by Roberta Calandra
(Translation)
In a year as extreme as this, I would like to greet our readers with a valuable testimony that comes from New York City. A wish for new exchanges between cultures, peoples, and institutions, through the words of a woman who deals with this specifically: Valerian Orani, theater curator and producer, who worked in Italy for 30 years before moving to NYC in 2014. Here, she creates a relationship between the American market and contemporary Italian culture through several projects: Umanism (http://www.umanism.com), Amina (http://www.aminaproject.org), and IAPP (http://www.italianandamericanplaywrightsproject.com), dedicated to dramaturgy. In Italy, she is the artistic director of 369gradi production (http://www.369gradi.it).
Tell us how you got to New York City and why. When one does something so big, there is not always a well-defined reason. I think the reason lays more in the concept of action and determination: I raised the bar of my personal challenges to see if there was a limit, or maybe to show myself that I fear no limit. I wanted to live a concrete experience to transform my own environment for the better: I wanted to be an example of how we can be moved by things we do not like to make things better. Getting here was not easy. As usual, one thinks they have planned everything, but then reality kicks in and unexpected things happen. New York City is a place that keeps amazing you, it challenges you. Now, six years later, I am beginning to better understand how to look at this crazy city; I am finally beginning to feel its personality, to understand its thousand souls, and to have a little fun.
The biggest satisfaction of your journey up to last year… Managing to build beautiful projects which bring me joy and enthusiasm in complete independence, without any limit imposed by others or myself. This has been the biggest professional satisfaction of this journey. Naturally, there are also many private ones that have to do with my own life and my son.
The biggest obstacles? The cost of living. Before I got here, everyone was telling me how New York was very expensive, and I never truly considered it, but the reality is much worse. This has been one of the greatest traumas, but also the compass which has guided me in my New York education. My life has changed greatly since I have moved here, and the biggest change is linked to the way in which I perceive value. In our culture, we learn to judge value as positive or negative. In New York I learnt, not without difficulties, that these two things are not necessarily opposites, and that it is actually better to put them in relation with each other. I learnt that giving the right value to what one does, to time, to actions, to one’s talent, is a good practice which influences one’s relation with others and one’s perception of themselves.
What changed with covid and how are you reorganizing your work? In New York, theaters have been closed since March (https://rewriters.it/intervista-a-silvano-spada-ecco-la-sua-formula-delloff-off-theatre/), and events, concerts and movies have been suspended. It is also hard to talk about social safety nets because the society here is not based on the citizens’ well-being, but on their productivity. The response to the crisis following the pandemic was proactive. Many have left the city and its costly life and dimensioned their lives with more sustainable standards. Many reinvented themselves with new careers. It has been an intense couple of months. Besides the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and the general election have been very stressful and have shown a nation divided in half. Art and culture are deeply interconnected with the surrounding environment, and it is normal that artists have another job which have nothing to do with the arts. It is not surprising to meet artists who are also taxi drivers, waiters or salespeople. The news is backstage workers: they have come up with the most amusing jobs, such as tour managers who organized moves for people who left the city.
What is the atmosphere like in New York City today? The city that never sleeps has slowed down and, for the first time, even the subway shuts down from 1am to 5am. There are few people around, there are no tourists, you do not leave your apartment if it’s not necessary. New York today is showing its underground: poverty and desperation are emerging – they were always there but would get confused with everything else. However, I love the atmosphere in New York City now. Its most human dimension is showing, covid has eliminated (at least for now) the superfluous, you can feel the positive vibrations. One cannot feel, among those who stayed, any rush to go back to normal, but there is a strong feeling that the people are united in the journey to get to the other side with as little damage as possible. We all feel like we have been called to do our part in complying with the rules, in respecting the work of essential workers, in trusting Governor Cuomo, who asked for unimaginable sacrifices to get a hold of a situation that appeared to be impossible to tame. The City today looks nothing like the New York City one usually imagines. It is a new condition, not a permanent one for sure, in which we are all parts of a perfect organization. It is a great inspiration and great pride for us all. It was tough, but also important and a privilege.