Brazilian director and author Christiane Jatahy, one of the most original figures in the wave of theatre that swept across the Atlantic and regenerated the European scene in recent decades, is the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre 2022.
“A harsh and acute observer of the violent cruelty of our world – write Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte in the motivation for the award – Brazilian author and director Christiane Jatahy ramps up an original interstitial language that merges the radical power of her poetic dimension with the counterpoint of caustic political thinking, always permeated by an intrepid spirit of experimentation between present and past.
Abrogating the dogmatic rules of performance and challenging its agonizing theorems, Christiane Jatahy merges the horizons of cinema and theatre, by means of a kind of Brechtian-Wagnerian sort of personal friction, to explore the more prickly territories that best reveal the instability of the fictitious reality embodied by her Characters/Persons, thereby orchestrating a dizzying tentacular dance with the carnal presence of their bodies in motion shouting truths at every single spectator.
Because words are not enough to export a form of life elsewhere, Christiane Jatahy sends powerful sequences of images in orbit and, with live editing, uses a camera as an integral part of the play – in the style of Cassavetes’ films – dismantling the devices of naturalistic illusion to structure her own theatre and in doing so create unexpected and searingly beautiful narrative traps in which the audience remains so actively captive and fascinated by what is taking place before its eyes that it feels no desire to escape”.
Followed by:
conversation with Christiane Jatahy
moderated by Andrea Porcheddu
