Amore

The project stems from the meeting and friendship between Pippo Delbono and the Italian theatre producer who has been active in Portugal for many years Renzo Barsotti and their desire to make a show together about Portugal. This was the starting point for their research on’“love” as a feeling, a state of the soul. A true cog in the human organism, which selects, moves, shatters and recomposes everything we see, everything we feel, everything we desire.
Love è a musical and lyrical journey through an external geography – in addition to Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde – and an internal one, that of the soul's strings that vibrate at the slightest blow of life. The notes are the melancholic ones of the fado, which explode into energetic outbursts through the voices of its singers, wide open to reach every corner of the room; the rhythm is that of a parade, a tableau vivant, a slow procession; the image is a picture that changes in colour, warms up and cools down.
And then there is the poetic word, rendered by the warm register of the Ligurian artist through his usual, hypnotic, psalmody at the microphone. The words are those of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Eugénio De Andrade, Daniel Damásio Ascensão Filipe, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jacques Prévert, Rainer Maria Rilke and Florbela Espanca.
«This show – tells Pippo Delbono – presents a twofold vision of love. On the one hand – and it is the texts that take voice – we set out, all of us, in search of that love, trying to escape the fear that assails us. In this journey, we try to avoid it, this love, even though we constantly recognise its urgency; I seek it, but I also want it, and it is precisely this that is frightening. But the journey – made up of music, voices, images – succeeds then, perhaps, in leading us towards a reconciliation, a moment of peace in which that love can manifest itself beyond every single fear’.
To hold together an emotional montage that is never completely pacified è a scenic grammar that alternates fullness with emptiness, song with music, the living voice with silence, in search of a dreamlike and elegiac representation of the cruel undertow of detachment and reunion. The protagonist è absence, è distance, è nostalgia, a mapping of emotions that delves into the soul of the author, of his performers and of the spectator himself, who is called upon to search always with his eyes for what is missing and which, inexorably, delays manifesting itself.
Love wants to be an attempt to share a fleeting encounter: love è «a bird of prey» that grabs and carries away and that, in doing so, presents itself as a totally human quality. The different languages that embrace in the sound texture are an expression of this land, Portugal, that welcomes and leaves traces; the poetic impetus reminds us what form of respect we should always offer to those motions of the soul otherwise always under siege by fear, mistrust, shame.
Love è once again the attempt to bring life into the theatre. By naming this word, invoking it in a secular and dreamy manner, we perhaps have the chance to give it a voice and, long a great absentee in public discourse, to free it from the confusion that has reigned over the entire narrative of this global, frightening, terribly human odyssey.