Rodrigo Batista

Rodrigo Batista is a Brazilian theater director, actor, and teacher based between The Netherlands and Belgium. He holds two Master’s Degrees, one in Theater Directing at the University of São Paulo (2015) and another at DAS Theatre Amsterdam (2019), adding a Bachelor’s Degree as a Theater Director at the University of São Paulo (2009). Since 2007 Rodrigo has offered theater research departing from philosophy, politics, cinema, and dance, having won several prizes and fundings in Brazil and supported by institutions in The Netherlands, and Belgium. Rodrigo has presented works in Brazil, Colombia, México, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, and worked as a teacher at Antwerp Conservatorium (2022-present), DAS Theater Amsterdam (2022), KASK (2022), Fábricas de Cultura (2013-2016), and Projeto Vocacional (2011-2014).

Rodrigo’s ambition is to create theatre performances that function as unapologetic aesthetic statements addressed to geopolitical contexts. He achieves this through intense body/mind research made from impulses of iconoclasm, humor, indigestion, mutilation, blood, and explicitness. His goal is to create a palpable sense of political urgency and action in his audience, through theater pieces that were intertwined with large concepts such as the relationship between art and power, tragedy, Latin-American politics, strikes/insurrection, political explicitness, poverty pornography, gore-capitalism, propaganda, anti-colonialism as an event of violence, the operations and consequences behind the North-American Alt-Right Movement, among others.