All you need is a white sheet, as big as the stage Small Strehler Theatre, a chair and a large screen to start an open conversation about the sunset of an existence. And the resulting dawn. That twilight, where demons fade and light reinvigorates, is forcefully brought into the spotlight by the corporeal presence of Pippo Delbonowhich leaves the lights on in the audience to look the Milanese audience in the eye.
«Tomorrow is another day, we’ll see» he sings together with a very young Ornella Vanoni, projected on the big screen behindAnd. Thus fragments of collective memory, light-hearted observations on the present and personal reflections overlap. The private and public planes become the fluid horizon within which the beautiful tribute to Bobò and Pina Bausch unfolds and, with them, to all those who, after falling asleep, had the courage to wake up or who are waiting to do so.
The awakeninga production of the Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT and numerous European partners, takes inspiration from Delbono’s personal experiences with Bobò, presudonym of Vincenzo Cannavacciuolo, a deaf-mute artist interned in Aversa hospital for more than thirty years and whom the Ligurian director decided to welcome not only into his company, but into his life, hosting him and living with him until his death in 2019. And from Pina Bausch, an artist acclaimed throughout the world for having created the tanztheater, the dance theatre, to which Delbono owes much artistically and whose movements can still be recognized in the cadenced gestures, in the mellifluous waves of the director’s hands as he moves about music.
And when he screams, writhes, alone on stage, questioned by a member of his company about his fears, Delbono reaches his most peculiar stylistic feature: presenting emotions on stage through emotions. Thus the fear for life, for love, for being alone, is reduced to a single shout addressed to the defenseless audience: “I want the people!”, welcomed by the actors who, one by one, embrace him.
Protagonists of a universal existence, where everyone is “a pilgrim in the world, until awakening comes”, the actors thus build mounds of earth on the stage in the orange horizon of the background. A landscape of war, that internal and external war that is experienced every day and that every day forces us to deal not only with ourselves, but with the tragedies outside our country. «I was in the shadows for a long time. But please, light that is inside me, let me come back up” he says off-screen. AND the final invitation is therefore to «Dance, dance in war», grasp life and cultivate it internally with the fertilizer of its own losses and pain, until it sprouts in a new spring.
