Jorge Lavelli

Who is Jorge Lavelli?

Jorge Lavelli is a French theater director of Italian ethnicity and Argentine origin.

The son of Italian immigrants in Argentina, Lavelli has lived in France since the early 1960s. He became a French citizen in 1977.

In 1963 he staged Witold Gombrowicz's play The Mariage, introducing this playwright to the French public. Lavelli later staged Gombrowicz's Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy and Operetta.

In 1967, Lavelli began a collaboration with Jean Vilar to stage Goethe's Triumph der Empfindsamkeit and Oscar Panizza's The Cathedral of Love. From 1987 to 1996 he was head of the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris.

Lavelli has staged plays by Calderón, Shakespeare, Corneille, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, García Lorca, Arrabalya, Ionesco, Schnitzler, Brecht, Pirandello, Dürrenmatt, T. Bernhard, O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Peter Handke, Edward Bond, George Tabori, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Mrocze, and operas by Gottfried von Einem, Gounod, Bizet, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev, Janáček, Luigi Nono, and Maurice Ohana. As an opera director he worked mainly for the Paris Opera, but also for the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, and the Aix-en-Provence Festival.