ABOUT
Marcus Borja is an actor, author, director, musician and choirmaster.
He holds two doctorate degrees from the Sorbonne and the University of São Paulo (2015) and the SACRe Doctoral Program from Paris Sciences et Lettres (2017). His career began in his native Brazil where he stages his first production at the age of 20: Sete Mitos de Amor (Seven Myths of Love), an adaptation of stories from Greco-Latin mythology for twenty performers and an Early music quintet. In this production he was set and costume designer as well as musical director.
After a degree in literature at the University of Brasília he moved to France at the age of 24. He attended the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq before being accepted into the École supérieure d’art dramatique de Paris (ESAD), and, then into the French National Conservatory of Dramatic Art as a theater director. He has also acquired a degree and masters in art history and museology from the École du Louvre.
It is this diverse background that has given rise to the polyphonic and multifaceted character of his work (theater, performance, musical concerts, opera, puppetry, etc.)
He has worked notably with Sophie Loucachevsky, Fausto Paravidino, Jacques Rebotier, Yoshi Oida, Christiane Jatahy, Meredith Monk, Éric Ruf, Christophe Rauck and Robert Wilson.
His main creations for the stage are Le Chant des signes (The Song of Signs), commissioned by the Festival des Francophonies en Limousin (2015), Théâtre, a choral performance with 50 artists in 38 languages (2015, 2016), Intranquillité, based on Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (2016-2017), Bacchantes, a version of Euripides’ The Bacchae translated by himself from ancient Greek (2017), Zones en travaux (Construction Zones), commissioned by the Théâtre de la Ville, a piece for forty young artists between 18 and 22 years old, Αιχμάλωτες / Captives, polyphonic tragedy created on the Cycladic island of Milos (2021), 沈黙の聖母/ Our Lady of Silence, site-specific performance at the Kyoto train station, coupled with a multimedia installation at Villa Kujoyama, and 京都の声/ Voices of Kyoto, both created in Japan (2021), Στάχτες χωρίς φωτιά / Ashes of no fire, based on the work of Dimitris Dimitriadis at ancient theater of the island of Milos (2022) and Bois Brûlé (Burned Woods), a text he wrote especially for the international Theater meetings of L’Aria in Corsica in August 2022. His first film, Note di Notte, shot in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the Rosa Bonheur’s Castle in Seine-et-Marne, had its world première in November 2022.
He often interweaves his personal work with new artistic collaborations.
Artist,
Researcher,
Pedagogue
Fluent in five languages, Marcus Borja sees himself as an artist-researcher- teacher. These three different perspectives do not only nourish his career but actually are the main composites of his work.
He has published several articles such as “From the Collective to the Collaborative: Trends and Developments in Plural Scenic Writing” in Les Collectifs dans les arts vivants depuis 1980, (L’Entretemps, 2014); “Active Listening and the sound of silence: Musicality as the Basis for Directing Actors” in La Direction d’acteurs peut-elle s’apprendre ?, ed. Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2015 and “Audible Presence and Listening in Presence : Towards a Sound Poetics of the Theater”, Revue Sciences/Lettres [Online], 5 | 2017.
In November 2015, he co-organized the international conference Pratiques de la voix sur scène : de l’apprentissage à la performance vocale (Voice & the Stage: from training to vocal performance), a partnership between the Gérard Phillipe Theater (Saint-Denis), the CNSAD and the Paris 8 University, that bought together researchers and artists from around the world.
He teaches at numerous superior drama schools such as the ESAD, the École du Nord (Lille), the ESCA (Asnières-sur-Seine) and the Cours Florent, as well as at the universities Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. Moreover, he teaches workshops and masterclasses in France and abroad.