Valentina Bassi I had no idea. When she started to watch the Catalan documentary “Beyond the mirror”, she did not imagine that she was opening the door to what today leads her to get on stage with “The Barbarian Gestures” (Picadero Theater). The commotion caused by the stories of people whose lives had radically changed from one day to the next, was the impulse to begin to germinate what is now a work.
“I felt moved by some particular situations in that documentary, I called Cristian (Drut, director) and Juan Ignacio (Fernández, author), and they began to give feedback with things they imagined. Later the rest of the cast was added and there was also feedback. An essence remained but it is wonderful what it has been transformed into, ”he says.
News: She says that the documentary moved her and in a note she gave to this magazine in 2010 she said: “I want to work for what moves me.”
Valentina Bassi: Oh look! It is so. When I’m given a character, 98% of the time I find pleasure in the character. But this is to start from another side, from what moves me, what I want to tell. When it was Teatro x la Identidad (Bassi was one of the pioneers of that movement) it was also like that. You work for what moves you. When what moves you is desire, what moves you, the drive is very strong.
News: In tune with Teatro x la Identidad, this work also brings up the question of who we are when we don’t remember.
Bassi: Totally. Each of the characters is in conflict with identity and the family as an institution, too. My character is the one who lost his memory and has to start putting the pieces together little by little. The gap between what he feels and perceives is tremendous. The work has a lot of black humor and an aesthetic more from the world of dreams that allows us to act very freely.
Between the original push and the debut the pandemic passed. Also putting Nancy’s body in “El hincha” (Flow and El Nueve), a series that won the 2021 Audiovisual Rebirth Contest. She says that when she was called and found out that Alejandro Ciancio would direct and the cast he had, including Victorio D’Alessandro, Luis Machín and Martín Slipak felt it like a prize.
News: Did something radically change your life, like the testimonies in the documentary?
Bassi: No, I didn’t have that. The link I can make is that since Lisandro (his 14-year-old son) has autism, he inevitably has a different notion of reality, which sometimes amazes me and sometimes worries me a lot, and both things together. I have been living with what it is like to live with a perception of reality that is different for 14 years, it is to accept that it does not play what I played, that it makes everything different. At the moment in which one accepts that, it is that he begins to relate. Many times I say: “I can’t wait to get into her little head and stay for 48 hours, to see if I can understand something else!”, because autism is mysterious. They are all different and they are included within a spectrum but beware, it is Lisandro, my son, it is not a diagnosis, I always had it very clear. It’s Lisan with his peculiarities, that he has a lot and among them is that he has a very different head. So many times I thought about being in his head to understand better. And a little what I do in the work is to get into a head that perceives everything very strange. As an actress, I am very amused by that.
News: Art is a great possibility to digest life, isn’t it?
Bassi: Yes. I cannot live without acting and I have known that for a long time because, They give me the character they give me, I will be acting what happens to me. One drains there.
News: Did you learn to take things better or did you always have a good disposition?
Bassi: No, I did not learn anything in my life. Years of psychology! (laughs).
News: I remember her post about motherhood where she said: “It didn’t make me happier or stronger or I learned anything.”
Bassi: I was angry that day, and I was not acting, because when I act I don’t have as much need to write little things on IG (laugh). My psychologist tells me that I learned a lot, but the truth is that I am very anxious and I have a son who is telling me all the time: “Mom, an anxious mom doesn’t go with me”, and I can’t stop then I tell him: “Son, I’m sorry, you got an anxious mom.” That’s how we are and that’s how we create our bond (laughs). Without a doubt, one learns things in life, but I have the feeling that it is very difficult. I’m not very zen or very om, I fight with things.
News: From the outside it seems that he received everything with open arms.
Bassi: Surely they are both, that is, while I fight, I accept it (laughs). But there is a romanticization of motherhood. It bothers me when they tell me: “These things happen to you because you are strong”. I am not strong, I am weak, things affect me a lot and with motherhood, I am weaker and more fragile because I have more and more fears. And it annoys me that, on top of the fact that I have a lot of problems, they give me the label of “the strong”, “the madrasa”. That post was like a catharsis and I didn’t delete it because it’s part of me. In addition, as an actress, one is constantly reviewing oneself and that of the perfect mother, not me.
News: You are about to turn 50, how are you doing with the change of decade?
Bassi: I just have to relax because the passage of time has already arrived. I don’t like it, I would like to be eternal, I would like to stay in my 40s but well, I’m at a point where I feel good, I feel like a better actress.
News: What does the medium do with age?
Bassi: It’s awful, we have less and less work but the position I have towards acting is very gratifying, which is not the same as when I was twenty or thirty when, I don’t know why, I felt I had to prove that I was a good actress and that is a terrible effort. Now I feel that I don’t have to prove anything, that I work to relate to my colleagues, to make catharsis of the things that are happening to us and to connect with the public. I’m an actress to relate.
