Pippo Delbono's creation Dopo la battaglia dates back to 2011, an elegiac and intensely multidisciplinary work that travels mercilessly through the lacerations of a present crowded with abuse and marginalization. The conflict evoked by the title, the author informs us, coincides with the profound cultural, political and ethical darkness into which our country has fallen, and takes shape, on the scene, in a gallery of images oscillating between acute zones of madness and islands of lightness, paintings of the demons of power (political and financial) and passages of angelic dance.
It is as if in this piece of his, which contains diaristic and "private" features (a short filmed portrait of Pippo's mother is also included), but which is fundamentally driven by a civil theater attitude, Delbono wanted to push us to cast our gaze beyond the darkness that oppresses us "to return to being", as he says several times during the performance. To cross the battlefield of the pain of existing and confront the heart of humanity.
Born from the ashes of an opera project that should have been staged at the Bellini in Catania, the show opens on the musical wave of Verdi's Macbeth and welcomes, among other things, the contribution of the violinist Alexander Balanescu. The homage to dance is constant, not only in the tribute to Pina Bausch, but in the vaporous appearances of the Étoile of the Paris Opéra Marie-Agnès Gillot and in the interventions of Marigia Maggipinto, former member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. And the stage wisdom of Bobò, Delbono's fetish actor, deaf and dumb and with a soul marked by almost half a century in a mental hospital, is spontaneous. The texts of Artaud, Kafka and Pasolini intertwine with the brightness of bel canto and with painful autobiographical insights, while cinema bursts in with clips on the scenarios of psychiatric hospitals and on the desperate migratory flows on the Mediterranean coasts.
Dopo la battaglia received the 2011 Ubu award for best show.
Theatrical show by Pippo Delbono
with Dolly Albertin, Gianluca Ballaré, Bobò, Pippo Delbono, Ilaria Dtante, Simone Goggiano, Mario Intruglio, Nelson Lariccia, Marigia Maggipinto, Julia Morawietz, Gianni Parenti, Pepe Robledo, Grazia Spinella
and with the participation of Alexander Balanescu and Marie-Agnès Gillot
original music Alexander Balanescu
scenes Claude Santerre
costumes Antonella Cannarozzi
lighting Robert John Resteghini
technical director Fabio Sajiz
sound manager Angelo Colonna
sound engineer Corrado Mazzone
lights and video Orlando Bolognesi
costume design by Elena Giampaoli
chief engineer Gianluca Bolla
train driver Mattia Manna
production manager Alessandra Vinanti
organization Silvia Cassanelli
company director Raffaella Ciuffreda
press office Silvia Pacciarini
scenes built in the D.ex M. workshop - Théâtre de la Place-Liège tailoring shop
production Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Teatro di Roma, Théâtre du Rond Point/ Paris, Théâtre de la Place/ Liège, Théâtre National de Bretagne/ Rennes with the support of Teatro Pubblico Pugliese and Cinémathèque Suisse
duration 110 minutes without intermission
Pippo Delbono, author, actor, director, was born in Varazze in 1959. In the 1980s he began studying dramatic art in a traditional school which he left following his meeting with Pepe Robledo, an Argentine actor from Libre Teatro Libre (a theater group active in South America in the 1970s that used collective creation as a means of expression and denunciation of the dictatorship in Argentina). Together they moved to Denmark and joined the Farfa group, directed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen, historical actress of the Odin Teatret and for Delbono an alternative path began in search of a new theatrical language. Delbono dedicates himself to the study of the principles of oriental theater which he deepens in subsequent stays in India, China and Bali, where the central focus is the actor's meticulous and rigorous work on the body and voice. In 1987 he created his first show, The Time of Assassins and in the same year he met Pina Bausch who invited him to participate in one of the works of her Wuppertaler Tanztheater. This extraordinary occasion marks a fundamental stage in the director's artistic career. Delbono's shows are not productions of theatrical texts but total creations, the actors are part of a nucleus that maintains and grows over time. Already in the first work the features of a unique theatrical lexicon are defined which represents the peculiarity of all subsequent creations.