Interview by Valentina Valentini and Bonnie Marranca
(source: PAJ Performance Arts Journal 77 (2004): 16–25)
Romeo Castellucci, with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, founded Societas Raffaello Sanzio, one of Italy’s most radical-thinking contemporary
theatres, in 1981. Since that time the group has created many productions, including provocative stagings of the classics of Shakespeare and the Greeks, including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, the Oresteia, as well as mythic texts, such as Gilgamesh. Societas Raffaello Sanzio also sustains a unique children’s theatre, a school, and produces books and conferences on their work. Based in the Adriatic city of Cesena, Italy, the company artists bring together theatre and the visual arts—and often, animals, children, actors, and non-actors—in productions that draw upon philosophical, literary, and visual ideas. Performed in nearly a dozen European cities, each as a singular creation, is the latest project, Tragedia Endogonidia, which unites art and science for a new reading of tragedy in the contemporary age. This interview was conducted in Italy, in June 2002.
V.V./B.M. Much of your theatre work has been the staging of classics by Shakespeare and the Greeks. What draws you to tragedy?
R.C. A spiritual connection exists between us and the classics; through them it’s possible to reconnect with the individual and with the universality of the individual, it is also possible to find the familiar as well as real solitude. A kind of reverse action shot is involved. Work with the classics demands that we confront the traditional, but that is precisely why the work can surpass the traditional, but never in a literary way. Therefore one mustn’t tackle these classical texts as a superstitious person who believes the classics to be safe; quite the opposite. One must make an effort to put them to the test of fire, in order to better determine their supportive structure, which leads exactly to the revelation that they speak to everyone, to the frail and private nature of every individual. And the book, as object, is no more.
V.V./B.M. How does it relate to your work?
R.C. The new cycle of work, on the other hand, is dedicated—and it’s the first time that this has happened—to a work outside the context of literature, outside the context of great books, books of the past; outside the “book,” yet it’s still work that is part of the discipline of tragedy. We could define the structure as classical, but the tragic form has so influenced individuals, society, and culture through the ages and has become so much a part of our psyches that it can appear in new aesthetic forms in our contemporary world. So, this new cycle of work has what I’ll call a universal structure, and as such it presents more basic problems. The universal is the simplest place possible to free oneself from narrative structure, from the burden of narrative, and thus also from the burden of the written word, from its visibility: the word should go back to being invisible. My tragedy project is called Tragedia Endogonidia or Endogonidial Tragedy. “Endogonidial” is a word taken from microbiology; “gonidial” refers to simple living forms that have inside them two gonads, thus both sexes, and they consequently reproduce through an endocrine system. The price they have to pay for being able to reproduce themselves is not conjunction, union, but division, a perpetual division of themselves. These living things are immortal. The interesting thing was to contrast these two words. Tragedia or tragedy is something that is part of our history (or at least the history of this side of the planet); its structure has a place at the origin of our consciousness and our culture. “Endogonidial.” on the other hand, is a word that falls completely outside culture, in the sense that there is no culture in this process of reproduction and survival. So while tragedy is a mechanism to expose the dead body, a mechanism whose fundamental aim is to display death, these micro-organisms are in fact immortal and reproduce themselves ad infinitum. “Tragedia” or “tragedy” on the other hand, presupposes an end (of the hero). Our intention with this production is to rethink tragedy, bring it into the here and now. In ancient Greece, the Episodes were sections of a tragedy that presented only the facts, without commentary; commentary was left to the Chorus. In Tragedia Endogonidia there is no Chorus. Out of the Episodes emerge basic recurring figures and forms, themes and ideas, which make the spectators aware of their existence, their state of being.
V.V./B.M. In what way is a city involved in the spectacle?
R.C. There are various ways in which a city can be involved in the project; in some cases it can be through a specific reference to something in the city even if the city itself is never actually named. A characteristic of this project on tragedy is that it changes from city to city, therefore it is in a process of becoming, but besides being in a process of becoming it’s an organism in continual flux, so the performance is never the same; but that’s no reason to call it a work-in-progress. Because it really appears to be the opposite; every time it opens for an audience, it’s a finished and complete production that supplies, within itself, the mechanism of endogonidial reproduction, a division of itself by itself, a sort of fall-out of spores, which provide for future and successive growth. Furthermore, it’s a system that completely eliminates the problem of repertory and therefore of reproduction, of the characteristic repetitive nature of theatre that’s calendar-related, because it is a project that in some way is strongly tied to a concept of geography and of place.The cities involved are Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Strasbourg, Bergen, London, Rome, Cesena, Paris, and Marseilles. Tragedia Endogonidia also includes a Film Cycle and a Travel Diary of the displacements: “Idiom, Climate Time.”
