Pippo Delbono, author, actor, and director was born in Varazze in 1959. He began training in traditional theatre, then he studied the principles of oriental theatre, through rigorous work on body and voice in Denmark. Later, in Germany, he was invited by Pina Bausch to follow her work. At the beginning of the 80’s he founded the Compagnia Pippo Delbono, with which he created most of his works, from Il Tempo degli Assassini (1987) to La Gioia (2018). He does not stage plays but, rather, total creations, devised with a stable group of actors whose numbers have grown through the years. The encounter with socially marginalized people determines a turning point in his poetical research: that’s how Barboni (1997) was born. Some of these actors –among them Bobò, a deaf-mute who had been kept in an asylum in Aversa, near Naples, for forty-five years and recently passed away– have kept working with the company and are still a central part of this experience.
The works that followed –La rabbia dedicated to Pasolini, Guerra, Esodo, Gente di plastica, Racconti di giugno, Urlo, Il silenzio, Questo buio feroce, La menzogna, Dopo la battaglia, Orchidee, Vangelo, La gioia– like the ones before, have been performed worldwide in more than fifty countries, in theatres and festivals, including the Festival d’Avignon (where a lot of the company’s creations were presented), Barcelona’s Grec, Theater Spektakel in Zurich, Festwochen in Wien, Festival TransAmeriques in Montreal, Venice Biennale, etc.
Several theatres, including the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Teatro Argentina in Rome, among others, present his performances regularly. Enrico V –his only creation based on an existing play– is the only Italian production of Shakespeare that has ever been invited to perform at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His production Vangelo (2016) has been realized at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb with actors of his company together with Croatian actors, dancers, musicians, and chorus and with refugees of the PIAM refugee camp in Asti (Italy). The performance has two versions: The opera with a chorus and orchestra, which premiered in Italy at Teatro Comunale in Bologna, and the Drama version, which premiered at Thèatre Vidy, Lausanne. The music of the performance, which has won the Ubu Prize, was composed by Enzo Avitabile. Delbono’s latest theatre creation, La Gioia, premiered in March 2018 and has been presented at Theatre Olympics in Delhi and Bhopal (India), at Hong Kong Arts Festival, in Shizuoka (Japan), in Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, etc. and it will be on tour in the theatrical season 2019–2020.
Pippo Delbono has also been investigating the language of film for many years. In 2003, following a tour in Israel and Palestine, he filmed Guerra, which was presented at the Venice International Film Festival and won a David Di Donatello as best documentary. His second film, Grido (2006), has been shown at the Rome International Film Festival and won the Prize for the best interpretation of Bobò and Delbono at “Festa di cinema del reale 2016” in Lecce (Italy).
In 2009 he directed La Paura, filmed entirely with a cellular phone, printed on film by the Bologna Cinematheque, and presented in the official selection at the 2009 Locarno Film Festival, alongside a retrospective of his works, including film versions of Il Silenzio and Questo Buio Feroce. In June 2013 his film Amore Carne (Grand Prize at the Nyon Film Festival, in Switzerland) was distributed in Italy and France, after a preview at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in 2011, in the section “Orizzonti”. This film has been considered by Le Monde as one of the best films of the year 2013. His short film Blue Sofa, co-directed with Lara Fremder and Giuseppe Baresi, was awarded the Grand Prize at the Clermont Ferrand Festival. Sangue was the only Italian movie presented at the 66th Festival of Locarno in August 2013 where it won the International Federation of Film Societies Prize, at Lisboa Doc Festival where it won the Honorable Mention, at Zagreb Film Festival where it won the Grand Prize of the Public. The short film La Visite, filmed upon request of the French Ministry of Culture, completely shot in Versailles, with Bobò and Michael Lonsdale, has been presented at the Film Art Festival at Louvre and won the most important prizes at “Festival del cinema del reale” in Lisboa and Rio de Janeiro.
