The theater steeped in cinema and life by Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy (Rio de Janeiro, 1968) yesterday received the Golden Lion at the Venice Theater Biennale. Installed in Paris, her works mix cinema and theater, past and present; and reality and fiction, revisiting classics such as the Odyssey to address emigration today in O agora que delay A montage in which he records people in Lebanon, South Africa or the Amazon narrating the epic of Ulysses mixed with his own and broadcasts on stage a documentary, some of whose protagonists suddenly appear playing the guitar, singing or encouraging people to dance in the next seat. In the fall, Temporada Alta will present her new play, After Silence, and Entre perro y lobo, part of the Horror Trilogy, will be shown at the National Dramatic Center, her committed look at current Brazil.
How did you receive the award?
It is for a career, and we artists always doubt whether the moment of recognition will come. For me it is very important as a woman, artist and person. And as a Brazilian artist at this time. Pure joy.
In Venice he has denounced the situation in Brazil with Bolsonaro. Which?
Terrible. Everything that man said he was going to do he is doing. And now that the institutions are trying to react, it threatens to be too late. The Ministry of Culture goes against the artists. The Funai [National Indian Foundation] goes against the indigenous, and it is the institution that should protect them. The Palmares Foundation, the institution that protects blacks, goes against blacks. It is not only a government of the extreme right, but also of destruction.
What is happening in the Amazon is of enormous danger, if it is not stopped now, we will lose it. It's not that the government doesn't do something, it's that it does it to destroy, to exploit. We have elections in October. I am very hopeful that Lula will win, but there is a constant threat to democracy of not accepting the result of the vote, including whether or not the election will be held. If this man continues for four more years, Brazil is over.
But if Bolsonaro does what he said he was going to do, why did they choose him?
Many factors caused him to be chosen. The first, the demonization of the left, the idea that everything bad that happened in Brazil was the responsibility of the left and its corruption. A horror movie was created to justify the right wing coming. The system did not imagine that Bolsonaro was going to arrive, but even the press put Lula and Bolsonaro as the same thing. Then there is the fake news. The great danger of democracy today is the invention of narratives to justify or to deceive the population about what is happening. Many say that Bolsonaro has been chosen by WhatsApp, where people received fake news that obscured the real image of him. In addition, many assured that he spoke but was not going to do it, it was propaganda. And that the institutions were strong. Well it does. Everyone thought: he's not going to make it. And he arrived. It is a warning to the world. We think that fascism is not going to come, but it can come.
Why do you define it as fascism?
I think there is a genocide, of the indigenous people, of the black people in the periphery, and there was a genocide in the covid. It is a deadly movement that is not only authoritarianism, but also violence against the lives of others, lives that are devalued.
The directors of the Biennial use the mixture of reality and fiction in their theater as an example that we are tired of representing characters and we are entering another place.
For me, the question of the character has not existed for a long time. We are many characters ourselves. And the characters are also very likely to be in relationship. The idea of diminishing representation is closer to each one. The characters are like transparent masks where we can see what is behind the mask, which are the people. This is how I see the theater. But I understand what they say. The reality is today so impressive, so strong, that it is difficult to go into fiction. And at the same time, reality is so full of fiction that how can we believe in a theatrical fiction? We are going to play so that we can continue working with fiction so that it can be closer to us.
What does cinema bring to your theatre?
Much. It opens up many other points of view about what I am doing, it opens up the possibility of building more complex and interesting dialogues, at more levels, it opens up the possibility that what is not on stage can be there, the screen is like a window for people who cannot cross that border. Then, in each work, the relationship between theater and cinema changes a lot. But it is like being able to play with two times, different spaces. I am from cinema and theater and it is as if the two territories that inhabit me could inhabit the scene.
The last work in that trilogy, After Silence, will arrive in Temporada Alta in the fall. How does Brazil look at it?
I have worked from two sources, a novel called Torto arado (Crooked Plow), which is going to be published in Spanish and Catalan, and which is an incredible success in all countries, and also a documentary by Eduardo Coutinho that is entitled The man marked by death. The novel is by Itamar Vieira Junior, who has worked for ten years with the communities in the interior of Bahia that live in a situation close to the idea of slavery, indigenous people but especially blacks who come from the quilombos and who lived or still live in a situation close to exploitation, slavery. He makes a very strong portrait of the present moment of these communities, which is a portrait of the profound Brazil.
They are female voices and they also talk about all the culture, the magic, everything important that the black people have brought to Brazil. The novel has a character who dies fighting for the rights of the land and in this sense I draw a parallel with the documentary that Coutinho began to make in 1964 about João Pedro Teixeira, who died fighting for agrarian reform. At the time the film was being shot, in which Teixeira's family gave life to the characters in the story, the dictatorship arrived and they were imprisoned. The film was interrupted for 20 years and with the end of the dictatorship he was able to finish it. The actresses are very connected to these stories. For Gaia, indigenous, it is the story of her family, and there is also an activist and actress. They are the people but also the characters. But they are acting, it is not about them, it is about fiction. And also about reality.
