Orchidee

“I still can write of love”, Dario Bellezza, a poet, great friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini, once wrote as AIDS was killing him.
The orchid is the most beautiful flower and the most wicked as well, a friend once told me, because you cannot tell the real one from its fake. The same is true of this our time.
In Orchids, as in all my shows, there is an attempt to stop the time I’m living through. To stop my time and that of my company, the people who’ve been with me many years now, but also the time we all are living in – Italians, Europeans, citizens of the world.
A time of confusion in which I, we, many of us, I believe, feel lost…
Feeling like something has been lost. Forever. Maybe it is our faith, our political, revolutionary, human, spiritual faith.
Orchids also came from the great sense of emptiness I was left with when my mother went away for ever.
My mother, with whom I had newly grown closer, after our conflicts, our separations, we had become friends once again. I had grown, I was a little wiser, and she had become more child-like growing old.
Hence, the void. I was nobody’s child anymore. Bereft of love.
Orchids was born of many voids, though, many abandonments.
The cultural void we experience, our being lost as artists. Theatre, that for the most part feels like a dusty, false, dead place to me. The accepted lie of theatrical representation.
But Orchids also deals with the vital urge to fill that void.
It deals with the urge to keep searching – new mothers, new fathers, new life, new stories.
Then, unexpectedly, theatre’s ‘important’ words, that I was determined to leave behind, came back and stuck to me, revealing a whole new meaning as they wedged into my life.
And my life has become, perhaps, thanks to those words, the life of many others.
I believe Orchids represents to me that vital, uncontainable urge to keep writing and speaking, in spite of all, about love.

Pippo Delbono

ORCHIDEE trailer from Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione on Vimeo.

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