✦ Golden Grolla Award 2008

Arturo Brachetti

The world's greatest quick-change artist

Arturo Brachetti, born in Turin, is universally recognised as the greatest quick-change artist in the world. He discovered the art of transformation as a boy, studying the legacy of Leopoldo Fregoli, the Italian master who invented the genre more than a century ago, and he brought it back to life on the great stages of Europe with a speed and an elegance nobody thought possible. In his hands a costume change is not a trick: it is a full change of identity, completed in a fraction of a second, in front of everyone.

His one-man shows have filled theatres in Paris, London, Montreal and across Asia for decades, winning some of the most prestigious theatre awards in Europe. In a single evening he can become more than a hundred characters: divas, painters, monsters, film icons, all flowing into each other as if the stage itself were dreaming. Alongside his own shows he has directed operas, musicals and grand theatrical events across Europe.

A showman, director and ambassador of Italian theatrical magic, Brachetti received the Golden Grolla in 2008, at the very first ceremony, a natural choice for the artist who turned transformation itself into an art form.

Honoured by Masters of Magic among the legends who have shaped the history of magic.