Stories of Eggs and Flour

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photo provided by UW Department of French and Italian

A person in a dark room blows some flour in the air.

Gaia Mencagli in "Stories of Eggs and Flour."

Of all the nations, Italy certainly knows how to transform eggs and flour into delectable repasts. Italian-Danish theater artist Gaia Mencagli performs Stories of Eggs and Flour, a tale of cooking and the magic of that transformation. She plays Rosa, who relives the key elements of her eventful life, all while making fettuccine. This public performance is free and open to all.

media release: This event is presented on the occasion of the 8th edition of the Week of Italian Cuisine in the World, a yearly initiative promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. The theme selected in 2023 is “Dining with the Italian Cuisine: Well-being with Taste.” Sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago. Free and open to all. No registration required.

Stories of Eggs and Flour. Thanks to eggs, flour, and an apron, Rosa tastes one more time the scent of her life. She travels in time, and the space around her transforms. Between handfuls of flour, Rosa relieves some of the most significant moments of her life, accompanied by music, objects, and people from that time. She goes through the times of the second world war and those of a child in the house of rich people. A moment later she is a mature woman in the countryside, then a young lover, and finally she becomes the grandmother, Nonna Rosa. All this while making fettuccine.

The seed for “Stories of Eggs and Flour,” an original solo show by and with Gaia Mencagli, was planted in 2018 during a storytelling project, and back then it was called “Nonna Rosa.” When the world shut down in spring 2020 and we were all forced into isolation, Rosa started making pasta again, again, and again until she found her way to an audience on the 13th of December 2021.

Gaia Mencagli is an Italian-Danish theater artist. The world is her home, but in 2020 she chose to go back to Italy and make her base in Trieste. Here she performed her solo shows Stories of Eggs and Flour and It’s Red! at Hangar Teatri, where she also taught theater to kids and adults. Now she is working as a puppeteer at the Rossetti Theatre with the Marionette di Podrecca while cultivating independent projects of her own. Previously Gaia was living in Minneapolis where she worked as an actor and an educator. There she collaborated with several theater companies as an ensemble member on original shows, and she worked on her first solo show It’s Red! thanks to an artistic residency at Open Eye Figure Theatre, which was later developed at the Grotowski Institute in Poland. She completed her degree at Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California in 2018, and previously studied in Denmark – Vox Viva, Move ́n ́Act, and the Danish Folk School RyHøjskole – and in Italy – with the theater company “Tutti in Scena”, directed by Pier Maria Cecchini. More recently (June 2023) she completed a two-year seminar-based movement training program called Sensible Dance by Claude Coldy. Gaia believes in building bridges. Her experiences in Italy, Denmark, and the US have taught her that collaborations across cultures and countries are possible, beautiful, and worth pursuing. She loves telling and listening to stories and believes in cultivating nests of creativity from which new work can take off and fly.