GIORGIO BARBERIO CORSETTI

Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, who holds the diploma of the ‘Silvio D’Amico’ Academy of Dramatic Art of Rome, founded his first company ‘La Gaia Scienza’ in 1976. In 1984 he set up the Compagnia Teatrale Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, which has been called Fattore K since 2001.

Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s work has been marked from the very beginning by complex research involving the use of different elements such as speech, movement, song, music and especially video and the use of stage machinery as a means of expressing the story, beginning with La Camera Astratta (The Abstract Room) in 1987.

An important phase of Barberio Corsetti’s artistic biography was that of his re-reading and rewriting for the theatre of Kafka’s works, beginning in 1985 with Description of a Struggle and ending with The Trial (for which he was awarded the Ubu Prize in 1999).

Also noteworthy at that time were Faust and Mephistopheles (1995), L’Histoire du Soldat, an unpublished work by Pier Paolo Pasolini staged with Mario Martone and Gigi Dall’Aglio (1995), La nascita della tragedia – un notturno (The Birth of Tragedy – a Nocturne), a travelling production (1996), Il Corpo è una folla spaventata (The Body is a Frightened Crowd) by Majakovsky (1996) and Notte (Night) in 1997. In 1999 he staged Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in 2000 Graal, which was inspired by the texts of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram Von Eschenbach.

In 1999 he became the artistic director of the Theatre Section of the Venice Biennale, where in the summer of 2001 he presented Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. During his three years at the Biennale he opened it up to different forms of contemporary creativity, including the circus. This was the moment when the circus arts became a part of Barberio Corsetti’s artistic research, leading to fruitful collaboration with the French artists of Les Colporteurs for two shows inspired by Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, which opened with Metamorphoses at the Venice Biennale in 2002, followed by Of Animals, Men and Gods, created in 2003 within the archaeological area of Syracuse.

In 2002 Fattore K created in Rome a new project Metamorphoses – a border festival between the theatre and the circus - a festival of contemporary circus put on with the support of the Rome Municipality.

In parallel with his theatrical activity, Barberio Corsetti has also for several years now been carrying out research in the field of opera. His first encounter with opera was in 1999, when he directed Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan at the La Fenice Theatre of Venice.  This was followed the year after by a double bill, La voix humaine by Poulenc/Cocteau and Erwartung by Schönberg at the Teatro Massimo of Palermo. In May 2001 he staged La Bohème at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele of Messina, and in the summer of the same year put on G. Spontini’s two operas Julie and Milton at the Pergolesi-Spontini Festival of Jesi.