Robert Cantarella
After studying fine arts in Marseille, Robert Cantarella trained at the École du Théâtre National de Chaillot run by Antoine Vitez. Very rapidly, in 1983, he founded his first venue, the Théâtre du Quai de la Gare in Paris, then the Compagnie des Ours with the desire to have 20th century authors discovered or rediscovered. He met the writer Philippe Minyana in 1987 and staged his play Inventories; it was the beginning of a long collaboration. Alternating contemporary plays and classics from the repertory, Robert Cantarella has staged Lars Norén, Michel Vinaver and Noëlle Renaude as well as Shakespeare, Chekhov and Strindberg. Appointed director of the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, a national drama centre, in 2000, he notably created the festival Friction en mai there, a meeting place for new forms of theatre writing, before joining, in 2005, the Centquatre adventure, whose conception he was involved in and that he directed with Frédéric Fisbach until March 2010. He has also written many critical articles and novels, published by Éditions Lignes, and since 2004, has produced documentaries and fictional films. At the Festival d'Avignon, Robert Cantarella presented The Siege of Numantia in 1992, The Naked Man and Murder in 1993, Public Domain in 1996 and Hippolyte in 2007. This year he is proposing a new text by Christophe Honoré, A Young Man is Killed, with the students of the École de Saint-Étienne and Gilles Deleuze's courses.
LP, April, 2012