Rébecca Balestra was born in Geneva in 1988 and completed her Bachelor’s degree in theatre at the Manufacture performing arts university in Lausanne in 2013. Since then, she has impressed with her acting and comedy skills. She works with the theatre collective tg STAN and the French-speaking Swiss directors Mathieu Bertholet, Anne Bisang, Oscar Gómez Mata, Natacha Koutchoumov, Jean Liermier, Hervé Loichemol and Michèle Pralong, among others. Balestra is also an author and director. In the 2018/19 season, she was a member of the Théâtre de Poche’s ensemble in Geneva. She also has ties to the Théâtre populaire romand in La Chaux-de-Fonds, where she has presented a number of her own works. She was awarded the Studer/Ganz Prize for dramatic writing back in 2013. Balestra often makes guest appearances on RTS, including her segment La chronique de Rébecca Balestra on the talkshow Les beaux parleurs, in which she addresses her wry, poetic take on current affairs.
A versatile actress, Balestra is equally at home with the classics and contemporary works and performs on many stages, both small and large, throughout French-speaking Switzerland, including the Comédie de Genève and the Théâtre du Carouge in Geneva as well as Arsenic and the Théâtre Boulimie in Lausanne. She began to develop her own creations after graduating alongside her acting career. In her first, short one-woman show Flashdanse (2015), which she performed at the C’est déjà demain festival in the Théâtre Sévelin in Lausanne, she recreated the striptease scene from the 1980s cult movie, calling the notions of glamour and beauty into question in hilariously Frenchified fashion. This was followed by solo pieces such as Tropique (2015), Show Set (2016), Piano-bar (2019) and Olympia (2021), which bore testament to her abilities not only as an actress, but also as a writer. Her comedic tour de force is the eponymous RÉBECCA BALESTRA (2022), in which she conquered the world of stand-up comedy while playing with its conventions.
Actor, commentator, poet: if “for souls nobly born, valour does not await the passing of years”, then Rébecca Balestra is without doubt a heroine of our times. In chronicling our world as it is, full of upheaval and turmoil, she has understood that we are living in an era in which the choices we face are rather like the Cornelian dilemma. Given the obstacles that fate strews in our path, how do we map out a future without lapsing into tragedy or just laughing at it all? Throughout her oeuvre to date and her performances, which range from the sublime to the bizarre, she recasts today’s world as a postmodern tragi-comedy, setting the scene for the groundbreaking career of her disillusioned diva character.
