Golden Lion – Venice Biennale 2022

Jury Deliberation and Statement from the Biennale’s Artistic Directors

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”.

Stefano Ricci & Gianni Forte, authors and directors

Christiane Jatahy’s Acceptance Speech

“I’d like to thank all the people who make me be here today, there are so many hands that have helped me, so many people who have supported me and collaborated over these more than 30 years of creation. Theater can’t be done alone and today I bring with me hundreds of people who have been, and many still are, involved in building my work. Some of these people are here today, and I would like to thank each and every one of them.

This award means a lot because it sheds light on a trajectory – it’s not easy to write a consistent artistic story – and this award confirms and breathes life into my choices. Choices that were sometimes misunderstood, as an artist, as a woman, because we know that it’s even more difficult when we’re women, and Latin American, born in Brazil – where it takes a lot of perseverance to keep going. It’s always about not giving up, I said it once and I’ll say it again. It’s always about not giving up. 

And at this sad time in Brazil, when artists are criminalized for being artists, this phrase seems to resonate even more deeply with me. Because I carry within me the place I came from, as an artist I am the past that formed me and also the present that expands me. And it is on this frontier that I create, with the deep desire that my work can blur other frontiers, can bring to light what sometimes ends up being invisible even though it is right in front of us, assuming that theater is a political space, without hierarchy, where we bring our subjectivities and objectivities together to look at others with more generosity and empathy. 

And by recognizing the other, who is never so far away from ourselves, we can try to change, even a little, this unjust reality that surrounds us. Because theater is actually very close to life. That’s why it can be so profound and transformative.

Many thanks to the artistic directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte, to the President of the Biennale Roberto Cicutto and to everyone on the Board of La Biennale di Venezia who, with this award, make me continue to believe that it is possible. I’m very happy and deeply grateful.”

Christiane Jatahy