On the occasion of the guest-performance Amore by celebrated Italian theatre maker Pippo Delbono in Sofia, we have the pleasure to stream online a video recording of one of his earlier performances, After the Battle.

Dopo La Battaglia (After The Battle) is a composition that opens wide the doors of our existential darkness, in a continuous flow that pierces through the void it has unveiled. Through the rhythm of the music and the dance, finding in the words and poetical verses the harmony between language and emotion, we witness present pain transfigured into faith in the future. The performers in Delbono’s company keep breaking through to the unexpected, in a sea of continuous metamorphosis. The dancer Marigia Maggipinto, a historical component of Pina Baush’s dance company, travels with them on this journey.

Delbono stands by his companions, urging them onto the neutral scenery, a crossroad of our imaginative world, where we see figures of our real world flowing through. Words of authors such as Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, Alda Merini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alejandra Pizarnik, re-written by Pippo Delbono, resonate in a ritual that is, at once, sacred and secular. Music by Verdi, Nicolò Paganini, and Petr Ilic Tchaikowsky accompanies these words and verses, entwining with original music composed and performed live by Alexander Balanescu, a violinist, composer, and prominent interpreter of music composed at the turn of the third millennium.

This theatre piece represents an important step in Delbono’s artistic path, bringing new lymph to his language, with video extracts and atmospheres from the movie world, and images that Delbono himself filmed with his phone. An expanding theatrical language, traced by bodies and texts, by different forms of saying and representing, by pitches and tones turned into action by the music and dance, by actors who turn words into flesh, in a theatre that becomes flesh of its own time, and of the times we live in.

After the Battle was awarded the Italian national theatre prize Ubu 2011 for Best performance.

In Italian with Bulgarian and English subtitles.

Online streaming of the production is accessible for 48 hours from 9 June, 19:00 h, till 11 Jine, 19:00, on the territory of Bulgaria only on viafest.org.

The screening is supported by National Culture Fund under Annual Grant Programme 2022.