On October 9, the Argentine - and French - artist Jorge Lavelli, a theater director born in Buenos Aires in 1932, died. Resident in France since 1960, he revolutionized the theater of that nation and spread the works of two other greats of the 20th century worldwide: Copi, like him, an Argentine resident in France, and Witold Gombrowicz, a Pole, whom destiny brought and kept for many years in our lands.
In 1960, a young twenty-eight-year-old Levelli won the National Endowment for the Arts scholarship to study theater in France with Charles Dullin and Jacques Lecoq. From Paris he wrote regular letters to Victoria Ocampo - then president of the FNA - in which he reported on his stay. Shortly after the residency deadline expired, a letter arrived: because of the enthusiasm shown, they offered to extend it. In 1963 he became known in France with his version of Wedding, by Wiltold Gombrowicz, which won him the grand prize for staging in a competition for young companies.
Years later, in 1987, he was chosen as founding director of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, whose premise was to represent only contemporary theater. He inaugurated the two rooms of that theater with The public, by García Lorca and La visita inoportuna, by Copi. He also directed there, between 1987 and 1996, works by Billetdoux, Lars Norén, Gombrowicz, Steven Berkoff, Thomas Bernhard, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Eugène Ionesco, George Tabori, Edward Bond, Arthur Schnitzler, Slawomir Mrozek, Serge Kribus and Brian Friel, among others.
In addition to prose theater, opera was its other great area of development and, again, innovation. In 1969, with the staging of Order, a play with text by Pierre Bourgeade and music by Girolamo Arrigo, he created a new form of musical theatre. The work covers in a series of caricatured and parodic paintings the way in which the Franco order was established in Spain around 1936. From then on Lavelli was a reference on the international lyrical scene, both with modern authors such as Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ohana, Luigi Nono, Heinrich Sutermeister, as with the classics Georges Bizet, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Georg Friedrich Händel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We highlight a performance of his from 2017 for the Avignon Festival, the opera The Shadow of Wenceslao, which brings together the creation of three Argentine artists repatriated from France: the playwright Copi, the composer Martín Matalón, and Jorge Lavelli himself.
The Shadow of Wenceslao, by Copi, Matalón and Lavelli, at the 2017 Avignon Festival.
In Argentina, she directed several works in the Sala Martín Coronado of the Teatro San Martín such as Yvonne, princess of Burgundy by Gombrowicz in 1972, with Elsa Berenguer, Juana Hidalgo and Luis Politti; Macbeth by Eugène Ionesco with the Théâtre National de la Colline in 1993, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello in 1998, with Leticia Brédice, Lidia Catalano, Patricio Contreras and Rita Cortese; Mein Kampf, a farce by George Tabori in 2000, with Alejandro Urdapilleta and Jorge Suárez; and King Lear by William Shakespeare in 2006. At the Teatro Colón she directed the operas The Makropulos Affair by Leoš Janáček in 1986, Pelléas and Mélisande by Claude Debussy in 1999, and Idomeneo by Mozart, in 2014.
Image of Idomeneo by Mozart. Lavelli's last performance at the Teatro Colón, in 2014. Photo: Arnaldo Colombaroli.
The one who was recognized as the “enfant terrible” of the French scene was named, in that country, Knight of the National Order of Merit in 1992 and promoted to Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1993. In 1994 he received the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor. Years later, the Minister of Culture and Communication awarded him the insignia of Officer of the National Order of Merit and, in 2012, Frédéric Mitterrand, the former French Minister of Culture and Communication, awarded him the insignia of Commander of the National Order of Merit. Merit. Here he won the Konex Awards, in 1981, 1989 -Platinum-, 2001 and 2009.