Questo buio feroce

Questo buio feroce (This Wild Darkness), written and directed by Pippo Delbono in 2006, is the show that fearlessly faces the taboo of the Death, hurling the audience into a white set, pure and unreal, created by Claude Santerre. In this white box, being at the same time an aseptic background, as well as an hospital waiting room or a catwalk for a disturbing fashion show, some black figures are standing still, as if they were portraits coming out of a funeral cortege, patients waiting for their call, masks and ladies, symbols of a dying Venice, in a parade. The music gives rhythm to the paintings appearing on stage, apparently as fragmentary as life, composed by each single moment and becoming time after time a general drawing. The stage is the place where all these characters meet: two harlequins rubbing their noses with affection, a skeleton-like Sinatra singing My way with desperation and irony, asserting his love for life, despite everything. The pictorial atmosphere of the images, standing before the strong white background, represents a constant flow that sometimes stops, creating an emptiness in which a girl with a mic reads the sex ads in a newspaper, in which an Italian/American woman describes unlikely pictures of a happy family. In this degraded universe, where normality is generated by advertising and soap-operas, black angels, obscure demons and the two harlequins playing hide and seek seem to be the only drop of truth and reality, even when they evoke with sweet grace the supreme hiding place, the death. Black and white, life and death, dance and immobility, music and silence, heaven and hell are the positive poles on which Delbono builds up this tormented travel that, engulfing into the theme of death, legitimates and lights life. What Delbono brings on stage without fear is the pain of human beings, slamming in the audience’s face the concatenation cause-effect between their own well being and the poverty of others: “Millions of people are dying just to make you feel free and happy… Isolated in your apartments provide with an air conditioner, you are free and happy”, states an amplified and distorted voice. Delbono and his colourful company, in which the faces tell us about life and the bodies are skeleton-like or full of energy, are able to speak directly to the heart and to the blood of the people, not just to their brains, telling us about life with no need of words.

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QUESTO BUIO FEROCE trailer from Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione on Vimeo.