The show l tempo degli assassini (the title is a verse stolen from Rimbaud) is an acute and casual reflection on the theater and a self-representation reminiscent of Odin by Eugenio Barba and Pina Bausch, inspirers and "motors" of the young Delbono. It is the story of the hardships and suggestions of two artists who expose themselves to the public "from the inside", condensing memories, lived atmospheres, solitudes and exhibited wounds, testimonies of identity crises.
Speaking about the theater and its fragile and perverse mechanisms, it is actually about themselves and all of us that Pippo Delbono and Pepe Robledo speak to us, narrating the dreams and fears of our daily lives. This dense and subdued opera dates back to 1987, which debuted at the Sant'Arcangelo festival and was then performed many dozens of times around the world. Dry and brazenly simple, The Time of Assassins places our heroes, who appear in a tie and dark suit, in a scene inhabited only by two chairs, with lots of heterogeneous music that acts as a carpet for their actions: rock and Mozart, Johnny Dorelli and Janis Joplin, Italian songs and Argentine music. The couple celebrates public and private black events, evoking violence suffered and loves killed, coups d'état and cursed overdoses. And between shivers of anguish and glimpses of humour, the two performers radiate a clownish energy like Jango Edwards, unleash rocking frenzy like the Blues Brothers, make forays into Beckettian absurdity, find ideas in the demented, borrow tones of shrill anger and growling melancholy from German cabaret.
The small choreographies that intertwine with the text are crackling inventions and Pippo and Pepe dive into them with joyful immediacy. The skinny Robledo is sophisticated and a bit Indian, the naughty boy Delbono is ribald and disturbing. While dancing, they know how to alternate vivid "natural" gestures with a flow of catwalks cut out of the music hall. And they offer us, like true friends, all their disturbing tenderness.
with Pippo Delbono, Pepe Robledo
I play Mario Intruglio
lights Simone Goggiano
duration 75 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.