Floriana Frassetto

Floriana Frassetto (Swiss) studied at Academia Alessandro Fersen in Rome from 1967 to 1969. She completed her training as an actress attending a school in mime and acrobatics at Roy Bosier‘s Teatro Studio. She then worked with the company of Roy Bosier in several school productions that toured Italy. The idea of founding Mummenschanz resulted from meeting, in late 1970, Andres Bossard and Bernie Schürch—two young Swiss clowns called Before and Lost who performed a partially spoken show. Frassetto became the third member of the new company in 1972 and together they co-created the repertoire of Mummenschanz, converting the spoken numbers to masked visuals. Frassetto has performed on tour worldwide for the last 47 years. She considers herself an artisan of fantasy and has always been motivated to construct new shapes along with Schürch. Since his departure in 2012, she has been challenged by the idea of creating a new show, which she has now accomplished, employing plenty of new ideas. This has been possible thanks to a collaboration with Tina Kronis and Richard Alger. Among Frassetto’s other work have been the choreography and the costumes for Giancarlo Sbragia’s Faust and André Heller‘s musical Body and Soul, and an artistic collaboration with Isabelle Baudet for the children’s musical Oliver Twist in Lausanne, Switzerland. Frassetto is the artistic director of Mummenschanz.