Born from a pirate town in the north of Italy Valentina has traveled through space and time to gather the knowledge that she brings here today. She first sailed to Ancient Greece where she finally found the hearts of the truest tragedy and the purest comedy while drinking wine with Aristophanes and Euripides at a tavern after a performance. At the Colosseum in Rome she discovered true tenacity when she was confronted with a pack of fierce lions for the entertainment of the masses. She broke bread with the priests in the Middle Ages and when she thought she had learned all their Mysteries she moved East to study the art puppetry and shadows over in the Orient. But still her land was calling and she caught a shortcut through Hell. Where she found a rather spiteful young man, Dante he was called, all intent in writing new tortures for some rather unfortunate souls. She emerged somewhere off Florence into the camp of a travelling company. There she found the Commedia dell"Arte. She learnt how to use the body and Gramelot to communicate with people who spoke a different language and she finally found a family. Like her these pirates of the land were not to be tied down to a certain place. she was now travelling in company. They traversed Europe. In Spain they met Lorca who said that life is but a dream, in England they bumped into Shakespeare who thought her how to use verse and rhythm to her own advantage and how to keep the audience amused with the not too occasional dirty joke, and in the dark and stormy German nights Isabella Andreini thought her how to write for herself female centric narratives. Not that women were ever meant to play women only in her Italian family. When they dropped her off once again at the entrance of her unruly city she didn’t expect to find there her next international connection. She spent long nights by the seaside chatting with Checkov and corresponding with Stanislavski discussing how one man’s comedy will almost always become another man’s tragedy and viceversa. She thought she had mastered the art of the emotional memory and how to live in the given circumstances. It was time to travel again. This time she went West. From Miller and Williams she learnt how to appreciate the lives of the small man in a big new world. In Mamet’s pauses she found new unexpressed worlds and then she travel South to the land of Spregelburd and in dialogue with him and Sinisterra she finally found out that all these rules she had learnt can be broken, deconstructed and put together anew in new and exciting forms. 

 

These days she is mainly in the UK honouring the memory of her friend Shakespeare with crazy, travelling productions, full of dirty jokes and sword fights, she is still writing, and most of the time she is using her voice to weave word and sound patters that, like magic spells, bring the listener into new and exciting fantasy worlds.