Il risveglio

Wake up.
You must smell the red scent of morning.
Don’t be afraid.
It’s time to talk about the mistery of life.
I’ve always been attracted,
enthralled and scared by the darkness of the night.
Now I would like to go again.
To run again. To fly again.
With a voice that sings
and yells like a mad bird.
It is an awakening after the storm.

Pippo Delbono

There is a sort of slumber at the beginning of Awakening. That is both a personal and collective one. There is the awakening of the man who at the end of Love – Pippo Delbono’s previous work – went to lie beneath a dry tree that suddenly bloomed with flowers. And the man stayed there, half asleep in that slumber that left us silent and afraid. A slumber that he feels he needs to wake up from, expecting the possibility to face a reality that will be worse than the one he faced before and to see himself grow old. Before the pandemic that shut everyone in their houses. Before the war that burst at our doorstep. Before the coming back of ideologies that we thought belonged to the past.

Awakening is rooted in a personal experience and then unfolds in a feeling of loss that concerns many. A feeling that demands to be healed, but that only a gesture of solitary rebellion can cure. Starting from the acknowledgement of a fragility that is mirrored by the performance.

For the first time the play lacks the presence of texts written by the authors whom Pippo Delbono has loved and met in his travels toward his Ithaca, and that he has often reworked in order to own them more. To express the new pain that has invaded him and to summon the rebirth there are only his own words, the stories and poems that he has been writing for some time. These words give him the opportunity to speak a new truth, to narrate himself in his own weaknesses, fears, hopes. And yet it is not just a personal issue.

Before the will of starting to live again, the eye widens and embraces what surrounds it. “Is there anyone here?”, the artist asks himself in a barren space that could remind of a desert. A few essential elements on set, that shift dramatically the space, are not an impediment to the view but actually lead the eye beyond the things one can see.

The theatre made by Pippo Delbono starts all from music and follows the score of an inner rhythm. His style of composition is, once again, musical. Heartrending notes that play laments of love and tenderness lead the actors of the Company in a dance, a sacred ritual, perhaps a funeral. On the notes of the virtuoso cellist Giovanni Ricciardi, on stage with his instrument, and music pieces that hail from the memory of the ‘70s, Delbono repeats: “You must dance, dance in your war”.

Together with his Company, born through meetings with actors, with dancers but primarily with people coming from different places of life, Delbono in this show pays tribute to Bobò, a faithful stage companion who passed away in 2019 with whom he shared his life on and off the stage for more than 20 years.

Awakening is a show about our many falls and many rises, dedicated to all those who fell asleep and have then reawakened. And also to those who have yet to wake up.

Duration: 65 minutes without intermission

Extracts from press review

HUFFINGTONPOST.IT – Mario De Santis – 28/10/2024
(…) Delbono is not afraid of what is simple, ridiculous, nor of the human body and of what is unconventionally human. (…) Delbono aims at performing a theatrical ritual of sharing his melting inner self. (…) Everything passes through an empathic connection with the audience, in that place where simplicity is reshaped into enlightenment.

DRAMMA.IT – Paolo Randazzo – 25/10/2024
(…) in the making process of his shows there might be many or very few constructive elements but, until this love for life remains active, warm with emotions and perceivable while he is on stage (despite him being scarred and almost overwhelmed by pain) and he tells his stories, there is no surprise in the audience and critics finding themselves involved and moved and feeling strong and acknowledging the warmth of a long, important and authentic artistic experience.

GLI STATI GENERALI – Walter Porcedda – 23/10/2024
(…) With a voice that is hoarse and velvety, softly sinuous, stroking even. By making contact with his audience once more, he finds again the thread of a conversation that had never really ended. (…) It is a moment of nostalgic poetry, like a breeze that sneaks in on a morning gust through the trees, when the notes played by the cello of the extraordinary soloist Giovanni Ricciardi rise and he gives the appropriate sound to the soul of Pippo Delbono’s words.

DRAMAHOLIC – Paolo Martini – 23/10/2024
(…) if one makes the mistake of letting themselves be dragged into it, even if just for the universal need of humanity that oozes out Delbono’s theatrical tales, it will inevitably end up in a valley of tears. Even putting aside the international mythology that applies to him, starting with the regard paid to him by all the other Irregulars for his ability to charm a Chinese audience, we are talking about an absolute champion of theatre, outside of the box and any “fancy” rule, in fact the epitome of Irregularity.

CORRIERE DEL MEZZOGIORNO – Enrico Fiore – 23/10/2024
(…) within those (nostalgic, as a matter of fact) memories of his young enthusiasms and illusions it is implanted -in a way that is gushing, untameable, and tormenting and comforting at the same time- the recalling of Bobò, the real protagonist of the show.

SPETTACOLO – Antonio “Rigo” Righetti – 21/10/2024
(…) Emotions. This is the food that nourishes and pleases. Pure emotions. Reactions made in the face of stern and heavy questions. Pippo Delbono is a man of theatre who lives art to its full, he does it by exposing himself to risks, by risking. (…) It is a theatre of love. Love for life and loss of love. It is a theatre that we need more than ever. (…) In the show you will find your own monsters, your own pain, your own fears, your own music. A theatre that is vital, where there is life, sweat, fear and courage. A theatre that is necessary.

APLAUZE – Alexander Hartmann – June 2024
(…) Awakening brings together Delbono’s confessions with music, dance and poetry, in a structure that is striking for its alternating moments of presentation of the harsh reality that grips us and moments in which personal experiences explode and flood the room with emotion, in a perfectly calibrated mechanism that generates contradictory feelings, which in turn accompany the audience liberation from daily worries.

ZIARUL METROPOLIS – Monica Andronescu – 22/06/2024
(…) A form of artistic metabolization of pain, sadness, suffering, helplessness, depression, love, Pippo Delbono’s visceral, highly personal theatre remains the most powerful cry I have ever heard on stage. Bordering on impudence, the exposure of suffering, as he does, has the sweetness of poison and the force of a volcano that blows you up.

LITERNET – Doina Giurgiu – June 2024
Pippo Delbono is a theatrical creator. He does not go on stage, he is the stage. It is an idea, it is a form, it is a text, it is voice and movement, it is characters and scene. It is his story, told to the audience in all possible forms, it is the story of the audience, of the world, of people.

All the Press Extracts