Daniela LABBÉ CABRERA
Stage director

Daniela received a creation grant to help her with her play Desterrio le vertige et la foi

What is your artistic background?
I started acting in my teens. In our home, the only things that mattered were books. My parents, Chilean political exiles and doctors, had risked their lives for their beliefs. They practiced medicine with total self-sacrifice and a desire to make amends. My relationship with theater stems from them, and from the anger that marked my childhood: the anger of seeing their ideals of social justice defeated by the dictatorship. I met artists who shaped my approach to my work, such as Ariane Mnouchkine, Ricardo Lopez-Muñoz, and Carlotta Ikeda. Then I entered the Studio-Théâtre d’Asnières and later the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. Later, I went to Berlin to study for a year at the Ernst Busch Hochschule because I felt a connection to German theater, due to its political and transdisciplinary nature. Theater in a city that had experienced the Berlin Wall could not exist without engaging with the world. I was born on the other side of the Wall (Bucharest), and Berlin reconnected me with the reasons that had led me to theater.
I first worked as an actress for many influential directors, but it was my encounter with Antonio Latella, a master of Italian theater, that changed the course of my career. We formed a European theater company, I learned to speak Italian, and we worked together for seven years. That encounter sparked my desire to write and direct. I founded the collective I am a bird now, bringing together colleagues and friends whose work I admired. I initially created works through collective writing or in collaboration with a partner. Then, in 2020, I decided to write “Cœur Poumon,” the first play in the cycle on care. As a director, you’re never alone, it’s a collective art, but it was with this production that I felt I began to develop a style that was uniquely my own. I was supported by playwright Youness Anzane and an exceptional team of creators with whom I still work. It is with them that I engage in a dialogue through my directing work.

How do you view your profession today?
Like Edouard Louis, I believe that the worse the world gets, the more powerful the need to resist through our imagination becomes. Offering a different vision of what our world could be is a vital necessity both from the perspective of the imagination and as a sensory experience. Theater has nothing in common with what digital media can offer. Our profession has become even more precarious and fragile; it’s shocking.But what we are doing today — questioning our world, our history, our beliefs, synchronizing minds together in real time — I believe is something extraordinarily powerful, and a form of unmistakable resistance to techno-fascism. Public services are being dismantled. Never before have culture, public hospitals, and public education been subjected to such an assault — nor has what we once held sacred. Yet what drives artists is stronger than any steamroller, and I believe theatre will rise again from this unprecedented moment in history.

How do you see yourself in 5 years? In 10 years?
I see myself working with civic organizations those fighting for human rights, the rights of non-humans, teachers, healthcare workers, researchers, ecofeminists, educators…to weave new visions and other possible worlds. I cannot conceive of my work without this connection to civil society. For me, theater is a sacred art driven by a powerful desire for justice.

Interview conducted in 2026
Photographs taken in 2026 by Yama Ndiaye