The Coronet Theatre is a reimagined architectural and design jewel, originally built as a grand Victorian Playhouse, now a pioneering home for international, cross-disciplinary arts. Curated by Artistic Director Anda Winters, over the past decade it has become a significant cultural landmark.
Known for world and UK premieres, its mission is to bring artists and art forms from around the world, championing work that would not otherwise be seen. The programme enables access for diverse audiences to world-class theatre, dance, music, film and visual arts through co-productions, commissions, and invited works.
Centrally situated in London’s Notting Hill, The Coronet has two main spaces: The Auditorium and The Print Room Studio. With the additional performances and exhibitions in the bar, the atmospheric upper rooms, and basements, the whole building is a living global showcase.
Photo: Laila Pozzo
I GORDI / TEATRO FRANCO PARENTI
A playful and profound parable of life from youth to old age, set entirely in a bedroom.
Visite invites us into the world of a couple, their family and the community around them – all unfolding within a single room that bears witness to a lifetime of love, loss and transformation.
Seen through Gordi’s distinctive, offbeat lens, where the unexpected can erupt at any moment, the piece unfolds as a sequence of encounters: visits from friends, family and strangers, each shaped by shared experiences – tender, unexpected and sometimes outright bizarre.
Using gesture, movement (with and without masks), sound, and the striking expressiveness of their trademark papier-mâché faces, Teatro dei Gordi creates a rich, wordless world that transcends
Photo: Laila Pozzo
CAST & CREATIVE TEAM
Concept and Direction
By and with
Dramaturg:
Masks and Costumes
Scenography
Lighting Design
Sound Design
Audio-lighting
Technician:
Assistant Director
Production
Supported by
Riccardo Pippa
Cecilia Campani, Giovanni Longhin, Andrea
Panigatti, Sandro Pivotti, Maria Vittoria
Scarlattei, Matteo Vitanza
Giulia Tollis
Ilaria Ariemme
Anna Maddalena Cingi
Paolo Casati
Luca De Marinis
Alice Colla
Daniele Cavone Felicioni
Teatro Franco Parenti
POEM: THE ONION, BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
TEATRO DEI GORDI: VISITE MASTERCLASS
Fri 15 May; 3pm
Join us for a special free masterclass with Teatro Dei Gordi, the company behind Visite, and director Riccardo Pippa.
Participants will be invited into a dialogue around the working process behind Visite and the construction of meaning through gesture.
The session will focus in particular on the masks, which participants can observe up close and, where possible, handle directly, exploring their material qualities and how they function within the piece
Photos: Dimitri Djuric
Photos: Noemi Ardesi
Photos: Noemi Ardesi
TEATRO DEI GORDI
Teatro dei Gordi is an independent theatre company founded by graduates of Milan’s Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Arts. Since 2010, the ensemble has created original works and cultural projects rooted in collaboration and collective creation. Guided by director Riccardo Pippa, the company explores a distinctive form of physical, non-verbal theatre that transcends language barriers. In 2015,Teatro dei Gordi won the Fondazione Cariplo “Funder35” award through the T.R.E. project, and in 2019 received the Hystrio–Iceberg Award, recognising it as one of the most innovative groups on the Italian theatre scene.
Photo: Masiar Pasquali
A NOTE FROM THE COMPANY ON VISITE
We'd like to tell a simple, common story, to capture, if possible, the mythical underpinnings of an everyday life close to us.
Much of our work has been inspired by Ovid's Metamorphosis of Philemon and Baucis.This myth resonates within us: conviviality as a way of life; the need to have an intimate place, or sometimes to leave it; becoming custodians of something or someone; metamorphosis as a sign of the times, a view of the world, a vital necessity and a dynamic stage.
The seasons of life pass through a bedroom: visits from friends, memories, dreams, and the act of visiting as a last, possible act of resistance. We imagine ourselves in ten, fifty, sixty years, like a child afraid of the injection and playing doctor like someone who wishes to
GETTING TO KNOW
TEATRO DEI GORDI
Teatro Dei Gordi’s name was coined in 2010 in a rented flat in Venice – a handful of young performers, freshly graduated from the Paolo Grassi drama school in Milan, workshopping in their downtime. It stuck partly as a pun on their academy (grassi meaning fat or rich in Italian), partly because in Latin gurdus means fertile ground.They are officially Teatro dei Gordi; informally, simply Gordi.
They have always operated as a collective: eleven members, no
SULLA MORTE SENZA ESGAGARE
Pippa has spoken in interviews about a key principle that governs this: it is the bodies that inhabit the masks, not the masks that clothe the bodies.They are not made to measure, but entirely freehand, and no two are alike – which means casting is itself a creative act, one full of unexpected discoveries. A mask originally intended to be a man may turn out, on an actress, to have far stronger character.
Sometimes the mask dictates the dramaturgy rather than the other way around: during the making of Sulla Morte Senza Esagerare, a mask created to represent a child came out too short on the actor’s face. Rather than remaking it, they lengthened the chin and added wrinkles, arriving at an elderly woman whose upper face still carried the eyes and expression of a child. From that strange tension, one of the show’s most affecting scenes was born.
Gordi’s theatre is almost entirely non-verbal.This is not a programmatic stance against language, but an instinct that the stories they want to tell are better told through the body.The shows are entirely built on the dynamics of physical scores and the mime of gestures and microgestures.The inspiration for this approach came partly from the German company Familie Flöz, whose wordless mask theatre Pippa encountered early in his career and found both liberating and reassuring – if they could hold an audience for ninety minutes without a word of text, so could Gordi.The common thread of Gordi’s path is the search for a specifically theatrical language, made of movement, scores of concrete gestures, objects, clothes, masks, music, poetry, presence and encounter.
Photos: Dimitri Djuric
Teatro dei Gordi created made five major productions since 2016: Sulla Morte Senza Esagerare (2016) – their breakthrough – placed a world-weary Death on a park bench and sent her a procession of the living: accident victims, restless escorts, elderly husbands, would-be suicides.Tragic and comic in equal measure, it won multiple prizes on its debut.The Coronet Theatre brought it to London in 2023; it sold out.
Visite (2018) puts time at the centre of the piece – the whole span of a human life unfolding in a single bedroom through a series of visits from friends, family, doctors and strangers. It won the HystrioIceberg Award in 2019, Italy’s most significant recognition for an emerging company.
Pandora (2020), selected for the Venice Biennale Teatro, sent six performers cycling through over fifty identities in a public toilet. It played at the Coronet in 2025 and was again popular with audiences and critics alike.
