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

СЕГА ЕАД – Irina Gigova – 17/06/2023
“Amore” by Pippo Delbono is a magical act of love to the audience, to oneself (…) and maybe it is an act of searching God.

btv hobИhИte – Daniel Dimitrov – 09/06/2023
In “Love” there are no rules, no limits, no laws. But there is enough strength, capable of quietly flipping our brain cells over – one by one, in savage calmness and deliberate cutting out of everything rotten. (…) Pippo Delbono’s performance (…) constitutes a small world, confined in the lights and shadows of love.

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. On stage, a humanity in its diversity and richness, both for the extraordinary talent of some artists who have recently joined the Company, and for the generosity and the intense, sometimes ferocious, encounter with the lives of the historical members.

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. A total staging; poetry, dance, theater, music and plastic arts. As if Wagner were a minimalist. If one day you come across a play by Pippo Delbono, please come in and let yourself be caressed by his art. 

SUR – Regina Sotorrío – 25/01/2023
Words (the chosen ones exact and loaded with lyricism), music and dance are put together in an apparently simple sequence, but where even each single shadow is measured. With hardly any set design, only effective lighting and the work of the actors, ‘Amore’ composes overwhelming, shocking and even disconcerting scenes. 

IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO – Paolo Martini – 31/12/2022
An ‘open-heart’ story of what’s left of feelings when a pandemic takes away the dearest person, as well as everyone’s freedom (I confess: I’ve seen it twice in a row, with the joy of paying both tickets, and the second one was even more exciting).

Télérama – Fabienne Pascaud – 14/09/2022
It is an ever more cosmic love that does not restrain itself into an individual passion, a love that shapeshifts and transforms into a spiritual substance before the world. (…) An extraordinary inner adventure. An inner search of truth that rejects all pretexts, illusions, appearances and lies.

Le Figaro – Ariane Bavelier – 09/09/2022
The omnipresent music strikes all the chords of love and makes them vibrate.  (…) 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
Inspired by the cultural context of Portugal but also of Angola and Cape Verde the Italian director has drawn his heart map. (…) Pippo Delbono enchants us with his images, his lights, and his strong shadows: the tree multiplies itself. (…) “Love” is a theater of shadows animated by the angels of the company who are always equally inspired. (…) Theater saves him once more. With the moved support of his audience in love.

Sceneweb.fr – Cristophe Candoni – 08/09/2022
The scenes flow and inspire beauty and sadness and a certain kind of wisdom. They seem simple isolated presences – often dressed in black without lacking cheerfulness. (…) Delbono sings about love, about the lack of love, about the need for love. He 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.

Les Inrockuptibles – Patrick Sourd – 23/08/2022
At the origin of this adventure there’s the Italian artist’s wish to exalt Portuguese-speaking culture by going beyond the borders of Portugal. (…) Waiting until the very last moment to go on stage Pippo Delbono allows himself a bewildering gesture that ends the show reaching an unforgettable peak.

Arts-Chipels – Sarah Franck – 08/09/2022
When Pippo Delbono’s personal mythology is rooted and intertwined with the solemn authenticity of Portuguese fado it becomes an inspired and poetic dream, unusual and upsetting that fascinates and takes us away. (…) 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
All the most precious and dark things that love embraces are contained in this truthful show. The sound and light design are key elements to give beauty to it. We witness a play of shadows on stage in which the perspectives become incredible. The result is magic. The music, but mainly the voices, become shadows themselves as expand they expand across the theater. (…) 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
“Love” celebrates Portugal, its contradictions, its nostalgia and its joy, life itself”. (…) An hour long very beautiful show, an hour of nostalgia. We want more of it. A beautiful welcome back to the theater to everyone!

I/O Gazette – Mathias Daval – 02/12/2021
It is by staging a sequence of musical and poetical images inspired by Portugal that he begins a search for love through a nostalgic fado cabaret of great elegance. (…) It is love without accounting then – to the point of loving even our own lack of love.

DUELS – Matteo Columbo – 14/06/2022
Like a wound. Like passion. (…) Pippo Delbono’s voice is true and vibrant expression, magnified texture, dense lecture of disenchantment, intimate and universal, which picks from poetry to draw a collection of tableaux vivants and chantants. (…) In an hour dense with splendor, the suspended space reveals the pain and beauty of the world, the misery and perfection of the human being, the connection between the opposites, and the dream of a community that dances and blooms.

IL GIORNALE – Stefania Vitulli – 11/06/2022
Spreading seeds on stage so that some time and somehow, they can bloom inside of us: this has always been the style of Pippo Delbono. (…) Dense quotes, true choir in a tragedy and a comedy of an hour of love.

KRAPP’S LAST POST 28/02/2022
A musical and poetic journey from Portugal to Angola all the way to Cape Verde.
Pippo Delbono’s last show is a ride through the unfathomable lands of “Love” – “real gear of the human organism” that filters, runs and is run through by everything we face and collide with. (…) Lights fade out; what comes next is a triumph of applause.

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. (…) Those who see this show will come out enriched with many emotions and images, some of them personal, some more evident, some other secret, as if for the entire show Pippo were narrating himself, a self-loaded with loves lost and found, with passions and farewells (…).

Limina teatri – Titti Danese – 17/11/2021
Pippo Delbono is a very special artist who’s been living on the world stages for years with an overwhelming vitality. His shows are tales and reminders and his popular and humane theatre combines brutality and visionary lightness in an ensemble of desperate beauty (…). His theatre is “necessary” and, like in all of his shows, Delbono tells about real life with sensitivity and passion (…). The staged fiction is run through by a sudden revelation, a vision that compels and changes you.

Teatro e Critica – Angela Forti – 18/11/2021
The surprising aspect of the show being its total simplicity, combined with the difficulty of telling it. It’s a direct speech, spoken as it is, without a riddle and anything to hide (…). 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
(…) “Love” by Pippo Delbono is the staging of a failure, but it is also the whispered cry of the artist need to question love in order to relieve death and pain (…) 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.

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