Christiane Jatahy
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Christiane Jatahy is an author, theater, and film director. She has a degree in theater studies and journalism and a Masters in art and philosophy.
Since 2003, she has been developing her work around border zones: borders between artistic disciplines, between reality and fiction, the actor and the character, theater and cinema. Her first performances include Conjugado (2004), A falta que nos move (2005), and Corte Seco (2009).
In 2010, she released her first feature film, A falta que nos move (The Lack that moves us), based on the play of the same name. Despite its radically experimental configuration – shot on a Christmas eve in one single location and one single 13 hour sequence – the film was widely acclaimed. It stayed on the billboards of cinemas in Brazil for over 12 weeks and was invited to several international festivals.
In 2011, Christiane Jatahy created the theater play Julia, a free adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, deepening her research into the tension lines between theater and film. The play was awarded the 2012 Shell Prize for Best Direction in Brazil and was presented over 300 times in major theaters and festivals across Europe and the United States. Even today Julia continues touring.
In 2012, as part of the cultural program of the London Olympics that same year, she created, directed, and coordinated In the comfort of your own home, a series of documentary works, performances, video installations, and interventions created by 30 Brazilian artists in the intimacy of homes in London. The creation process of In the comfort of your own home was captured in a documentary film, that premiered under the same name in Lisbon in 2018, in the context of Christiane Jatahy artista na cidade.
In 2013, she developed the audiovisual installation and documentary project Utopia.doc, her first research into the issues of home, exile, and refugees. This project was presented in Paris, Frankfurt, and Sao Paulo.
In 2014, Christiane Jatahy premiered What if they went to Moscow? a theater/film show based on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Splitting the audience between two spaces – a movie theater and a theater hall (they swap spaces at the interval) – What if… was a huge success, receiving the Shell Prize for Best Direction, the Questão de Critica prize and the APTR prize in Brazil, and receiving global critical acclaim.
In 2015, the creation of A floresta que anda (The Walking Forest), inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and combining live performance, video installation, and live cinema, concluded the Trilogy of Memory (including Julia and What if they went to Moscow?).
In 2016, Christiane Jatahy directed her first opera, staging Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, combining live performance, cinema, and a lyric choir.
Invited by the Comédie Française in Paris, she created in 2017 La Règle du Jeu based on Jean Renoir’s famous film. In the same year, the Festival Theater der Welt and the Thalia Theater gave her carte blanche to design and create in Hamburg the installation/performance Moving People, again focusing on the issue of refugees, as well as an adaptation of Dans la solitude des champs de coton by Bernard-Marie Koltès.
In 2018, the City of Lisbon named her Artista na Cidade (Artist of the City) and she presented her work throughout the year in the main theaters, cinemas, festivals, and cultural spaces of the Portuguese capital.
The same year marks the beginning of a diptych, Our Odyssey, inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, and deepening the research on people living in a refugee situation. The first part, Ithaca, premiered at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, mixing Homer’s epic with real-life stories of refugees crossing the Mediterranean today.
In 2019, the second part, O agora que demora (The lingering now) crosses the Odyssey with documentary material shot in Palestine, Lebanon, South Africa, refugee camps in Greece, and the Amazon. It is a dialogue between cinema and live performance, featuring artists who have been cut off from their homeland speaking about their situation through the words of Homer. After a series of try-outs at SESC São Paulo, O agora que demora premiered at the 2019 Avignon Festival.
The situation in her homeland Brazil in the years under the presidency of Bolsonaro urged Jatahy to develop the Horror Trilogy, zooming in on a series of structural questions underlying the country’s shift to the extreme right. The first part, Entre Chien et Loup (Dusk), produced by the Comédie de Genève and premiered at the 2021 Avignon Festival, engaged in a dialogue with Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville to study the mechanisms of fascism in a small community.
In the second part, Before the Sky Falls (premiered at Zurich’s Schauspielhaus in October 2021), Shakespeare’s Macbeth meets The Falling Sky – the fabulous account by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert of the cosmology of the indigenous Yanomami people and their encounter with a capitalist society – to address the violence of toxic masculinity, the political power of patriarchy and its inherent assault on the feminine in all its emanations – women, children and ultimately nature and the earth itself.
Depois do Silêncio (After the Silence) is the final chapter of the Horror Trilogy. Starting from the novel Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Junior and Cabra marcado para morrer, a monument of Brazilian documentary cinema by Eduardo Coutinho, Depois do Silêncio focuses on structural racism and questions of home and territory. It premiered at the Wiener Festwochen in June 2022.
During the 2021-2022 season, Christiane Jatahy was a guest artist at the MUCEM in Marseille, presenting several of her creations as well as a number of proposals and interventions conceived in situ.
In 2023, Christiane Jatahy directed Juan Mayorga’s The boy at the back at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, a classroom-based study of how fiction can manipulate reality.
In the same year, she created her second opera, Nabucco, at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, transforming Verdi’s masterpiece into a hymn to hope and resistance.
In 2024, Christiane Jatahy staged Hamlet – in the folds of time at the Odéon in Paris, radically re-reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the light of contemporary issues of gender, violence/war, and the urgency of revolutionary action.
In January 2022, Christiane Jatahy was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her body of work in theater.
Christiane Jatahy has been associated at L’Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe Paris (2016-2024), Arts Emerson Boston (2019-2024), Schauspielehaus Zurich (2019-2024) and Piccolo Teatro di Milano (2020-2024).
She is currently an associate artist at the CENTQUATRE-Paris.
Her company, Compagnie Vertice-Axis Productions, is subsidised by the Direction Régionale des affaires culturelles d’Ile-de-France, Ministère de la Culture France
PERMANENT COLLABORATORS
THOMAS WALGRAVE – Artistic Collaborator, Scenographer and Lighting Designer
HENRIQUE MARIANO – Production Director, tour manager and collaborator
JULIA BERNAT – Actress and collaborator
STELLA RABELLO – Actress and collaborator
MATTHIEU SAMPEUR – Actor
PAULO CAMACHO – Director of photography
MARCELO LIPIANI – Scenographer
JULIO PARENTE – Video System
PEDRO VITURI – Sound design
VITOR ARAUJO – Musical Composer
CLAUDIA PETAGNA – Administrator