PRESS RELEASE (EN)

JULIA

Since 1996, the research of theater director Christiane Jatahy has focused on the exploration of new scenic territories. At first, she staged plays in unconventional spaces that proposed new kinds of interaction between the public and the scene, and, from 2003 on, her investigation grew more extreme by means of productions that crossed the subtle borders between reality and fiction, the actor and the character, between the here-and-now and the rehearsed scene. Always with the purpose of creating a living, dynamic relationship with the audience. Over the last years, her work has embraced the audiovisual language in plays such as: Conjugado (“The studio apartment”), which integrated the use of video to the scene, Corte Seco (“Cut”), in which surveillance cameras reveal the surroundings and the behind-the-scenes of the theater live, and especially with the film “The Lack that pushes us”, an adaptation of the play with the same title.

JULIA, an adaptation of August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, gives continuity to Jatahy’s research by bringing together theater and film on the scene. If in “The Lack that pushes us” theater had turned into film, and if in “Cut” the theatrical structures had been disclosed, in JULIA theater becomes live cinema and the filmic structures are exposed. By using pre-filmed footage and scenes filmed live, the film will be built in the presence of the public on each day of the performance, in a permanent friction between theater and film, between the classic and the contemporary, between that which can be seen and that which can only be perceived in the real presence of the actor in scene and the detailed framing of cinema.

Moreover, this adaptation brings the conflict of the original play to the here-and-now, to the very day on which the public sees the play and asks themselves who they are and how they relate to Julia and Jean (named Jelson in this adaptation) in today’s Brazil. If Strindberg had used a magnifier on the relationship between two human beings so different though close in the 19th century, we have used a camera; presence and permanent testimonial breaking through and building together this unusual, up to date encounter with the glance of the public.

 

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 Christiane Jatahy ()