CRUELTY IN
THE THEATRE OF THE SOCÌETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO
by Wouter Hillaert and Thomas
Crombez
lecture delivered at the
conference on “Tragedy, the Tragic, and the Political”
(RITS/VUB/KUL/UPX), 24 March 2005, in Leuven
From the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts of 2003 in Brussels one scene is
still beating in my memory. As it is probably in yours, if you have
seen it. It’s that one scene in which a policeman gets undressed
to his underpants and is beaten up like a bloody animal by his
colleagues. Everybody could see that the torture was fake all the way.
The blood had been poured out before the action took place and the
police batons were made of soft rubber. And still, this scene was quite
horrible to watch. Especially because of the amplified sound of every
beat on the victim’s naked flesh, because of his spastic moves
and his total silence afterwards.
It was the first time I saw the Societas Raffaello Sanzio of Romeo
Castellucci. For the company it was already the fourth time they
presented a new episode in their performance cycle called Tragedia Endogonidia. I jumped in
there, and I couldn’t resist. Neither as a theatre critic nor as
an individual. Even before the festival in Brussels came to an end, I
was flying to Bergen in Norway in order to see the next episode. Since
then I’ve seen every single one of them, together with
partner-in-crime Thomas Crombez. It was for us an alternative way of
citytripping, with Castellucci setting our agenda. Rome, Strasbourg,
London, Marseille and finally Cesena, the small home town of the
Societas near Bologna in Italy. There the Tragedia had taken off in
January 2002, and there it landed again last December.
Here we want to report from that journey, focussing on the unique
atmosphere of cruelty in some episodes of the Tragedia Endogonidia. To make this
presentation more than a report is not easy. The theatre of Castellucci
is an autonomous and enigmatic sight, where scenes and images
continually clash. With every new episode our interpretation got a
little more insecure, instead of brighter. But still, we want to try.
First I will give a broader introduction on the Tragedia Endogonidia, from a more
journalistic perspective. This will lead to some thoughts about the
kind of violence that is expressed through the episodes. Next Thomas
will make a more academic analysis of possible narrative strategies of
violence in theatre, and how Castellucci relates to them. Background
for both of us is the question to which extent the Tragedia Endogonidia could be seen
as a contemporary tragedy. In between we will show you a ten minutes
film of the first episode in Cesena. Because whatever one may say about
Castellucci’s theatre, it always has the last word itself.
TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA
The title of the cycle is already a contradiction. Or an
‘oxymoron’, as Castellucci called it. He explained the
meaning of the two words ‘Tragedia’ and
‘Endogonidia’ in an interview we had with him in Brussels.
“The words cannot be brought together.
‘Tragedia’ is essentially an epic word, it speaks about the
hero. The hero is called to die (est
appelé à mourir). ‘Endogonidia’, on
the contrary, is a term from microbiology. Certain protozoic formations
have both male and female gonads inside. So they don’t reproduce
sexually but exclusively by means of division. They are indeed small
immortal beings.”
So, the contradiction in the title Tragedia Endogonidia is between the
death of the tragic hero on the one hand and an eternal
self-replication in nature on the other. It’s a contradiction
between the mortality of a human being and the immortality of the
species, combined in one theatre cycle.
All eleven episodes of the Tragedia Endogonidia show implicit
images of birth and death and repetitive reproduction. For instance,
these themes are present in a scene in the Paris episode where an older
mother figure squeezes her empty breasts for more than twenty minutes.
Her manic action does not develop at all, it’s simply repeated
into eternity. As she’s sitting at one side of the scene, at the
other side there’s a large white statue of a Sphinx, the silent
reminder of the riddle that Oedipus had to solve. The different stages
of man, put into question by the sfinx, is something Castellucci likes
to play with in the different episodes. Maybe ‘play’ is not
the right word. The Tragedia
Endogonidia rather shows mystic transformations between these
stages. The Brussels episode moves from a scene in which a child is
left alone in a big claustrophobic marble chamber, to a scene in which
a very old man is entering on all fours. In the end he sinks into his
deathbed, till nothing is seen anymore. But in the next episode in
Bergen, this evolution goes the other way around: an old lady is
covered with a goat skin and turns up again as a young girl.
