Christiane Jatahy

Sunday 26 June 2022, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia will present the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Christiane Jatahy.

“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 Jataly 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”.

Christiane Jatahy (Rio de Janeiro, 1968) is an author, theater director and filmmaker. Since 2003, she has been developing a body of work that explores border zones between artistic disciplines, between reality and fiction, actor and character, theater and cinema. Her first works include Conjugado, Corte Seco, A Falta que nos move ou Todas as histórias são ficção, which would become her first feature film (2010). Her first international success came with Julia, based on Strindberg’s Miss Julie, winner of the Shell Award 2012 for Best theatrical direction in Brazil, performed over 300 times around the world, and still on tour.

As part of the cultural program of the 2012 Olympics, she conceived, directed and coordinated In the comfort of your home, a series of interventions, documentaries, performances and video installations by 30 Brazilian artists in the privacy of their homes in London. In 2013, she developed the audiovisual and documentary installation project Utopia.doc, the first in a series of works concerned with the issues of home, exile and refugees. In 2014, she created E se elas fossem para Moscou?? based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which - like Julia - is still on tour and has won the Shell Award, the Questão de Crítica Award and the APTR-Associação de Produtores de Teatro Award. In 2015, she completed the “trilogy of memory” with A Floresta que Anda, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In 2016 Christiane Jatahy directed her first opera, staging Beethoven’s Fidelio (Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro).

In 2017, she premiered: La règle du jeu, based on Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, at the invitation of the Comédie Française; the installation/performance Moving People, centred on the issue of refugees, at the invitation of the Theater der Welt Festival and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg; the adaptation of In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès. This was followed by the diptych Nossa Odisséia, which confronted Homer’s epic with the reality of today’s refugees: the first part, Itaca, premiered at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris in 2018; the second, O agora que demora, premiered in 2019 in Sao Paulo and at the Festival d’Avignon.

Entre chien et loup – based on the film Dogville by Lars Von Trier – presented in Avignon in 2021, is the first part in a “trilogy of horror” on themes relating to fascism, male chauvinism and racism. The other two titles are:  Before the sky falls, which connects Shakespeare’s Macbeth to The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, and Depois do silêncio (adapted from the book by Torto Arado) which will open next June at the Wiener Festwochen. She is an associate artist of the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Centquatre-Paris, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Arts Emerson Boston and Piccolo Teatro di Milano.