Amore

Creation and direction: Pippo Delbono

«What can a creature do but
among creatures love?
To love and forget, to love and mistreat,
to love, decisively, to love.
Love what the sea brings to the beach,
what he buries, and what in the sea breeze
Is it salt, or precision of love, or simple longing?
To love the inhospitable, the harsh,
a vase without flowers, an iron floor, a bird of prey.
This is our destiny: to love without measure.
To love our very lack of love.

Carlos Drummond De Andrade

The project was born from the meeting and friendship between Pippo Delbono and Italian theatre producer Renzo Barsotti, who has been active in Portugal for years, and from their desire to create a show about Portugal together. From here begins the research on ‘love’ as a feeling, a state of the soul. A true mechanism in the human body, which selects, moves, shatters and reassembles everything we see, hear, everything we desire.

AMORE is a musical and lyrical journey through an external geography – beyond Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde – and an internal one, that of the strings of the soul that vibrate with the slightest beat of life. The notes are the melancholic ones of fado, which explode in energetic impulses through the voices of its singers, wide open, reaching every corner of the room; the rhythm is sometimes that of a parade, sometimes that of a tableau vivant, sometimes that of a slow procession; the image is a painting that changes colours, warms up and cools down.
And then there are the poetic words, restored through the warm recording of the Ligurian artist with his usual hypnotic humming into the microphone. The words are by Carlos Drummond De Andrade, Eugénio De Andrade, Daniel Damásio Ascensão Filipe, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jacques Prévert, Reiner Maria Rilke, and Florbela Espanca.

“This show,” says Pippo Delbono, “presents a dual vision of love. On the one hand – it is the texts that give voice – we all set out in search of that love, trying to escape the fear that invades us. On this journey, we try to avoid this love, even though we constantly recognise its urgency; I seek it, but I also want it, and this is precisely what causes fear. But the path – made up of music, voices and images – may perhaps lead us to reconciliation, to a moment of peace where this love can manifest itself beyond any fear.”
Maintaining an emotional montage that is never completely pacified, it is a scenic grammar that alternates between fullness and emptiness, singing and music, lively voices and silence, in search of a dreamlike and elegiac representation of the cruel hangover of detachment and reunification. The protagonist is absence, distance, longing, a cartography of emotions that digs into the soul of the author, his performers and the viewer himself, called upon to search, always with his eyes, for what is missing and which, inexorably, is slow to manifest itself.

AMORE aims to be an attempt to share a fleeting encounter: love is a “bird of prey” that grabs and carries away, and in doing so, presents itself as a wholly human quality. The different languages that embrace each other in the soundscape are expressions of this land, Portugal, which welcomes and leaves its mark; the poetic impulse reminds us of the respect we must always offer to these impulses of the soul, which are otherwise always under siege by fear, mistrust and shame.

AMORE is also an attempt to bring life into the theatre. By naming this word, invoking it in a secular and dreamy way, we may be able to give it a voice, long absent from public discourse, freeing it from the confusion that has reigned throughout the narration of this global, frightening, terribly human odyssey.

Photos: Estelle Valente/São Luiz Teatro Municipal