Transformation is the central code of the Tragedia Endogonidia. Also in its
total form as cycle. On the one hand the eleven different episodes are
meant to be stand-alone performances, each one loosely inspired by the
history of the specific city where it is produced and shown. In
Brussels for instance Castellucci related to the unique language
problem of this capital. On the other hand the Tragedia Endogonidia produces
explicit leitmotivs. The arrow machine that you’ll see in the
film of Cesena came back in Bergen, as did the letter machine of
Avignon in different other episodes. A lot more examples could be
named. The Tragedia Endogonidia
is an ongoing transformation of semiotic objects in continually new
contexts, where each episode gives birth to another and makes the
previous die, in one eternal reproductive system. Of course there are
fixed structures. For instance, in each episode some characters are
wearing identical small pieces with a number around their arm. And over
their head they get a kind of terrorist cap, which only leaves their
eyes and their mouth free. These are core symbols of what we want to
talk about here today: the cruelty in the theatre of Castellucci.
But first it’s necessary to say how Castellucci relates to
the classical tragedy. For Castellucci, tragedy is ‘the
exhibition of the corpse of the hero to the polis’. Thomas will
tell you more about it. More important for my point here, is what
Castellucci says about the tragic: “The tragic is a form of
energy that is human and inhuman at the same time. This form of energy
does not belong to the gods but to the human and the inhuman.”
The tragic energy does not belong to the gods, but to the human
and to the inhuman, Castellucci says. The human aspect of tragedy we
can understand, but what does Castellucci mean by ‘the
inhuman’? It’s his work itself which gives answers. At
least, if we accept his powerful, but incomprehensible images as
answers to our questions. They go beyond language, beyond any
possibility of rational analysis. They rather form new questions, one
could say. The only way to talk about them is in terms of the technical
or abstract principles they are based upon. By naming these concrete
principles and structures, linked to concrete scenes, I’ll try to
give an insight in the specific cruelty in Castellucci’s theatre.
It’s a cruelty that is cruel by its anonimity. It’s cruel
because it passes beyond everything we can identify.
The first principle of inhumanity which is developed through the
different episodes, is the appearing of animals and machines on stage.
To start wirh the animals: from Cesena 1 to Cesena 11, we have seen
rabbits, goats, horses, apes and cats. If they appear on stage, they
are extremely theatrical, but they’re not aware of it. They
haven’t any intention to play or to represent, they just are
there, as a pretragic appearance of life itself. Of course the goat in
Bergen functions as a strong symbol, because in Castellucci’s
etymology ‘tragedy’ means ‘song of the goat’.
But what it sings, what it communicates, has no comprehensible meaning
to us. That’s why the animals function as such strong images.
They go beyond language, and they deny will as a basic category of
tragedy.
A little different form of inhumanity is embodied by the
many machines in the Tragedia Endogonidia. They do express a sort of
will. For instance, there’s the arrow machine in Cesena and
Bergen, automatically shooting arrows into the opposite wall.
There’s also the mechanic tree-robot in London, which rather
ironically rapes the character of Saint Paul. They function as a kind
of ‘deus in machinae’. In Paris three cars suddenly fall
down from the ceiling, whereafter they park themselves without any
human interaction. In Strasbourg these kinds of unbelievable
interventions are driven to its extreme when at the end of the episode
a real tank is driving into the theatre, aiming at the audience.
It’s not its possible shooting that is most threatening, but the
fact that there’s nobody operating on it, which is also the case
for the other machines. The human individual as an autonomous initiator
or operator is driven out from Castellucci’s theatre. Every
technical stageprop is mechanically coming out of the walls or down
from the ceiling, as if the Tragedia Endogonidia was one big machinery
itself. And in the second part of Marseille it really is. That part
just exists of colour areas moving up and down behind layers of
transparent net curtains, accompanied by a thrilling soundscape of
Scott Gibbons. The gods of the ancient tragedy has become anonymous
technicians here.
A second principle of the
Tragedia Endogonidia is the anonymous architecture in which it
takes place. In the first ones episodes the space was looking very
monumental and claustrofobic at the same time, five sides of a cube
without doors. Remember the golden room in Cesena or the huge marble
chamber in Brussels. They show an architecture which is extremely
naked, but overwhelming to the same level. These spaces have no
identity, so that the characters are dropped there as the last leftover
pieces of humanity. In the later episodes however, the architecture
grew more open and transparant, which was however blurred by many net
or plastic curtains in the front. What you saw, you saw behind a
non-reflecting mirror. A direct contact between audience and stage,
from face to face, almost took place.
