CHRISTIANE JATAHY/ CIA VERTICE

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Christiane Jatahy is an author, director and producer. She has a degree in theatre 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, theatre and cinema. Her first performances include Conjugado, A falta que nos move and Corte Seco.

In 2010, she released her first feature film, A falta que nos move, based on the play of the same name. Despite its radically experimental configuration – the film was shot in a sequence lasting 13 hours, on Christmas Eve, in a single location – it was widely acclaimed, remaining in cinemas in Brazil for over 12 weeks and being invited to several international festivals.

In 2011, she created Julia, a free adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie in which she deepened her research into the spaces of tension between theatre and film. The play won the 2012 Shell Award for Best Direction in Brazil and has played over 300 times in major theatres and festivals in Europe and the United States. Today, the show is still available on tour.

In 2012, as part of the cultural programme for the Olympic Games that same year, she created, directed and coordinated In the comfort of your home, a series of interventions, documentary works, performances and video installations produced by 30 Brazilian artists in the intimacy of homes in London.

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, she premiered What if they went to Moscow? a show loosely based on Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters. Splitting the audience between a cinema and a theatre (and reversing them at the interval), What if… was a huge success with audiences and critics alike, winning the Shell Prize for Best Direction, the Questao de Critica prize and the APTR prize in Brazil, and receiving widespread acclaim from the press in many countries.

In 2015, Christiane Jatahy concluded the Trilogy of Memory (including Julia and What if they went to Moscow?) with the creation of A floresta que anda (The Walking Forest), inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and combining live performance, video installation and live cinema.

In 2016, Christiane Jatahy directed her first opera, staging Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, combining live performance, cinematographic elements and a lyric choir.

In 2017, at the invitation of the Comédie Française, she created La Règle du Jeu based on Jean Renoir’s masterpiece. In the same year, the Festival Theater der Welt and the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg gave her carte blanche to design and create the installation/performance Moving people, again based 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 theatres, cinemas, festivals and cultural spaces of the Portuguese capital. That same year, taking her research into refugee issues a step further, she began work on a dyptic, Notre Odyssée, inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. The first part, Ithaca, premiered at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, comparing Homer’s epic with the reality of people 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, Greece and the Amazon. It is a dialogue between theatre and cinema, mixing classical Greek fiction with the true stories of refugee artists. The lingering now was previewed at SESC Sao Paulo and premiered at the Avignon Festival.

In 2021, she unveiled Entre Chien et Loup (Dusk), a production by the Comédie de Genève that premiered at the Avignon Festival, a study of the mechanisms of fascism in a community based on Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville. It is the first part of a Horror Trilogy that dissects the horrors of Brazil’s regime at the time.
The second part Before the Sky Falls (premiered at Zurich’s Schauspielhaus in October 2021) weaves together Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky 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.

In 2022, the third and final instalment Depois do Silêncio (After Silence), based on the novel Torto Arado by Itamar Veira Junior, takes a closer look at structural racism, land and territory, and premiered at the Wiener Festwochen in June this year.

During the 2021-2022 season, Christiane Jatahy will be a guest artist at the MUCEM in Marseille, where she will present several of her creations as well as a number of proposals and interventions conceived in situ.

In 2023, she will direct Juan Mayorga’s The boy at the back at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, a classroom-based study of how fiction can manipulate reality; and at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva she will create Nabucco, transforming Verdi’s opera into a hymn to hope and resistance.

In 2024, Jatahy staged an adaptation of Hamlet at the Odéon in Paris, radically re-reading Shakespeare’s work in the light of contemporary issues of gender, violence/war, the relevance of action, and the way in which the history of theatre has approached them.

Christiane Jatahy is currently an associate artist at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the CENTQUATRE-Paris, the Schauspielhaus Zürich, Arts Emerson Boston and the Piccolo Teatro de Milan Teatro d’Europa. Her company, Compagnie Vertice-Axis Productions, is subsidised by the Direction Régionale des affaires culturelles d’Ile-de-France, Ministère de la Culture France

In January 2022, Christiane Jatahy was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her body of work in theatre.

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 and collaborator

PAULO CAMACHO – Director of photography

MARCELO LIPIANI – Scenographer

JULIO PARENTE – Video System

VITOR ARAUJO – Musical Composer

CLAUDIA PETAGNA – Administrator