Amore

“What can one creature do,
Among his fellow creatures, if not love?
Love and forget,
Love and mis-love,
Love, definitely, love?
Love what the sea brings ashore,
Love what it buries and what, in the sea-breezes,
Is salt, or love’s yearning, or plain anguish?
Love the barren, the unpolished,
A flowerless vase, an iron floor, a bird of prey.
This is our destiny: to love without limits,
To love even our own lack of love”.
                                                        Carlos Drummond De Andrade

The project was born from the meeting and the friendship between Pippo Delbono and the theatre producer Renzo Barsotti, who lives and works in Portugal since years, and from their wish to realize together a performance on Portugal. This is the starting point of a research on “love” which is not only a feeling, but also a state of the soul. A real gear of the human organism, that selects, moves, crashes and rebuilds everything we see, feel and everything we crave for.

Amore is a musical and poetic journey through an outer geography – besides Portugal: Angola, Cape Verde- and an inner geography, the one of the strings of the soul that resonate at the slightest beat of life.

The musical notes are the sad ones of fado, notes that explode in bursts of energy through the voice of its singers which opens up to reach every corner of the theatre. One moment, the rhythm is the beat of a parade, the next one of a tableau vivant and then rhythm of a slow procession.

The image is a picture that changes its colours that becomes warmer and cooler.

Then there is the word of the poets, spoken in the warm style of the Ligurian artist through their usual, hypnotic reciting at the microphone. The words are those of Carlos Drumming De Andrade, Eugenio De Andrade, Daniel Damásio Asensão Filipe, Sophie de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jacques Prévert, Reiner Maria Rilke e Florbela Espanca.

“This show – says Pippo Delbono – presents a double vision of love. On one side – where we hear the voices of the texts – we, each one of us, look for that love, trying to run from the fear that attacks us. In this journey we try to avoid that love even if we acknowledge the constant yearn we have for it; I look for it and I yet want it, too. And this is exactly what is scary. But this path – paved with music, voices and pictures – may lead us to a reconciliation, to a moment of peace where that love can manifest itself beyond any fear.”

What keeps together this emotional process that never really finds its peace is a structure that juxtaposes the full and the empty, the singing and the music, the live voice and the silence, in search for a dreamlike and poetic representation of the cruelty of the undertow of breaking up and coming back together.

Absence, distance and nostalgia are the main characters; an emotional map that digs deep in the soul of the writer, of the actors and of the spectators themselves who are called to search with their eyes for what is missing and what will always be late in showing up.

Amore is an attempt to share a vanishing meeting: love is “a bird of prey” that catches you and takes you away and in so doing it is an utterly human quality. The different languages that intertwine within the soundtrack are an expression of this land, Portugal, a Land that welcomes and leaves traces; its poetic impulse reminds us what kind of respect we should pay to those waves of the soul that are otherwise constantly besieged by fear, mistrust and shame.

Amore is yet again an attempt to bring life into theatre. Mentioning this word, evoking it in a non-religious and dreamy way, we might get the chance to give it voice, to the long-time absent in the public discourse, the chance to free it from the whole narrative of this global, fearful, terribly human odyssey.

Pippo Delbono

Extracts from press review

SIPARIO.IT – Francesca Maria Rizzotti – 14/03/2023
(…) It is neither a theatrical biography nor a documentary theatre but it is life itself that becomes theatrical material and, even before that, theater that is born as a vital urgency.

Málaga Hoy – Pedro Hofhuis – 30/01/2023
(…) Pippo Delbono Company’s theatre production is living poetry. (…) Everything is studied to the millimeter to arouse emotions and astonishment in an audience hypnotized by the beauty and harmony of the staging. (…) It had been a long time since I had seen something so beautiful, sensitive and true on the stage of a theater.

Télérama – Fabienne Pascaud – 14/09/2022
(…) An extraordinary inner adventure. An inner search of truth that rejects all pretexts, illusions, appearances and lies.

Le Figaro – Ariane Bavelier – 09/09/2022
(…) For the entire span of this hour-long performance we are taken to an unprecedented journey of poetry in which one can glance at all seashores, walks, promises, memories. A moving and unique chant of the world.

Les Echos – Philippe Chevilley – 08/09/2022
(…) Pippo Delbono enchants us with his images, his lights, and his strong shadows: the tree multiplies itself.

Sceneweb.fr – Cristophe Candoni – 08/09/2022
(…) Delbono (…) offers us a show that is at one time deep, fragile and necessary just like the feeling it explores. (…) And the emotion reaches its peak.

Arts-Chipels – Sarah Franck – 08/09/2022
(…) The beauty of the lines is accompanied by the dreamlike force both brute and sophisticated of a performance that combines the unusual and the poetic, the strength of voice and the enlightenment of the apparition. (…) It happens rarely to find oneself imprisoned in someone else’s universe and in their words without feeling like a prisoner. “Love” is one such singularity and offers the imagination a unique and precious place to soar from.

Le mond du ciné – Aurélien Corneglio – 07/09/2022
(…) We witness a play of shadows on stage in which the perspectives become incredible. The result is magic. (…) Breathtaking, impressive, disturbing, obscene, gross, esthetic, dreamlike and even violent: each individual will respond in their own way to the show but what is certain is that “Love” will not leave anyone indifferent. A mind-blowing piece of theater!

Critiques Théâtres – Philippe Charvernac – 07/09/2022
(…) An hour long very beautiful show, an hour of nostalgia. We want more of it. A beautiful welcome back to the theater to everyone!

Il Manifesto – Gianfranco Capitta – 30/10/2021
(…) This time the show shifts almost naturally into a “chant”, that sings about the subject that gives it its title, obviously, with an emotional rapture that’s really consistent. (…) The show goes on with visions and lunges, with the heart breaking melodies and the sparkling images produced by the wild performers.

Repubblica online – Anna Bandettini – 17/11/2021
(…) Do not miss the new show by Pippo Delbono: Love. It’s a beautiful show, one of the most intense and important of this season: dedicated to love, to loss, to life, to abandonment, it is pure poetry, as you will rarely see it on stage.

Teatro e Critica – Angela Forti – 18/11/2021
(…) A simple show, but perfectly inserted within the artistic path of this company, for the elegance and solemnity of its images, for its thick colour, for the accuracy and refinement of its stage movements, and the sequence of the pictures that make it. A bewildering and captivating show, that invades with all its frailty.

La Provincia DI Cremona – Nicola Arrigoni – 26/11/2021
(…) it’s a present, a gift, a show birthed by yearning and pain. (…) “Love” is the notes from the soul of an artist who brings life on stage and who’s always brought himself and his poetic world on stage.

All the Press Extracts

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AMORE BOOKLET