Lázaro Rodríguez | Contesting Reality: Radical Fictions at the Boundaries of Art

In this talk Lázaro Rodríguez will explore the shifting boundaries between fiction and reality through fragments of my ongoing research and examples from my past work. Moving between theater, film, writing, and performance, he will bring together clips, memories, stories, references, and other materials to think through fiction as a privileged space where reality can be questioned, altered, and reimagined. Rather than treating fiction and reality as opposites, Rodríguez is interested in the unstable territories where they overlap: in acting, imposture, appropriation, espionage, cosplay, forgery, simulation, escorting, and the many ways in which what is invented can acquire real consequences.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Lázaro G. Rodríguez (M.A., Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) is a Mexican actor, theater maker, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice unfolds across theater, film, text, photography, video, and radio. Since 2003, he has been a core member of the theater group Lagartijas tiradas al sol, with whom he has developed an extensive body of work at the intersection of theater, politics, and personal life.

In cinema, Rodríguez has worked as an actor in approximately fifty films. His awards include the Janine Bazin Prize at the Belfort Film Festival, Best Actor at the Gramado Film Festival (twice), and the India Catalina Award at the Cartagena Film Festival. His work has been the subject of international retrospectives at venues such as the Cali International Film Festival, Paris Cinéma, the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, the Geneva International Film Festival, the Spectacle Theater in New York, among others.
Rodríguez's theatrical projects have been presented throughout Mexico and in more than thirty countries, including Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival TransAmériques (Montreal), Temporada Alta (Girona), Theater Spektakel (Zurich), Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo, and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). Since 2023, his work has been part of the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library in New York.
At Princeton, Rodríguez will develop his current research project, “The Word to Come: Representations, Fictions, and the Politics of Life”.

DISCUSSANT

Vivi Tellas, Theatre Director, Argentina

Co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts