Il risveglio

Life is to die and to be born again
To be born again and to die
We are afraid to come out
Of this heap of sand and love
The time of suffering is gone
Now it’s time to be born again
The awakening after the storm
Without fear
I’ve spent a long time in the shadows
But I beg you, the light inside of me
Let me rise again
Like the eagles
Sooner or later
I will wake up again

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. 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 war”.

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.

IL RISVEGLIO teaser from Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione on Vimeo.