Biennale College Teatro / Valerio Leoni - Cuspidi

Cuspidi is the new play by Valerio Leoni, winner of the Biennale College Theatre call for Directors under 35 for the two-year period 2022/2023. A Roman director, actor and playwright, born in 1988, Valerio Leoni worked as a director while conducting research into theatre in Poland, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Italy. The founder in 2015 of the Agiteatro company, he is the artistic director, along with Sofia Guidi, of the cultural centre Labirion Officine Trasversali, which he founded in Rome in 2018. It was at Labirion that in 2022 Leoni developed the original idea for Cuspidi.

Selected from a shortlist of six candidates because “his artistic career moves beyond and away from a visually and linguistically realistic trajectory to redirect the investigation by instilling into it an emotional tone that can cast light on, move or freeze the bodies and the plurality of their monologuing voices within a mental landscape imagined by Magritte”, Valerio Leoni creates his play around three characters-emotions: A consisting of Screams (Sofia Guidi) which “contains within it the concepts of discomfort, difficulty of living in the world, expressive confusion”; B consisting of Dust (Sara Giannelli), which “maintains its own gaze turned towards the past, remaining disunited”; C consisting of Boxes (Jacopo Provenzano), which “relies on classification and organization as a weapon to defend itself against the chaos of the world”. Self-standing universes, with their own habitat, substance and rhythm, but forced to share the same space, at the end of the play A B C will emerge from their conditions as islands and re-establish a dialogue.