Gianna Valenti Guaitamacchi

Gianna Valenti is a choreographer, actress, performer, improvisation coach for dancers and physical acting tutor.

She studies Classical, Modern and Contemporary Dance. Travelling between Italy, France and England, she studies Graham, Limon, Cunningham, Release Techniques and Body Contact. In the meanwhile, she graduates in History at Milan State University. She then earns a tuition to complete a Master of Arts at the University of California Riverside. At UCR she devotes herself to investigate her interests in dance and choreography at a practical and theoretical level. She studies History and Theory of Dance, Modern Dance, Dance Pedagogy, Laban and Bartenieff Techniques, Dance Antropology, Dance Reconstruction, Dance Improvisation and Choreographic Composition. She researches performance practices and the Theory and Analysis of Choreographic Processes graduating with Susan Leigh Foster and Heidi Gilpin.

From California she moves to Eastern Europe and she works in Lithuania as a choreographer and a pedagogue, teaching Choreography, Contemporary Dance, Dance History, Movement and Improvisation. In the same years, she receives a EC fellowship for young artists to study New Dramaturgy at Amsterdam Summer University with Marianne Van Kerkhoven and Hans-Thies Lehmann. As a choreographer she works also with actors and student-actors and takes up studying acting herself. She chooses the Strasberg and then the Stella Adler Methods in order to meet very different coaching traditions from the ones she is coming from. She then researches and coaches in acting, performance and physical theatre, searching for the grounding principles of bodily and verbal action in performance practice.

From these teaching years CorpoAct and DanceAct take form. CorpoAct is Gianna’s teaching vision for theatre and performance and DanceAct is her teaching vision for dance. Both programs view teaching as a coaching activity in which techniques and methods are used and absorbed to develop a level of self-awareness and creative autonomy which she refers to as a Technology for Freedom. Freedom to follow a path of self-transformation and personal and artistic growth. And freedom to stand up for our unique identity as people and for our unique artistic visions as dancers, actors and performers.

Having always choreographed for groups of both dancers and actors, she’s currently working on evening-long choreographic projects for solo dancers. She takes care of the dramaturgy, of the directing and applies her choreographic coaching -a highly collaborative practice enacted to support the dancer’s unique identity and talent and the dancer’s abilities to make autonomous creative choices.