The third principle of inhumanity in the Tragedia Endogonidia is the total
abscence of meaningful language. If there’s any language one can
understand, it’s expressed by the lettermachine, for instance in
Avignon and Bergen. This machine looks like that kind of older
information boards in airports or train stations, with rattling
alphabet letters. In Bergen this lettermachine welcomed the audience by
forming the sentence ‘Hello, it’s me the goat
speaking’. This is a pure mechanical speech, presenting language
in a very physical way.
If, next to the machines, characters speak, they only produce
sounds without any semiotic connection. They only utter a ritual score
of separate notes. So what Castellucci is doing, is making language
fall apart in its smallest components: alphabet letters or just sounds.
This is not really a postmodern vision on language, but a utopic one.
By the dissolution of all known language, a new language has to be
found. Text as a basic category of tragedy is denied to give birth to
an alternative kind of pretragic unity of speech.
And the last principle, even the most cruel one, is the opposition
between a uniform group and a naked individual, which is depersonlized
by a terroristic cap pulled over the head. The group on the other side
is often clothed in the same way, and by that it also looses all
personality: the religious vicars in Rome, the cleaning team in London,
the gothic counts in Bergen, the policemen in Brussels, the shooting
women in Berlin, the old fashioned detectives in Cesena... They form a
choir, but not longer a passive one. They operate as a collective body
ruled by higher demands, and this is always leading to the sacrifice of
one of them by the others. In Marseille one naked woman is becoming the
victim of extreme boundage, whereas in Bergen the old lady is
repeatedly bashed by an immense battering-ram in the form of a tragic
goat’s head, operated by four gothic counts in white. Their
violence is precise and autonomous, as a ritual acted out by one
identical collective. It’s what René Girard would call the
mimetic drive leading to a sacrifice, in order to reinstall the Law.
But in the Tragedia Endogonidia this
violence is unique by its anonimity.
To me this anonimity is the basic key Castellucci is using to open
up ancient tragedy into the 21st century. He finishes with
individuality as the tragedy’s central category to give way to a
collective intimacy. At the same time he conserves the real tragic
situation of ‘not having a choice’. Without any willing
language the characters of the Tragedia Endogonidia are subordinate to
a higher order not of the gods, but of autonomous machines and an
overwhelming architecture. They are horified by the anonymous choir
that ‘ll sacrifice them, but they do not resist. At least
that’s the way that policeman in Brussels meets his fate: he
undresses almost spontanously, in a great acceptance of life’s
cruelty.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - -
After Wouter has given a sort of phenomenology of the Tragedia
Endogonidia, I would like to discuss two specific problems posed by the
cycle. The first problem is that of the relationship between the Tragedia and tragedy. The second
is the problem of violence, or, as the programme for today announces,
cruelty.
Romeo Castellucci is at the same time very clear and very vague
about the relationship between the cycle and classical tragedy.
“Tragedy is a structure that is able to house everybody who is
born in the West. It’s one of the sources of the West. I did of
lot of work on this problem, but now I understand that I understand
nothing. Tragedy is really an unknown object. It is unknown because it
is obscure, and it is obscure because it is within us. It’s a
core that belongs to everybody. And maybe everybody belongs to this
core.”
So, first of all we have an ‘object’ that is not by
definition highbrow art or a relic of the past. Tragedy belongs to
everybody and it is a contemporary object. It’s even connected to
such concepts as community and intimacy. “Intimacy is the keyword
that opens the possibility of tragedy for the future.”
Tragedy is something that concerns all of us, but sadly enough we
cannot understand it very well. That’s the vague side. On the
other hand, Castellucci is very precise as to what is the essence of
classical tragedy for him. He even defines tragedy: “Tragedy is
the exhibition of the hero’s corpse. The hero’s corpse is
exhibited to the city and to the citizen. ‘Look, this is the
corpse.’ For the city, this moment is critical. The corpse breaks
the rules, it breaks the law. However, this does not constitute a
transgression from the outside. The transgression rises from the heart
of the law. (La transgression sort
du milieu de la loi.) It is the law that is breaking the law, by
means of the law. And the corpse is the final point of the law.”
Now how are we to make sense of this? To clarify this, I will make use
of Klaas Tindemans’ reflections on the political nature of Greek
tragedy.
