Every theatre work can become a journey, moving through different situations, moods and intuitions, catching you by surprise. It’s not a show happening each night, it’s a ritual, an apparition, a unique gesture bonding who acts to who’s watching as they breathe in unison. To stage a piece on joy is a search for that singular circumstance, it’s crossing rivers of extreme sentiment -- angst, happiness, pain, enthusiasm -- to try and capture [witness] at last, in the instant, the explosion of joy. Rather than freezing into images, sounds, or stage directions, Pippo Delbono and the actors of his Company try to push one step further each night in the direction of that unbound exaltation, this scorching intuition. So bring in the clowns, the circus and its dance. And here’s the memory of a shaman who through madness sets souls free. Here’s tango’s melancholy chords, and stifled cries from the floor of the house. Here’s a bounty of visions chasing one another, forming and morphing and fading one into the next: hundreds of little paper boats; colored rags, strewn as waves of that Mare Nostro, “Our Father Sea who art not in Heaven” of Erri De Luca’s secular prayer; up until the finale, the floral explosion that Pippo created with Thiérry Boutémy, the Norman “fleuriste” who lives in Bruxelles and works worldwide. Delbono’s actors go up on stage, one by one. Taking the audience by hand, each in his way, they make of each one a travel companion, a part of this endless search. Personal stories, masks, clowneries, memories, all fleeting images of people [humans] reaching for joy. Thus every night is a dot on the map, every fragment of this piece a single step on the path. The journey never ends, the kaleidoscopic wheel of image and emotion keeps on turning. Each night, ready for surprise, to the rhythm of this company, on the path of this never-ending quest for joy.

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