“Theater must be lively, deep, light, unexpected, real and dreamed.” Never boring or pretentious. Never professorial, nor conformist, nor submissive. The theater was invented to be able to talk about life and death.” This was the theater of Jorge Lavelli, one of the most important directors of the last decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries, who, according to his wife Dominique, was born this morning at the age of His friends died 90 years ago in Paris. His funeral will take place in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
More information
The Buenos Aires-born artist played most of his career in Paris. He came to France in 1960 on a scholarship from the Argentine National Fund for the Arts to attend courses at the Charles Dullin School and the Jacques Lecoq School. He finally obtained French citizenship in 1977, although he continuously toured Europe, running his personal theater across the continent, characterized by an aesthetic nonconformity that made him one of the greatest directors.
The confrontations that Lavelli made throughout his life with the texts of the classics are numerous, varied and important, although he carried them out using the most avant-garde techniques of the contemporary scene: Calderón, Seneca, Molière, Pierre Corneille, Goethe, Antón Chekhov, Paul Claudel, Valle Inclán, William Shakespeare… to highlight just a few. In all his works, Lavelli’s thinking was clear: humanity has failed to rid itself of even one iota of its most important characteristics, fear and ambition.
Blanca Portillo, in the foreground, in the role of Semiramis in “La hija del aire”, directed by Jorge Lavelli. SPANISH THEATER
At the same time, as he grappled with these mythical texts, he liked to boast that he had actually given precedence over the classics to numerous modern and contemporary authors, and in some cases he even did so before any of these authors were internationally known and respected. The truth is that his works remained there, along with works by Kushner, Gombrowicz and Copi, which he brought to the stage as a nobody and staged all the texts until his last play, which he wrote when he was terminally ill. With a work by Copi, he opened the Théâtre National de la Colline, of which he was founding director from 1987 to 1996 and which focused on the discovery and creation of 20th century authors.
In 1969 created a first form of musical theater at the Avignon Festival with medals from Pierre Bourgeade and Girolamo Arrigo, and in this way he began another branch of his work, dedicated to opera. Among the authors who inspired his passion for contemporary theater were the Spaniards Juan Mayorga, Lorca, Valle Inclán and Fernando Arrabal, to which is added a long list such as Ionesco, Pinter, Rezvani, O’Neill, Claudel, Boulgakof and Berkoff, Peter Handke, Óscar Panizza, Tony Kushner, Pirandello, Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Arthur Miller, Edgard Albee, Fuentes… “Before the director of a public theater programs a Pirandello, he should ask himself whether his decision does not consist in the place of an interesting current author,” Lavelli explained in a 2008 interview in EL PAÍS.
Ernesto Alterio and Juan Luis Galiardo in “Oedipus the King” directed by Jorge Lavelli at the Roman Theater of Mérida.CEFE LÓPEZ
In Spain he made many productions and maintained a special relationship with artists such as Juan Luis Galiardo, whom he chose for the leading role in Oedipus Rex and as Harpagon in Molière’s The Miser, and especially with Blanca Portillo, with whom he collaborated on several occasions. In fact, Portillo considers him one of his great teachers. “He was a magician, a genius of the theater,” said the grief-stricken actress yesterday after learning of his death. “And I understood that theater was a reading that didn’t have to resemble reality; In fact, he had to create a new reality. For Jorge, the actor came first. He loved Spanish actors. And he had a fascinating life, because as early as the 1960s he met the great French intellectuals of his time. I did Eslavos and La hija del aire with him and went to Buenos Aires with him.”
The city of Paris awarded him the Grand Prize for Performing Arts for his entire work and he was a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and a Knight of the Legion of Honor. Lavelli returned to Buenos Aires several times and toured the world’s most important theater festivals throughout his career.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
GET IT