Three years after the performance of La Gioia, Pippo Delbono returns to Teatro Donizetti. The internationally renowned author, actor, and director, a poet of experimental theater, presents Amore, scheduled for Thursday, March 6 (8:30 PM) as part of the Altri Percorsi Season of the Teatro Donizetti Foundation. The performance will feature a large group of actors on the main city theater’s stage: Dolly Albertin, Margherita Clemente, Ilaria Distante, Mario Intruglio, Pedro Jóia, Nelson Lariccia, Gianni Parenti, Miguel Ramos, Pepe Robledo, Grazia Spinella, and Selma Uamusse. Original music by Pedro Jóia and other composers.
Amore originates from Pippo Delbono’s encounter and friendship with Italian theater producer Renzo Barsotti, who has been active in Portugal for years, and their desire to create a show about Portugal together. From here begins the exploration of love
as a feeling, a state of the soul. A true mechanism in the human organism that selects, shifts, shatters, and recomposes everything we see, feel, and desire.
Amore is a musical and lyrical journey through an external geography – including Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde – and an internal one, that of the soul’s strings vibrating at the slightest touch of life. The notes are those of the melancholic fado, which explode in energetic bursts through the voices of its singers, wide open to reach every corner of the hall; the rhythm is at times that of a parade, at times a tableau vivant, at times a slow procession; the image is a painting that changes in colors, warming and cooling. And then there is the poetic word, delivered in the warm register of the Ligurian artist through his usual, hypnotic chanting into the microphone. The words are those of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Eugénio De Andrade, Daniel Damásio Ascensão Filipe, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jacques Prévert, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Florbela Espanca.
“This show – Pippo Delbono himself recounts – presents a dual vision of love. On one hand – and it’s the texts that give voice to this – we all search for that love, trying to escape the fear that grips us. In this journey, we try to avoid this love, even though we constantly recognize its urgency; I seek it, but I also want it, and that’s precisely what’s frightening. But the journey – made of music, voices, images – perhaps manages to lead us towards a reconciliation, a moment of peace where that love can manifest itself beyond any individual fear”.
Holding together an emotional montage that is never fully pacified is a scenic grammar that alternates fullness with emptiness, singing with music, live voice with silence, in search of a dreamlike and elegiac representation of the cruel ebb and flow of detachment and reunion. The protagonist is absence, distance, nostalgia, a mapping of emotions that delves into the soul of the author, his performers, and the spectator, who is called to always search with their eyes for what is missing and which, inexorably, is slow to manifest.
Amore is once again an attempt to bring life into the theater. By naming this word, invoking it in a secular and dreamy manner, we perhaps have the possibility to give it voice and, long absent from public discourse, free it from the confusion that has reigned over the entire narrative of this global, frightening, terribly human odyssey.
