Valerio Verzin participated in the Startup Forum at Spring Forward 2025

The Unione Ginnastica in Gorizia is bustling with attendees at this year’s Spring Forward festival. Finding a spot at the edge of the room, I sit down with Valerio Verzin, a participant of the Startup Forum, the festival’s programme aimed at emerging dance presenters. With a background in contemporary dance, performing arts management, and literature, Valerio has worked with numerous Italian festivals. Since 2022, he has co-organised Sicilian international performing arts festival, Teatri Riflessi.

We clink plastic cups of Friulano wine and talk about how art interacts with the local environment, the curatorial practices of the festival, and the unique place it occupies within the Sicilian community.

You relocated from northern Italy to Sicily – that’s quite a shift. What drew you to make that move, and how was the transition?

It was a massive cultural shock. I moved to Sicily for an internship during the last year of my MA in cultural management. Which is atypical, I would say – going to the very south of Italy to work. But I found the perfect place with plenty of challenges.

Suddenly, you start to get noticed by others. People ask how you are, even if they don’t know you. But it’s at the heart of what I do as a professional now, which is all about creating human connections.

You work with IterCulture, a Sicilian association that promotes the performing arts, and you co-organise the Teatri Riflessi festival. You’ve described it as community-based. How did you go about building a connection with local people, especially as an outsider?

The starting point was changing the perspective a little bit. Instead of expecting people to go toward the arts, it was the other way around, bringing the arts to the public, especially in public places. We started programming outdoors, in unconventional spaces such as the main square.

And at first, people were like, what’s going on? But then they became curious and recognised that these activities were adding something to Zafferana Etnea, the little town where we are based. Especially having international artists come in, it opened doors towards an intercultural dialogue, and the community response has been very positive.

We try to preserve the content, contemporary dance and contemporary theatre, but make it as welcoming and inclusive as possible. For instance, almost everything is free. You can grab a drink or eat something while attending a show. People feel free to come, lie on the field, watch and talk about dance, and ask questions.

So how do you curate a festival that stays true to contemporary performance while remaining open and inviting to the community?

You never know what will really work. We programme around 13 works that are up to 15 minutes each. That helps the public get used to different languages and aesthetics, and get a glimpse of the international scene.

From there, we slowly introduced other works and tested some more experimental dance works, which went well. 

What draws you to a piece when you’re curating the festival? Can you give an example of something that worked well, or that surprised you?

In 2023, we hosted a Japanese performer, Kenji Shinoe, with a piece that manipulates facial expressions. As soon as we saw it, we thought, this will be a huge success. And it was. Especially for kids, they were so happy and enthusiastic. They were going into the dressing room afterwards to ask for autographs. It was like being at a concert with a pop star.

What’s the benefit, for both artists and audiences, of limiting works to 15 minutes?

For the audience, it’s easier to enter into the piece – especially for new generations who are used to short formats like TikToks. The pieces are short and to the point, which helps, especially at the beginning of your journey as a spectator.

We were curious to challenge artists to design a piece that is finished and well-conceived but only 15 minutes long, not just an excerpt from a longer piece. We have seen artists produce brilliant full evening works, but they were not that strong with the shorter format. But it’s an interesting test, for both the audience and the artists.

People might shy away from contemporary performance or worry they won’t understand it. Is that a perception you’ve encountered in Sicily? And how do you try to shift the relationship between audiences and art form?

It’s really important not to be judgmental towards the public. So we are not trying to educate them or tell them this is good, and whatever you liked before coming to the festival, is not. We would rather display a variety of different things, and some will resonate with them, while others might not. But that helps people create their own taste and interests.

That’s the beauty of this public dimension of the arts, making theatre welcoming to people. Just showing that they can access the arts if they want – because for many, the arts are not seen as a right.