Dopo la battaglia

Watching Pippo Delbono’s latest work, we find ourselves at the beginning of a visionary journey, at the threshold of a sequence of frames, in the body of a dramaturgy that shows us, without holding back, the truth that folly uncovers.

Dopo la battaglia (After the battle) is a composition that opens wide the doors of our existential darkness, in a continuous flow that pierces through the void it has unveiled.  Through the rhythm of the music and the dance, finding in the words and poetical verses the harmony between language and emotion, we witness present pain transfigured into faith in the future. The performers in Delbono’s company keep breaking through to the unexpected, in a sea of continuous metamorphosis, where salvation is only possible after the unavoidable shipwreck.  A new presence travels with them on this journey: the dancer Marigia Maggipinto, a historical component of Pina Baush’s dance company. Delbono stands by his companions, urging them onto the neutral scenery, a physical and mental grey zone, a crossroads of our imaginative world, where we see figures of our real world flowing through, where the misery and vices of a captive, blind people take form and come to life with motions that become mechanical, automatic. The words of authors such as Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, Alda Merini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alejandra Pizarnik, re-written by Pippo Delbono, resonate in a ritual that is, at once, sacred and secular. Music by Verdi, Nicolò Paganini, and Petr Ilic Tchaikowsky accompanies these words and verses, entwining with original music composed and performed live by Alexander Balanescu, a violinist, composer, and prominent interpreter of music composed at the turn of the third millennium.   This theatre piece represents an important step in Delbono’s artistic path, bringing new lymph to his language, with video extracts and atmospheres from the movie world, and images that Delbono himself filmed with his phone – a continuation of the experiments we saw in his recent “La Paura” (The Fear).  An expanding theatrical language, traced by bodies and texts, by different forms of saying and representing, by  pitches and tones turned into action by the music and dance, by actors who turn words into flesh, in a theatre that becomes flesh of its own time, and of the times we live in.

DOPO LA BATTAGLIA trailer from Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione on Vimeo.
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Video by courtesy of Sat 2000 and Retroscena