We sat down with Alessia Siniscalchi to chat about her latest show, Garden Party – Truman Capote’s Black and White Celebration. Artistic Director of Kulturscio’k, she grew up in Italy and is based in Paris, and has been developing Garden Party for more than a year. Her work is strongly influenced by questions of gender, power, desire, and social performance, and collaborates with artists from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Your work often interrogates social performance—what drew you to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball as a lens through which to explore that idea on stage?
My work explores social performance, and Capote’s Ball is less interesting to me as a party than as a mechanism of success and sabotage. I want to precise that the party in our show is not real. And if there is no party now here will probably be an after party. I’m fascinated by how a genius can orchestrate their own fall. Capote built a world of glamour and power, yet through his own trajectory, he contributed to the collapse of his position. In Garden Party, I use the Ball as a lens to explore how visibility, desire and recognition can turn into exclusion and self-destruction. It becomes a space to question not only who succeeds, but how success itself contains the seeds of its own undoing.
Having grown up in Italy and now based in Paris, how do those different cultural sensibilities shape the way you approach power, desire and identity in Garden Party?
Yes, coming from different cultural contexts—and from a family of lawyers, having been trained in law myself before choosing art—has shaped how I approach power, desire and identity. These perspectives allow me to navigate between instinct and structure, emotion and analysis. My work reflects this multiplicity: identity is never fixed, but fragmented and evolving. Each piece becomes a space where these different influences meet, creating a dialogue between cultures, disciplines and personal histories. The power of passion is the only kind of power I recognize as interesting and desirable. My idea of life and art is that they are intertwined to the point that there is no line of demarcation. That is why this line by Truman Capote became the signature of my exploration.
The show blurs cabaret, theatre and immersive experience—what possibilities does that hybridity unlock for you that a more traditional form wouldn’t?
Blending cabaret, theatre and immersive experience allows me to move beyond the idea of a fixed performance. There is a written structure, but also space for improvisation and transformation. I’m not interested in producing a static object, but in creating an evolving process. Each version of Garden Party changes—performers, dynamics, even the relationship to space. This hybridity opens a freedom where the work can adapt and grow, rather than repeat itself. It allows contradictions and different artistic languages to coexist, creating a living experience rather than a closed form.
As both director and performer, how do you navigate your own presence within a work that actively invites the audience into the same social “game”?
I navigate between structure and exposure. As a director, I build the framework; as a performer, I enter the uncertainty of the moment. In the improvised sections, I invite the audience into an experience where they are selected rather than a defined “social game.” The goal is to create a situation where spectators become aware of their own position—how they look, judge, or participate. My presence is not about control, but about opening a space where something unstable and real can happen, even for me. Capote himself was very unstable with a childhood filled with violence and abuse. And when he meets Perry Smith to create his masterpiece In Cold Blood, Capote himself was then declaring that if he knew what this book could create, he would have decided to stop in Garden city.
Capote’s world was built on glamour and exclusion—how do you invite audiences to both indulge in and critique that seductive surface?
Capote’s world was built on glamour, but also on exclusion. I’m interested in that seductive surface—because it’s precisely what makes the system powerful. Today more than before when we keep discovering horrible things on the Epstein files .. social hypocrisy brought people to trust a miserabile like him. The audience is invited to enter this world, to enjoy it, but also to feel its contradictions. Not to be attracted but repulsing it. To hear gossips and secrets spreading in the room while we sing the original song Our Lady has a secret. What seems like a celebration reveals underlying hypocrisy and tension. The piece doesn’t only speak about Capote, but about our society today, where similar dynamics persist. The critique emerges through experience, not through distance.that is why we wrote Fear of darkness . A song about the fear to be forgotten.
Working with a diverse, international group of collaborators, how do different artistic and cultural perspectives challenge or sharpen your vision for the piece?
Working with international collaborators brings complexity, and that’s essential. I don’t expect them to simply follow my vision—instead, I consider them as full creators within the work. Each performer, artist or collaborator contributes their own perspective, language and identity. The dramaturgy is built through this encounter. My role is to hold the direction, but also to allow space for these different voices to transform the piece. This process makes the work richer, more unstable, and more alive.