Castellucci’s definition sounds quite confusing, but
actually it’s a very technical definition. Castellucci pinpoints
the moment in Greek tragedy where the dead body of the hero is brought
out using the ekkyklema. The
ekkyklema is a platform on
wheels rolled out through a door in the skene, used “to indicate that
whatever is on the platform (actors and props) is supposed to be viewed
as an interior scene”. For example, in the Agamemnon of
Aeschylos, the corpse of Agamemnon is being wheeled out through the
doors of the skene using the ekkyklema.
Indeed, the exhibition of the corpse constitutes a perplexing and
confusing moment for the citizens who are watching. They have to think
about this corpse, about what the death of this important political
figure – a leading hero, very often a king – means to the
city. When Castellucci singles out this critical moment to define
tragedy, it is clear that he understands theatre as a medium for
reflection. Or at the very least a medium for astonishment and
unexpectedness, an occasion for puzzling and perplexing experiences.
Tragedy makes us think about a corpse that is not a normal corpse.
The hero has died a violent death. The circumstances of his death are
often very sensational. Agamemnon is killed by his own wife and will be
avenged by his children. Tragedy asks us to look at this corpse, then
think about it. What does this corpse mean for the city?
This, then, is probably what Castellucci means with the enigmatic
sentence: “It is the law that is breaking the law, by means of
the law.” Tragedy was a democratic institution in ancient Greece.
It belonged to the city, and it belonged to religion as well. So we
have the city itself displaying the corpse of a political hero to the
citizens.
Now we have an idea of what Castellucci means with the word
‘tragedy’. I’ll take that as a starting point to
discuss the violent acts he shows, and, more importantly, the way in
which he shows them.
Tragedy is an ‘amazing space’. It’s not the
space itself that is amazing, but what can be shown in this space.
Theatre, according to Castellucci, is a space to show amazing events.
It’s not a coincidence that Christian Biet has made the link
between early modern theatre, in particular French tragédie sanglante, and the
theatre of Castellucci. In the Renaissance, there is an abundance of
new, theatrically structured, ‘amazing spaces’. A lot of
such spaces are being invented, such as the anatomical theatre, an
educational stage to display the amazing insides of the human body, or
the Wunderkammer, literally a
‘chamber of wonders’, the prototype of the museum. The Wunderkammer houses a collection of
rare and wonderful natural objects, such as precious stones, big shells
or the remains of exotic animals, that are displayed together with
expensive books, weaponry, and objects made from gold or silver . The Wunderkammer is the prototype of
the ‘amazing spaces’ of early modern times. It’s a
spatial structure designed to maximize astonishment. It’s crammed
full of wonderful objects, so that when something catches your eye, the
next moment you will already be watching something else, equally
wonderful, that’s lying just next to it. In the Wunderkammer, “objects were
positioned next to one another so as to maximize dissimilarity”
(Daston/Park). What’s more, the Wunderkammer
is quite explicit about this structure. The visitor of the Wunderkammer knows that he will be
amazed – there won’t be any sudden shock of surprise. The Wunderkammer has nothing to do with
suspense.
The Tragedia Endogonidia
has the same structure as the Wunderkammer.
This theatre is not about suspense or psychological examination.
It’s not about fantasy or storyline. It’s not about
beautiful, touching scenes. This theatre is about astonishment. For
Christian Biet, the similarities between the Tragedia Endogonidia and early
modern ‘amazing spaces’ such as the tragédie
sanglante (or the Wunderkammer, we might add) imply that, when we are
faced with an act of violence in this kind of theatre, this act is
framed such as to make us reflect on it. Just as the tragédie sanglante always
shows both sides of a moral problem, the Tragedia Endogonidia shows how an
act of violence and the frames for watching that act are
‘constructed’. However, this is only a vague suggestion. I
would like to discuss in a more detailed way the nature of the
amazement we experience when we witness a violent scene on
Castellucci’s stage.
My main proposition is that ‘pure’ violence or
‘naked’ force is never visible to the human eye. Whenever
we watch an act of violence, be it real or imagined, we are being
subjected to powerful perceptive and conceptual mechanisms in order to
be able to frame this event. Of course, this is true for all of human
experience. But in the case of violence it’s especially
strikening. As a matter of fact, we do not know what we are talking
about when we utter the word ‘violence’.