V.V./B.M. In Italy the theatre of the 90s came closer and closer to the language and forms of writing typical of film or visual installations. There’s a big crisis in the lines of demarcation between cinema, video, film, installations, the visual arts. What has glaringly disappeared in many of our most recent experiences is the boundary between the concept of entertainment and the concept of art, and the feeling of pathos.
R.C. Yes, of course, I understand perfectly. It’s a problem for me too; if there’s no emotion, for me that’s it, it’s over, it’s only a sterile idea. And that’s true above all for the new generation; there’s no dynamic, there’s no thought. I always demand that an artist move me. I even ask that of a visual artist. For me the emotional wave is the ineffable nucleus of a work, its breath of life. But it’s still difficult to be moved at exhibitions, at the biennials, where one sees dazzling and hallucinatory spectacles and stagings that remind one of amusement parks. Although even that type of irony can succeed, it’s a very difficult exercise. Irony is interesting when it’s fierce, when it rips your mind apart. That doesn’t always happen. The artists have to be damn good.
V.V./B.M. However one very often can have an enjoyable experience when there is an absence of irony, when there is no discussion about the world. How does European art make itself felt on the international scene?
R.C. In my opinion in certain American artists, such as Bill Viola, for example, the relationship is obvious: his references, in his most recent works, are to the Italian Renaissance even on a formal level; the composition, I could even say the prosody, becomes a choice of colors, of placements. He’s another example of work on the classical. In other situations the legacy of the European experience shines through as backlighting. Pop Art itself, which is completely American, has plainly taken certain pathways left in suspension by Dada and symbolism.
V.V./B.M. Is there a link here that is missing-how does it relate to Europe question?
Matthew Barney is an artist who is completely and magisterially American. He’s extraordinary because in his works he manages to trigger off a sort of language that’s self-contained, cohesive, endowed with merciless logic. He presents us with this reality, this complex system of signs, but the most satisfying thing is that he does it by using the signs of our reality. He’s one of the strongest artists today who is not, apparently, influenced by European art. He appears to be indifferent to the history of art, because the history of art has no bearing on his work. Brilliant.
V.V./B.M. How do you work with actors in relation to the Italian tradition?
R.C. The Italian tradition is based on characteristics of types. That is, there are character types in the Italian tradition, but meanwhile we know that Stanislavsky founded everything really on the idea of digging and interpretation, where the actor analyzes the character, the psychology of the character. In my case, neither the one nor the other exists; but these two pathways are not negated, they’re simply two unacknowledged tracks, two tracks that remain suspended. My work is of a more objective nature, it relies on the body of the actor. It’s a discovery, an encounter that happens with men and women willing to live this adventure. A professionalism is not necessarily required, although the actors do acquire it, in the sense that those who work with me don’t work spontaneously, nor do they improvise, but they become professionals even if they weren’t at the beginning. What makes an actor important in this experience is the soul, the face, and the body. The truth of the body becomes inscribed quite precisely in the fiction of the spectacle.
Two “temperatures,” two expressive registers, are present: on the one hand the logical structure of the movement principle and on the other the body and its truths, which is the most concise form of communication possible and also the most disconcerting, the most pointed. The body is the simplest form of communication, in the sense that even an animal understands you since it’s in a position to see you, hear you, and smell you. The body is the point of departure and probably also the point of arrival, after having completed an ellipse, after having also passed through and shaken the body of spectators. So I would say that this is a fundamental idea that sustains the work of the actors; it doesn’t repudiate tradition, it ignores tradition, the Italian and European tradition. And the static tradition of the East.
V.V./B.M. Can you give some examples of the difference between type and body?
