"A very rich range of impressions that catch the heart of the spectator. Do not miss this marvelous poem.”

— AVUI, Barcelona, SPAIN

    “The Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo is a solid team with few competitors in Europe.”

— LA STAMPA - Turin – ITALY

    “An Italian theatre group able to dance, on stilts, a waltz with the elegance of the age of Anna Karenina...”

— Eugenio Barba, La canoa di carta

    About the Valse:

    Valse is an open-air performance built around an indispensable piece of European culture – namely, the waltz, performed gracefully on stilts.

    This celebrated work will be specially tailored to Wuzhen's beautiful Shi Tian Square, a stunning counterpoint to an ancient Italian piazza with its splendid old silk factory facade. In keeping with their usual method of performing many iterations of a work over a long repertory period of many years, TTB has used a number of approaches with this piece. The result is now being performed in its full version.

    Using the symbol of a red thread, a restless girl, eluding the surveillance of her tutor, opens her eyes to the world of adults at a great ball. A silly but sly monkey tries to lure her in with its golden ball.

    Stilts, by now classic accessories of open-air theatre, expand the party full of low-cut dresses, tulle, and dinner jackets into a folly that pushes back against the heavy formal atmosphere, resisting the lead-grey boredom of our cultural life.

Creative Team:

Writer & Director: Renzo Vescovi

Performers: Tiziana Barbiero, Silvia Baudin, Antonietta Fusco, Rosa Da Lima Iannone, Caterina Scotti, Veronica Varesi Monti; Francesco Carrà, Giuseppe Chierichetti, Mauro Danesi, Ruben Manenti, Alessandro Rigoletti

Technician: Pietro Bailo

Organizer: 

Emanuela Presciani

    About Teatro Tascabile Di Bergamo
    TTB Teatro tascabile di Bergamo – Accademia delle Forme sceniche soc. coop. ONLUS was founded in 1973 by Renzo Vescovi following the path of Jerzy Grotowsky’s Teatr-Laboratorium and Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret.
    The theatre is in Bergamo Alta, in the former Monastero del Carmine, where its activity of theatre-laboratory takes place, developing its research about outdoor theatre, eastern theatre-dance, pedagogy and actor’s dramaturgy.
    Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo’s peculiarity is to be a “group theatre”. Our work is based on the interaction of each member, as in renaissance art workshops: not a “company”, but a group of people cooperating in a continuative daily effort to not just produce a play, but also to work on what’s behind the play, realizing specific and autonomous creative processes not to obtain an immediate result, but to give a parallel and continuous cultural elaboration.
    After founder and director Renzo Vescovi’s passing in 2005, TTB moved towards collective directing, continuing the production of indoor and outdoor performances and organizing cultural initiatives in cooperation with local organizations, both national and international.
    The names Teatro tascabile di Bergamo – Accademia delle Forme Sceniche reflect TTB’s double feature: on one side our performance, both indoor and outdoor, on the other pedagogy and research on the art of acting and its many techniques. TTB is an international theatre with its roots in its territory where we organize Events, Festivals,  Performances, theatre projects for young people, a theatre school, theatre culture and pedagogy initiatives. It started as a small amateur theatre in Bergamo at the end of the 1950s. During the 1970s TTB starts, alongside indoor  shows, a research on open air theatre, creating a specific category named “La poésie dans l’espace”: that is outdoor performances with the passion and precision of regular indoor ones. In 1978 we started our research on eastern stage culture (particularly on classic Indian theatre in Bharata Natyam, Orissi, Kathakali e Kuchipudi’s styles), spreading its critical-artistic knowledge through the foundation of IXO – Istituto di Cultura Scenica Orientale. Through the eighties and nineties we started research on flamenco, clown art and popular chants. In 2008 opened “Via Bonomini”, the skeletons’ theatre, lyrical and grotesque, connected to the “macabri bergamaschi” imaginative world in 2012 we created, in collaboration with the Bergamo University, the “Fondo Librario Renzo Vescovi”, open for consultation to students and researchers.
    TTB has its roots in Bergamo. During 40 years we realized or produced 111 performances in Italy and 36 in foreign countries and held conferences, laboratories and lectures cum demonstration on the techniques we practice. We also organized more than 70 events in Italy and abroad (Festivals, Shows, Special Events, pedagogical Activities). 
    Since 2011 TTB is a ONLUS social cooperative whose aim is to pursue the community’s interest for human promotion and for the citizens’ social integration. Theatrical craftsmanship, and the necessary training for it, is based on a role distinction type of collaboration (different duties and specializations) and not on the sectorialization of the jobs, implying values and rules that aim to the creation of a “collective mind”.
   Live performances, especially outdoor, have been experimented for a long time not only as an artistic product, but also as a way to revitalize the relationship between groups and individuals, in situations of difficult social interaction, outcasting, handicap, linguistic, ethnic or religious differences, etc.

    Actor: Giuseppe Chierichetti 
    Born in Gagliole (MC) in 1948 he got a degree in engineering at the University in Milan in 1974.
    In 1972 in Bergamo he founded, with other members, the theatre company where he has been working until now, the TTB Teatro tascabile di Bergamo. 
    Since then, his professional career is the same as his theatre group, and can be shortly described in the following figures: 59 plays performed more than 1500 times for more than half a million spectators; invited in the most important Italian and International festivals in 38 countries of 4 continents; it got many reviews and has been subject for various degree thesis (Universities of Milan, Bologna, Rome, Perugia, Florence, Bielefeld-Germany etc.); founder of the Oriental Staging Culture Institute (IXO) in Italy; active in the national and international theatre field with reports, workshops, conferences, meetings, ateliers,  publications, films, a specialized library and video library on the actor's art and Theatre Anthropology.
    On the one side, the Street Theatre with its popular audience and the research on the spaces. In this field, Giuseppe Chierichetti has also been responsible for the direction of many performances of the repertoire of Tascabile.
    On the other side, the oriental stage tradition that Mr Chierichetti has practised entirely (Orissi, Bharata Natyam, Balinese Dance-Drama) concentrating quite soon on Kathakali, the discipline of which he is now responsible inside the Tascabile.
    In charge of his group Mr Chierichetti has been exploring the Kathakali Dance-Drama continuously, almost daily, for more than 15 years. His skill in this actor's art allowed him to present his performances in many countries in the Western World and even in India during several artistic and religious events.

>>>