Growing up with the dream of being an actress can be a gift and a conviction at the same time: I never even tried to be something else. When I was 16 I had my first role - as Ophelia's brother Laerte in a production of Hamlet by Andrea Battistini. I fell in love with everything about it: playing, being the centre of the attention, taking part in rehearsals, the colours, adrenaline, the smells. It was my turning point - and the moment I realised I needed to get out of my home town.

I was born in Sarzana, a small village in the north-west coast of Italy, too small for anyone with any ambitions in life - as in Lou Reed's Small Town. It's a lovely place in summer but somewhere you don't want to be in winter. As soon as I finished the Classico High School - I studied Ancient Greek and Latin (not quite sure why) - I moved to Rome. A few years later I got my degree there in Modern Literature at La Sapienza University. In my second year I got the chance to spend a year studying in Denmark.

Copenhagen was enchanting: balancing on my bike waiting for traffic lights to turn green; snow; silence; blonde beautiful smiling people everywhere. I loved it so much that one day I got on a train and went travelling by myself around Scandinavia - as far as Lapland. My thesis was on the eclectic Danish director Lars Von Trier, and his way of directing actors - his proper, unique, way of relating with them.

Back in Rome, lazily studying for exams, I looked round all the time for parts to play and workshops, and ended up working with Mamadou Dioume and Tapa Sudana. They were both performers in Peter Brook's original company. I was also trying to make myself part of an institution, enter a drama school - but I can now see I was a bit too temperamental a teenager to fit in there, at least then!

Coming from a small town, everything felt like a battle, and I was looking at the word in a childish, naive way. It was a mixture of feeling vulnerable, but at the same time avid for knowledge and experience. What I was studying made me more and more aware that all the arts need to be united somehow, that there were naturally related one to each other - with a unity in which image, sound, rhythm, movement, breath and silence all came together.

So I was looking for a kind of theatre of all the arts. That kind of theatre would be not only words and lines, but movements and bodies - and no need to explain or understand everything with the left side of your brain. I'd done lots of sports - I was a professional swimmer for 6 years, a long-distance runner, volleyball player, ballet dancer, acrobatic performer. I could do languages - native Italian, able to speak English and French, could understand Spanish. Summing up all these things, I finally found a drama school which felt right - Centro Internazionale La Cometa, in Rome.

It was, let's say, tough, spending three whole years every day with the same eight people. We shared every joy, every pain in life; we grew up together, as actors and human beings. It was fulfilling, trying to mix all the arts - well, not all of them, but always keeping the big picture in my mind. And I worked with directors and mentors from the Drama School in London, and GITIS in Moscow. I had the good luck to work with director Pierpalo Sepe - my Pygmalion - who taught me what grace was and how important it is - in theatre and life. It kept me alive and willing to keep on trying this crazy (glorious) career. Free from college, I did a show with the National Youth Theatre in the Soho Theatre. And then, wonderfully, moved to live in London. It's a mesmering adventure, an opening horizon.

END

(c) Caterina Bertone 9 September 08

Caterina Bertone is an actor living in London

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

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