R.C. In some cases the choice of an actor depends exclusively on the dramaturgy presented by a particular stage situation or by the specific text, the choice is never a personal one; the choice of a person, the shape, weight, age, walk doesn’t depend on me. They’re all elements that create the truth of the person’s body and that spill over, willy nilly, into the dramatic fabric. So the choice depends on the dramatic characteristics of a piece of writing for the stage or even a simple text. To give an example, and to remain concrete, to the perceptive eye, the hallmark of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is its loaded rhetoric. In my production, Cicero is interpreted by a man who, I think, weighs 240 kg (Trans. note: approximately, 528 pounds). I didn’t want to put something shocking on stage, something provocative; on the contrary, although I needed to work with a large body, in a certain way I hid it, I didn’t do anything to make this already oversized choice too obvious. The body was big, in this case, because Cicero is the man who drives forward Shakespeare’s text the most, who has the most weight because he inspires the conspiracy. Even if he doesn’t ever take part directly in the action, he’s still like a sort of weight that throws the action off balance. Thus Cicero is an enormous man who always has his back turned to the audience, because he turns his back to the action, and on the set with him are two treble clefs that refer
to Man Ray. Quite simply, he, in his turn, became a “rhetorical” body. In Julius Caesar I also worked with an actor whose larynx had been surgically removed, and it was his job to perform the voice of the character of Mark Antony. Mark Antony is the one who wins the oratorical competition, so working with someone who has no larynx meant having a new voice that came from the viscera, from deep down inside. Mark Antony’s speech is completely focused on Caesar’s wounds, it recalls the number of stab wounds, the blood that came out of them, the fact that the wounds are “silent mouths” which have no other voice at that moment but his, Mark Antony’s. Well, this character in the shape of this actor actually talks from a wound, to make the speech truthful, outrageous, and moving. The most amazing thing of all is that this type of emotion is really stimulated by a consciously rhetorical use of the body and voice.
V.V./B.M. In what way is technology present in your productions?
R.C. Technology is present on the stage as metaphor and spirit. Technology and machines are bearers of phantoms who inhabit the set, the stage—the concept is animistic. So a machine has an entrance and an exit, it lights up, it takes up a chunk of the world; in short, it creates its own world. So it’s quite clear that it’s not merely a gadget, a decoration, because it is energized and it is triggered by argument with the actor, and thus it has in some way a dehumanizing function. It dehumanizes the actor, puts
him in danger, places him in the paradoxical position of deuteragonist, so that finally it creates an inhuman tension.
The machine, unlike the animal, is inhuman because it’s pure function without experience. The actor falls exactly between these two camps, between animal and machine, he’s both things at the same time, pure function and pure exposed body, pure being. Technology becomes a central metaphor and, as such, it’s often more useful to hide it in order to make it effective: it’s the operation or action of the machine that’s important, not the machine itself. The technology I use is very diverse and ranges from being very primitive to very sophisticated: video technology, endoscopes which reconnoiter the insides of the actor and upset the traditional relationship that the audience has with the actor, in the sense that it’s possible to see the actor’s interior. For example, the endoscope in Julius Caesar passes over and probes the vocal chords and projects a video of them upstage. The first image is the inside of an actor, not a face, not an exterior. But I only do this with very sophisticated technology, instruments that are very difficult to use to which I devote twenty, thirty minutes of performance time without any human intervention by the actors. Pneumatic, hydraulic, oleic dynamic or oil-pressure machines, taxidermy, automaton mechanics, microscopes, organic chemistry, chemiluminescence, techniques for breeding certain animals, acoustical physics, robotic components, but also little pieces of sacred wood that have been badly nailed together . . . in short, whatever.
V.V./B.M. What is the spiritual dimension of your work? Can you describe its place in your theatre?
R.C. I can’t say, I don’t know anything about it, really. It’s something that escapes me completely, it must be there somewhere, but I can’t know it, I can’t say what it is. I try to plunder the spirit of others, in order to move myself. It can happen in certain situations, in certain total creations. It can even happen in certain ancient texts that I tackle in which everything seems clear to me, even the power that they trigger. What is very difficult, however, is what happens, at least for my sensibility, with a
contemporary author. It’s difficult for me, if not impossible, to stage a contemporary author like Beckett. I’ll never stage him, not because I’m a coward, but because we’re on the same level. Beckett has, like me, like a contemporary man, the same kind of box, one might say, the same type of aporia. We both find ourselves in the same circumstances, and it is not possible to work with someone who is in the same circumstances as I. It’s like an algebraic sum: two similar signs cannot stay together. I need a classical structure, one that’s universal, pure, transparent. Being universal, it belongs to me, because it resonates in me. Beckett doesn’t resonate in me, really, but I see my neighbor in him. The classical structure is pure, and being pure I can manipulate it. And once manipulated, I can purify it.
V.V./B.M. The universal allows you to dig inside yourself, to extract, to add.
R.C. Exactly, in a word . . . it’s possible to work, it’s possible to live. In freedom. No absolute freedom exists in a contemporary author. Again, contemporary texts are all packaged, ready-made, in speech.
V.V./B.M. Do you feel that you have any “fathers” or “sons”?
