The secret ingredients for a good art entrepreneur
Teatro-Cucina is neither a play with dinner included nor a dinner with someone acting: it is a play representing life through food and its cooking phases, an experience where theatre mixes with every course and where every course has a specific meaning. This show is an idea of Valentino Infuso, actor and Bocconi alumnus. Teatro-Cucina has been on stage for 15 years at the Atelier Teatro in Polvere (founded together with director Elisabetta Faleni), located in via Bastia 15.
"The mix food-acting is typical in theatre. The peculiarity of this play is not the subject itself, but the way we perform it" says the actor, dancer and artisan. 15 years after the debut, the interest that public has for Teatro-Cucina remains the same: "I was moved when I found out that a little boy who watched our performance 10 years before, has then come back at the age of 29 with his partner. This made us think that we are able to strike the right notes". And he is right, as noticed by the director Gabriele Salvatores, who watched one of the first performances in 2001, and the chef Davide Oldani, who made a contribution to the menu of Teatro-Cucina. "We invited him to watch the play in 2003. He had a scientific attitude towards the food: he analyzed, opened, broke up into different parts, smelled and then tasted each course".
Valentino has always been hungry for theatre, since he was a child and lived in Naples. "Art was already in my life: my mother was a dance teacher. Besides, in Naples theatre is everywhere, especially in the kitchen". So he had arrived in Milan already with a strong theatrical verve and with a project in his mind: study economics to understand how to make the work of the actor a productive work. This is the reason why he decided to enroll at Bocconi University, convinced that the best way to achieve an artistic independence is to reach financial self-sufficiency.
"Adding the food factor, the marginal cost becomes lower than the marginal gain", he explains, "we have few seats, so we need to sell the ticket at a higher price, but the price has to be justified by what we offer to our public". What's more important, in Valentino's opinion, is the big picture: a good entrepreneur of art has to be also an artist, he has to know how the development of a creative idea works. "Studying cultural entrepreneurship isn't enough, because we are talking first about works of art, and then about products", he says. "Division of tasks is important, but an actor must be able to put a nail on the stage. As well as a manager of arts he has to be also an artist", he concludes.
This is one of the ingredients of the success of Teatro-Cucina and of other plays performed by the company Teatro in Polvere. Next appointment is on New Year's Day with the debut of Novella Vaga, name deriving from a nouvelle vague's ironic mangling: a light and funny comedy telling the stories of a restaurant team.