Nicolás Lange
- Opleiding
- DAS Theatre
- Lichting
- 2026
I am a writer, performer, and theater director. I was born in Chilean Patagonia. Currently I’m based between Firenze and Amsterdam. I seek to change the matter on stage through words. I work with the metaphor—its ability to transform the substance on stage, its capacity for survival as an image in the viewer’s brain, its materiality to create an order: of extreme beauty, of violence, of an end, and generate light, and horror.
My texts have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and French, and my plays have been presented in more than 15 countries. I am the author of the novel ‘Caminamos Porque Amamos Algo’ (National Literary Awards), the play ‘This Could Last, and Last, and Last, and Last’ (Winner of the 2021 Literary Awards: Premios Literarios and the 85th Edition Gabriela Mistral Awards), and the book ‘Hunt The Dog, Hunt The Boy, Hunt The Other Boy Too’ (Published by Centro Dramático Nacional, CDN, Madrid, Spain).
My questions revolve around language. The shift between first and third person. The authority of the first person; the constant doubt in identity trauma. And the utopia of the third person, a narration detached from the self. My interests lie in the Middle Ages, specifically the burning of sodomites in Firenze, Italy, in the 1400s, and the masking of the smell of burnt flesh by casting fennel seeds onto the bodies (hence the term "fennel" for calling homosexuals in Italy today).
I am seeking transformations of matter on stage through alterations in word order. Phrases that create alchemy. How language arranges itself in order to love, to torture, to invoke(?), and how language ceases in the face of extreme violence. I am looking for the residues of vowels after a place has suffered great devastation. I think about the act of faith against cynicism, about mystery over the sovereignty of trauma, about class struggle, about money. I am inspired by paranoia as a means of survival. The fear of death as imagination. Surrender to horror. Horror in the face of cynicism. Distrust toward contemporary art policies around identity in the performing arts. I work with prologues, with the complete declaration of the interpreter's economic, emotional, and desirous circumstances before starting a work.
Metamorphosis. Miracle. Survival. My research is mainly about the light present in those moments—the light that makes bodies disappear in the form of light. Light as genesis. The fanatic search for enlightenment and its connections to contemporary fascism. Illumination as mystical revelations. Homosexuality as access to the mystery of flesh, and sex as a possibility for alchemy.
I have been a resident artist at GORKI Theater, KVS, National Theater of Lithuania, Chateau de Monthelon, Grand Theater Groningen, Giornate del Respiro, Teatro Cantiere Florida, PARC: Performing Arts Research Center. Cité des Arts, and Watermill Center in New York.
Photo by: Kiriko Mechanicus