The body captured by dance. Like a promise. An adventure made of harmony, lightness and sublime coherence. Pippo Delbono "plays" with dance, working its paths in what he himself defines as a "theatrical choreography": each of his shows intimately possesses one.
It is a necessary and very defined grid that functions, from time to time, as the structural prerequisite of the piece. And dance lives, in his theatre, through dancing bodies highly modeled by technique - such as that of the splendid étoile dancer of the Paris Opéra Marie-Agnès Gillot, one of the performers of Dopo la battaglia - combined with the "heroic" and "pure" (culturally unfiltered) bodies of the actors gathered from life who participate in the journey of the Delbono company. Standing out among them, first of all, is the presence of the deaf-mute Bobò, who was imprisoned for forty-six years in the Aversa mental hospital, until Delbono came to free him, revealing his very strong identity as an actor. Bobò is a "natural" clown and a brilliant interpreter for "direct" expressiveness, and his innate talent has transformed him, in recent years, into the greatest star of Delbono's theatre.
Within the space that the focus dedicates to dance and to the questions posed, in the context of contemporary performing arts, by the "dancing body" (leonetta Bentivoglio and Delbono himself lead the meeting), a short "pas de deux" will be presented, unpublished and edited specifically for this occasion, which Pippo dedicates to the "odd couple" Gillot-Bobò. Beauty identifies its mirror in their two very differently dancing bodies.
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.
Leonetta Bentivoglio, graduated in Philosophy, works as a journalist and essayist. She has been a consultant for cultural events in Italy and abroad. Since 1992 he has been a special correspondent for La Repubblica, for culture and entertainment. She is the author of various books, including La danza contemporanea (Longanesi, 1985), a volume on Il teatro di Pina Bausch (Ubulibri, 1991) and an essay on Verdi (Il mio Verdi, Socrates, 2000). In 2006 he chose, edited and translated into Italian for Garzanti the short stories of Thomas Hardy (I tre sconosciuti e altri racconti). In 2007 he published in France and Germany, for L'Arche Editeur, another book on Pina Bausch, published in 2008 in Italy (Barbès) with the title Vieni, balla con me. From 2009 he produced Corpi senza menzogna (Barbès), based on the theater of Pippo Delbono.
Bobò is a small deaf-mute, illiterate man, met (on the occasion of a workshop activity) in the mental hospital of Aversa, where he had been locked up for forty-five years. Delbono recognizes the principles of oriental theater in Bobò and his gestural ability. The elements that Pippo Delbono learned after long years of training are present as a gift acquired in Bobò, an actor capable of precisely accompanying his theatrical gesture in the total absence of rhetoric.
Marie-Agnès Gillot joined the Opéra Ballet School in 1985 and the Corps de Ballet in 1990 at just fifteen years old. In 1999 she was promoted to première danseuse and nominated Étoile in 2004 after the show Signes by Carolyn Carlson. Marie-Agnès Gillot receives the title of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 2006.