The Rochelle Festival has dedicated a homage to his cinema in 2014 that presents all his films, and Wroclaw (Poland), European Capital of Culture for 2016 has presented the same retrospective in July 2016. His latest film Vangelo, interpreted by the refugees of PIAM centre in Asti, coproduced by Italy, France, Belgium, and Switzerland has been presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2016 in the framework of “Giornate degli autori”. The film premiered in France at the 11th edition of Journées internationales du film sur l’art at Louvre Museum and has been presented in other international festivals, then broadcasted on the French-German channel Arte.
As an actor, he appears in Io sono l’amore by Luca Guadagnino (2009), Io e te by Bernardo Bertolucci (2012), A Castle in Italy by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (2013), Cha cha cha by Marco Risi (2013), Goltzius and the Pelican Company by Peter Greenaway (2014), Pulce non c’è by Giuseppe Bonito (2014), Worldly Girl by Marco Danieli (2016), Falchi by Toni D’Angelo (2017), Un tramway à Jerusalem by Amos Gitai (2018), Lucania by Gigi Roccati (2019), among others.
For the Teatro Sperimentale of Spoleto, he directed the opera Studio per Obra Maestra (2007), for Théâtre Wielski in Poznan (Poland) Don Giovanni (2014), for the Teatro San Carlo of Naples, Cavalleria Rusticana (2012) (Prix Abbiati) and Madama Butterfly (2014), for Teatro Massimo in Palermo the theatrical version of La Passione secondo Giovanni by Bach (2017), for Opera di Roma, Pagliacci (2018). In 2011 he devised Rosso Bordeaux, presented in Place de la Comédie in Bordeaux as part of Evento, a festival directed by Michelangelo Pistoletto with the choir and the orchestra of the city and films projected on the walls of the palace on the square.
The same year, Residenztheater in Munich invited Delbono as a guest director: Erpressung (blackmail) is his first creation with actors that are not part of his company. It premiered in Munich on January 14, 2012, and has become part of the theatre’s repertory. He conceived the concert Amore Carne with the violinist Alexander Balanescu, Il Sangue on Oedipus by Sophocles with the Italian singer Petra Magoni and the musician Ilaria Fantin, the concert Bestemmia d’amore with the singer from Naples Enzo Avitabile, and La notte with texts by Bernard-Marie Koltés and François Koltés with the guitarist Piero Corso.
He publishes Barboni – Pippo Delbono’s Theatre with Ubulibri. For Actes Sud editions he publishes Mon Theatre (also published in Romania with the title Teatrul Meu), Récits de Juin and Regards. For the editor Les Solitaires, Intempestifs Le Corps de L’Acteur; for Punto Aparte, El Teatro de la Rabia; for Garzanti Racconti, Di Giugno and for Barbès, Corpi Senza Menzogna and Dopo La Battaglia; for Edizioni Clichy, Sangue, written together with Giovanni Senzani; many books have been written and published by other authors on his theatrical and cinematographic experience. In 2017 the journalist Gianni Manzella published with Edizioni Clichy the book The Chance of Joy: a dialogue about the journey Pippo Delbono has been making in the last twenty years telling stories in a literary form and, at the same time, leading to a concrete analysis about Delbono’s art. In 2018 Actes Sud published his last “confession” book: Le donne de soi (The gift of oneself) recently translated in Rumanian.
He has been awarded, among other prizes, the special Ubu prize for Barboni, the Critic’s Prize for Guerra, the Olympic Prizes for Theatrical Innovation for Gente Di Plastica and Urlo, and in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2009, he received the Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities. Dopo la Battaglia, with the participation of the violinist Alexander Balanescu and the Paris Opera Étoile Marie-Agnès Gillot, won the 2011 Ubu prize as best play.
In September 2014 he presented his exposition Ma mère et les autres at Maison Rouge in Paris. From October 5th, to November 5th 2018 the Centre Pompidou in Paris scheduled a big event about Pippo Delbono’s work including an installation called L’Esprit qui ment, a film retrospective, and live performances. Throughout one month the event was attended by 18.000 visitors. The installation will be presented at Musee des Beaux Arts in Bruxelles.
