Futuro Presente is an acronym that is more applicable than ever to an author's world that in its fervent humanism shows itself attentive to the political and social themes of the present, but that also appears driven by a burning curiosity of investigation projected towards the future, both in terms of the unprejudiced exploration of contents, and in terms of the free and futuristic experimentation of languages. Dance, music, theater, cinema, writing, dramaturgy, expressiveness of gesture and voice: Delbono's research travels by connecting and intertwining codes and signs. All of this never ignores an intense relationship with reality, in an overall fabric of solicitations and questions that illuminates the centrality of the body on the stage, making it the engine of an original poetics.
The body, in fact, is the “sensitive” propeller of his theatre, whether it is a trained or technically trained body, or the “normal” body of an actor or a dancer (many are the professionals who work in his troupe), or whether one is dealing with a “different” body, full of difficult truths, not culturally educated but communicative even as such (Pippo has welcomed into his company some peculiar “castaways” of existence such as the deaf-mute Bobò and Gianluca with Down syndrome, working on the innocence and emotional strength of their gesture and their stage presence). In Pippo’s theatre, in short, the body is a “sapiential” pivot corresponding to a very powerful and fragile dimension in its transience, a messenger of life and death. As the great Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy points out in a beautiful text on dance theatre, “whoever speaks of the body speaks of death, and whoever speaks of death speaks against death”. Therefore, dance “is always a desperate and at the same time joyful discipline”.
Joyfully desperate is also Delbono’s very human theatre, of which the current edition of Futuro Presente wants to trace a portrait through a series of chapters on the body framed according to different perspectives. There is a “dancing body” in Pippo’s shows, which always occupies the space of the stage on the basis of an implicit choreography, understood as the structural architecture of the piece. And there is a “theatrical body”, in a more universalistic sense, which probes the meaning of theatre at its roots, and which calls into question its most rhetorical and stereotyped conventions. These and other bodies will be discussed by the guests of Futuro Presente, experts and specialists in theatre and dance, but also philosophers, writers, politicians and essayists. The event aims to be not only a journey “on” Delbono’s peculiar world, but also “around” the issues that his work addresses, taking on its coordinates as a starting point for a catalogue of reflections on the body, whether “political” or “feminine”, whether looked at inside the screens of cinema or within the arts of performance, whether musical or rethought as that “body in search of truth” that characterised Pasolini especially in his last period, that of Petrolio and Salò, particularly dear to Delbono.
In a parallel track, the exercises of Pippo’s practice are programmed, through a workshop on his performance techniques and the staging of two titles from his vast repertoire: one “historical”, Il tempo degli assassini, alongside his long-time partner Pepe Robledo, and the other very recent, Dopo la battaglia. There is also a lot of cinema to tell us about Delbono the filmmaker, not only as a director, but also as an interpreter of other people’s films. And an evening with the Balanescu Quartet, with whom Delbono has collaborated a lot, gives us a glimpse of his work in the musical field. Visioni del corpo is a journey into the very particular story of Pippo Delbono and the numerous territories that intersect with it, in view of a geography that will end up reminding us (it is a goal and a hope) how much his story also deeply concerns ours.
Download the program of this edition!