‘Violence’ is one of the most abstract concepts in our
language, which is in stark contrast to our daily experience. When
someone says a movie is too ‘violent’ for children, we all
seem to agree that we know very well what that person is talking about.
Actually, we know nothing. ‘Violence’ means nothing more
than ‘force’ (from the Latin vis, force). It’s the same
in other European languages: ‘geweld’ and
‘Gewalt’ both have as their origin the ancient German word
‘wal’, which means ‘to rule’. My proposition is
that there are quite specific mechanisms at work underneath this very
abstract words. And what Castellucci does in the Tragedia Endogonidia –
amongst others – is to bring these mechanisms to light.
Most of the ‘violent’ scenes of the Tragedia Endogonidia are about
torture, sacrifice, or humiliation. There is the police officer who
undresses to be beaten by his colleagues in the Brussels episode; there
is the sacrifice on the washing machine in Paris; there is the naked
woman being ‘punished’ by an invisible voice in Rome; there
is another naked woman being exhibited, abused and photographed in
front of a group of gentlemen spectators (in the Marseille episode).
In each of these scenes, the stress is not on the person being
tortured or the persons executing the action. It is on the ways these
acts are being watched.
In theatre and film history, there are two methods of representing
violence. In most cases, the violent scene is framed by a narrative.
This narrative makes it easy for us to digest what we see. During a
torture scene, for example, many directors make sure the spectators
have no difficulty separating the good from the bad. The tortured
person becomes a hero, the torturers appear as utterly depraved demons.
The narrative, for example that of a historical drama or war drama,
makes it clear why the violence was unavoidable and what will be the
consequences of it. The hero might, for example, through torture become
a martyr. (From this perspective, the essence of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ [2004]
was already announced by the torture scene at the end of his Braveheart [1995].) The violent
action may very well be gripping, such as for example a supposedly
unwatchable rape scene or horror scene (e.g., the infamous
chest-burster scene from Alien
[1979] ), but once it is finished, the movie relaxes its grip.
It’s easy to recuperate from a horror picture; we are feeling
very tense while watching it, but afterwards we have an immediate
feeling of relaxation. The violent action was just a part of the
narrative; once the narrative is over, the violent action disappears
with it.
A second method of representing a violent action is to fuse it not
with a narrative, but with a performative. There exist a set of
culturally defined reactions to watching violence. For example, most
kinds of torture presuppose the presence of spectators. You can’t
burn a witch if nobody’s watching. The spectators are part of the
show; without them, the frame for the violent action would be
incomplete. There are some artworks that do not frame representations
of violent actions by means of a narrative, but by referring to certain
performatives. You are all familiar with some examples: Salo by Pasolini (1976), or Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer
by John McNaughton (1986). In both of these movies the voyeuristic
position of the viewer is explicitly brought to his attention.
In the Tragedia Endogonidia, we
don’t find any narratives or performatives for staging violent
actions. Instead, these methods themselves become the subject of the
performances. During the beating of the policeman in Brussels, or the
bondage scene in Marseille, the theatrical frame for violent actions is
turned inside out. The frame is made explicit. This relates to another
statement of Castellucci: “The real problem is not the statue,
but the pedestal.”
This, then, could be the ‘meaning’ of violence in the Tragedia Endogonidia. A violent
action must be isolated from its habitual frames of perception. Only in
that way may we become conscious of the specifity of violence. We may
get to know more about how we watch a violent scene, and why
‘violence’ as such means so little. We may learn that to
watch violence is very often to cover up violence. We may learn that,
in fact, we need to know every single detail of every single violent
act if we are to get a clear view of this abstract concept.
But, as Castellucci himself would say, “that’s only a
hypothesis of me”. It is important to know that, in almost every
interview, Castellucci states that he himself is equally ignorant about
the exact meaning of his images as everyone else. He has only a number
of hypotheses about his work. We should therefore conclude with a
remark of Castellucci about the Tragedia
Endogonidia being a project that is essentially ‘on the
run’, wandering or roaming, just as the Voyager spacecraft:
“The image that is closest to the spirit of the Tragedia Endogonidia has been
reproduced on the programmes. It was engraved on a gold disk that is on
board of the Voyager. This spacecraft was sent adrift in space. The
project is adrift too. Great discoveries are only possible adrift. This
image is concerned with the experience of aporia. You don’t know
the end of the road.”