The Italian Compagnia Pippo Delbono brought their very exciting work This Wild Darkness to Trafo last week. Pippo Delbono is a director/performer, who has worked with some of the big names of contemporary experimental performance. This piece juggles a high level of theatrical innovation and a thorough and searching scrutiny of human nature.
The subject matter is death, the journey of a dying man. The piece is based upon Harold Brodkey’s book with the same title, which is a log he kept of his life from the moment of being diagnosed with AIDS to the point of becoming too weak to write just before his death. Accordingly, the piece is a dance macabre that takes us through the tragic to the hysterical, the tortured to the grotesque.
A gentle voice occasionally offers some of Brodkey’s deeply provocative thoughts on the topics of death, of existence overshadowed by the knowledge that death is imminent, of the dehumanizing process of the body that is beginning to fail. These thoughts are visually brought to life with powerful imagery; the cold, clinical, stagnating atmosphere of hospitals, the passiveness of depression, bodies torn and abused to symbolize the tortured soul, dreamlike fantasies about the dead.
The sensuality of the piece is key to its success in complementing the powerful text. There is an abundance of costumes, each of the fourteen performers appear to have at least three. The performers fill the empty space, decorated with a white floor and three large white walls, with a huge variety of characters from all different social levels. But each appearance is short and fleeting. We see ghosts of the past, the present and the future, and we see them become entangled in each other’s stories. We hear a dying man thinking about the dead. We hear playful music. We see corpses from various historical periods perform a morbid fashion show. Images vary between dramatically serious and playful, but thankfully they always manage to display thoughtfulness and sensitivity towards Brodkey’s very personal, very articulate writing.
“Especially in Western countries, the thought of death has been banished. Death is seen as fear, loss, pain, rarely as lucid, profound, living consciousness.” Pippo Delbono
While this was not always an easy piece to watch, I felt that the Compagnia Pippo Delbono have tapped into something very poignant. Death is a concept that has fascinated artists since the beginning of, well, art, and attempts to bring Death to life on stage have not been rare. It is a difficult task to connect with an audience on this topic, and This Wild Darkness approaches the challenge in a manner that is both accessible, and at many points very personal and moving.
Trafó House of Contemporary Arts
1094 Budapest, Liliom utca 41.
Tel: +36.1.215.1600
www.trafo.hu