Pippo Delbono has, for many years, lived the stage as a place for research, working in the fertile areas between the public and the personal, between autobiography and history. Vangelo marks a new step in this journey, it is a choral work, created in Zagreb with the orchestra, the choir, the dancers and the actors of the National Croatian Theatre together with the actors from the company that has accompanied Pippo Delbono for years. Born from the music of Enzo Avitabile, but also fed by the memories of the actors who have lived through one of the most ferocious wars of recent history.

“A few days before dying, my Mother, a fervent Catholic” writes Delbono, “said to me: ‘Why don’t you create a show about the gospel? This could be your message of love. There is so much need nowadays’. And so I began to film and photograph the images that I came across in my travels. Images of Virgin Marys, of Christs, of martyrs. Everywhere, I saw Christs with pained, serious faces. I saw very little joy in their faces. And I got lost, forgetting the gospel, or perhaps carrying only the name. In the end I stayed in those images, those voices, those sounds, those echoes, those silences heard in the gypsy and refugee camps, in hospital corridors; but also that living force, that unexplainable joy found in places designated for suffering.