Valentina Carrasco
Valentina Carrasco was born in Buenos Aires, where she studied music, dance and literature and began her career in film and video that would take her to work in Paris. She has collaborated with La Fura del Baus since 2000. Apart from big outdoor shows such as the Barcelona Forum 2004, Beittedine Festival in Beirut or the opening of the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Valencia, she is co-author and director of XXX, a play inspired by de Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir, which toured internationally for three years in Europe. America and Australia (2004) and is the most represented show in the history of the company.
As for opera, she participated in the staging of DQ, Don Quixote in Barcelona at Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona and co-directed the world premiere of Auf den Marmorklippen by Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli based on the novel by Ernst Jünger in Mannheim National Theatre, which won the Critics Award of German Opera for the Best Production. She collaborated on the staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Ruhr Triennale in 2004, at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2005 and at Paris Opera in 2005 and 2008. She did the staging of Bluebeard’s Castle by Bela Bartók and Diary of a Vanished by Leos Janácek, presented at Paris Opera, Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona, the Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Kobe and Tokyo Bunkamura. She directed and participated in the creation of Rheingold and Walküre for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, with the musical direction of Zubin Mehta (2007-2010).
With Carlos Padrissa she co-directed Michaels Reise um die Erde by Karlheinz Stockhausen, which was presented at the Vienna Theatre Festival, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Philharmonie in Cologne and the Venice Biennale (2008). In 2010 she collaborated on the stage direction of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil), a co-production of Teatro Real in Madrid, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Megaron of Athens. She also collaborated in the staging of EXPO’s Shanghai 2010 theme show, Windows of the City seen by four million people in China.
In 2011, she directed the singers staging of Quartett, by Italian composer Luca Francesconi, based on the play by Heiner Müller, with a stage concept by Àlex Ollé, for Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and Lille. That same year she was invited for a similar collaboration in Tristan und Isolde at the Lyon Opera House.
Outside of La Fura dels Baus she choreographed the opera La Strada, by Belgian composer Luc van Hove, based on Fellini’s film, presented in the Flemish Royal Opera in Antwerp and Ghent. She also staged a second version of Stockhausen’s Michaels Reise um die Erde for the Warsaw Autumn Festival. Furthermore, in 2012 she was invited to design a permanent show of large format for Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China.
As an opera director, she staged Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti, a work that has been presented in the opera house La Monnaie in Brussels, the Rome Opera, the English National Opera in London, the Liceo of Barcelona, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and came to Australia in 2010 as part of Adelaide Festival. The success of this production, that won many prizesin Europe and was released on DVD, led the La Monnaie director to propose another work, also co-directed with Àlex Ollé, Oedipe by George Enescu, a production of the Theatre de la Monnaie and Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires premeiered in 2011.
In November 2012 she was invited by Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires to direct the world premiere of a new version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, after Katharina Wagner left the project. The piece was a great success for audiences and critics, especially among the German, Austrian and Spanish press. This production will appear in a DVD edition, together with a 90-minute documentary by German TV Deutsche Welle.