. That's exactly where I prefer to situate my work, large scale ambitious universes with the essence and experimentation of more conceptual boundary pushing ideas. Things you would normally see in the underground independent scene, yet on the big stage.

You will be brought together with the nine other laureates at the Venice Biennale in May. What do you hope to take away from meeting artists working across such varied disciplines?

When I first saw the list of 10 winners, I was quite surprised by the similarities in our practices. Artists at the forefront of their work, yet in a way that felt both humble, challenging and culturally specific to each person. I felt as though I shared this with like-minded spirits. So in meeting them I am curious to encounter other ways of thinking through cultural specificity and radical poetries through our different disciplines, especially outside of dance. I love how when practices from different disciplines meet, they reveal our own blind spots and also unexpected affinities. For me this encounter is about building an international community with these artists who are pushing for excellence in their respective fields.

You received the New Choreographies Award at the Venice Biennale in 2023, then the Ballet BC Choreographer Award in 2024, and now the CHANEL Next Prize. How do you experience this succession of recognitions, and what do they change — or not change — in the way you work?

These recognitions of course create visibility and momentum, which open doors and shift the scale of possibilities, but they don’t fundamentally change the work itself. My creative process remains playful, hybrid, uncertain, and rooted in deep research. For me these recognitions however are part of paving a path for other Latinx artists to operate and take place within the international arts market. What I hope shifts, is the space for speculative futures coming from Latinx artists. In the case of my works, rooted in queer-ing perspectives, decolonial imaginaries, and Latin American ancestral memory, these recognitions allow for these perspectives to reach wider audiences and weave these thoughts, aesthetics into the arts world at large. They are no longer peripheral gestures, rather they become central to the present and the future of contemporary culture. So if anything, to me they reinforce a responsibility as an artist, to continue pushing toward complex ideas, rather than settling into something that has been achieved or resolved in my career.

Finally, the publication is called S-quive (avoid/dodge). What do you dodge in your art?

I'm interested in avoiding resolution and fixed meaning, avoiding work that can be easily consumed or understood in a single reading. I prefer to construct situations that remain indefinable, where the audience is invited to stay with the tension and the hybridity as a form of fluidity rather than resolution. A place of complexity.