The Teodelapio Theatre School turns 16 and sails on toward this year’s Open Lessons, ie meetings with showmen and performers at the Sala Pegasus.

The first such meeting will be on 30 November at 18.00, featuring writer and screenwriter Giuseppe Manfridi, whose La cuspide di ghiaccio (The Ice Cusp) competed for the 2008 Strega Awards; Manfridi is a successful theatre author whose scripts include Ultrà by Ricky Tognazzi.

His lecture, titled Anatomy of Plot Twists, will be an actual performance, already successfully represented in Rome and elsewhere in Italy; it is a reflection on how the unexpected works on the human nature, in a virtuoso play of quotations and reflections, from Chekhov to Pirandello, from Dario Argento to Maradona.

Giuseppe Manfridi was born in Rome, where he returned after many years in Paris, France. He is considered among the most outstanding Italian dramatists and is the author of worldwide-represented comedies. His most important works include Giacomo il prepotente (James the Bully) and Ti amo, Maria! (I Love You, Mary). He authored the screenplays for successful films, including Ultrà (Ultras – 1991), Maniaci Sentimentali (Sentimental Maniacs – 1994) and Vite Strozzate (Strangled Lives – 1996). In 2006 he also debuted as a novelist with Cronache dal Paesaggio (Landscape Chronicles).

The Open Lessons’ second appointment will be on Thursday 21 December at 18, featuring actress and author Anna Leonardi who will lecture “La lettura ad alta voce –la difficile arte del traduttore che crea” (Reading out: the difficult art of the creating translator), an analysis of the relation between reading and writer. The last appointment will be on 8 February at 18 and will feature professor at the Bologna University Laura Mariani, and will focus on two icons of world theatre: “Diversamente belle – Vecchiaia eroica di Sarah Bernhardt; Più che bellezza di Eleonora Duse” (Otherwise beautiful – Sarah Bernhardt’s Heroic Old Age; Eleonora Duse’s More Than Beauty).

The Association Teodelapio has been working on theatre didactics for 16 years now, with workshops for schools and through the foundation of a theatre school for all ages, supported by the City of Spoleto and directed by Pietro Biondi and Anna Leonardi, all the while leading an intense activity in the world of theatre, performing arts and communication through recurring meetings with Italian scholars and professional entertainers, on stage and on the screen.