Pippo Delbono's seminar intends to tell us, through a series of exercises on the expressiveness of the body, what the mind cannot see. Those who know Delbono's theatre, where the action of the bodies on the stage becomes a "theatrical choreography", know how much his work is centered on the body and on the gesture (both the unconscious and the voluntary gesture). It is a work based and structured on languages, including eastern movement techniques and western dance theatre. Through his work on the body, Pippo Delbono has found its strength and fragility, and also the resonance of voice and listening. Through all this, he identified his own path of theatrical “truth”. And it is precisely on the voice and the chorality of the voice, as well as on the techniques of the body, that this new intensive seminar will focus, which aims to be a story, even a practical one, of his very personal journey.
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.