FEW ARTISTS HAVE followed their dreams as literally as Ennio Marchetto. Like a pop culture annunciation, the vision that launched his career appeared 25 years ago, while he was asleep.
'The idea came from a dream I had of Marilyn Monroe walking from the clouds in a pink dress,' says Marchetto, 45, a quick-change performer who ingeniously morphs himself from one cultural figure into another using cardboard costumes, his expressive face and lithe limbs. 'The funny thing was she was already in paper. So I woke up and took pink cardboard and did a costume of her.'
Marchetto had made three-dimensional costumes for the traditional Venice Carnivale, but for five years after the Marilyn dream she remained his only cardboard outfit. Gradually, he expanded his repertoire and performed for friends, who loved his send-ups of the famous. But it remained only a pastime, a break from working at his father's coffee-machine repair company, until a friend found Marchetto a spot at a theatre in the nearby city of Padua, where he became a hit.
In 1988, at the age of 28, he beat more than 300 competitors to win the Golden Mosquito award for new comics in Bologna. Among his early fans was Sosthen Hennekam, a Dutch national who had worked as a dressmaker for Jean Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo and Thierry Mugler. The two teamed up to expand Marchetto's cast and create technically superior costumes that were more durable and reliable, and thus suitable for the demands of the stage.
In 1990, Marchetto performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where agents from all over the world witnessed positive audience reaction to the impersonations, and he was soon invited to perform in countries as distant as Canada and Australia. 'After Edinburgh, I was much surer of myself,' he says.
Marchetto, who returns to Hong Kong this month after seven years, has performed in 27 countries, including 10 trips to Japan, a frequency that prompted him to develop impersonations of Japanese cultural figures for that market. 'The Japanese love the paper,' he says, referring to the cardboard from which his costumes are made.