R.C. I have a putative “father,” a false father, and he’s a shining figure, one of the ghosts of my turbulent adolescence, Carmelo Bene, whom I didn’t follow in any way. For me, he’s simply an icon, but the important thing is that he’s an icon that is part of my adolescence; there’s a personal story there. However, I reject the idea of master teachers, it has no meaning at all for me. I’m completely outside, and it would be worse still if I claimed a master teacher. Naturally there may be figures who were, and continue to be, fundamentally important to me, but they are invariably outside the orbit of theatre. That’s perhaps natural and human. But following in the tracks of a method, for me that’s a mistake. Following a model means taking another’s path, and I want to question the very idea of a path.
V.V./B.M. In your opinion, is Pirandello relevant to present-day theatre?
R.C. I don’t know. No, I’d say he isn’t. Pirandello is a figure who’s central to Italian literary culture, but I personally have never followed him, because he sets off a kind of self-reflection, a sort of tautology that is mirrored in the actors. It’s not part of my thinking, it never has been. Pirandello’s theatre is self-reflective, and a sort of new awareness happens through language. But the limits of Pirandello lie in the fact that language becomes linguistics. The energy and power are buried by the situation created, penned, by a man who knew a lot about books and short stories. “Pay attention: Pirandello is ‘literature.’” That’s something else. For example, when the six characters are searching for the author, that’s more than a symbol, I have to say. These people are renouncing the disconcerting truth of the stage, the rift or barrier of the stage, the alienation that is an essential characteristic of the stage experience. They are renouncing all of that, thus they are also renouncing their stage roles. They are completely dependent on an author, on a poet, on the script, and thus they just repeat the script. All of this was happening at the same time that, beyond the Alps, a tortured Antonin Artaud was tearing words from his flesh, and paying a high price for it. There’s an abyss here, I would say. These are two separate worlds that will never know each other.
V.V./B.M. In Tonight We Improvise there’s a scene where the actors send away the director, who in his turn had sent away the author, and they end up doing everything themselves. To end that scene, Nina plays her part, she sings etc.; and then there’s the one who doesn’t die, but she does faint. This infers how dangerous it is when an actor does without the director, without the author, because it changes from being performance to being life.
R.C. Yes, but it’s even more ironic that it was written, fixed for all time through artifice, through a kind of somersault. It’s strange. I admit there’s a great sharpness of vision there, but it belongs to a piece of writing, a script that’s completely dead, one that has already divulged everything. One that’s descriptive, demonstrative. Life on the stage . . . why are we afraid of that word on the stage? What harm is there in it? They say it’s dangerous. But I embrace the danger that is so essential to theatre. So? I think it’s really the divide, the barrier, that causes all the furore.
Pirandello’s style is to mix up the levels, but everything remains in the linguistic domain. It’s like the sweet yarrow, an herb with many leaves but only one flavor. I find that—to continue the parallel which gives a sense of proportion to the things we’re talking about—Artaud is a figure who doesn’t belong to the past, he’s not part of tradition. Thus Artaud represents an aspect of making theatre in this sense; he’s not simply a playwright, indeed, he really isn’t one at all, and that’s a dimension I find pregnant with the future, despite the fact that academics try to manage him, to conjugate him. Artaud won’t be taken, really, he won’t be held.
V.V./B.M. The theatre of this century, of our century, does it go beyond the text and literary language?
R.C. No, not always. I believe that in this era theatre can really be created in all possible ways, even by simply reading a text from beginning to end. I don’t believe that there’s any problem with form. I believe that in this era we can finally say that we are released, indeed liberated, from the burden of style, from the burden of form. You can create theatre through the written word, through a text, but theatre doesn’t happen just because there’s a written text, it’s not automatic. What counts is the spirit, the emotion.
V.V./B.M. Does a new theatre of Europe in the 21st century exist?
R.C. In my opinion, it is a theatre that no longer has the problem of formal boundaries. I find that the most interesting experiences are those where certain choreographers create spectacles with very little dance, or theatrical spectacles that are really concerts.The most interesting situations, in my opinion, are those in which there’s a breakdown of styles and roles, or where what happens is of a radical nature worthy of this era, and this idea can happen even when there is not much tension, when the “heat” is low. The most interesting experiences are often those that, from a formal point of view, assimilate more from the visual arts, and I believe that, all in all, the most creative energies are coming from there. There’s a whole mode of theatre tied to tradition; I don’t call that art, only bourgeois decoration. Essential theatre is what can be done either in the middle of a war or in a museum. I believe that, in the end, what’s very important is the idea—mental giddiness, temporal suspension from this world—and presenting it for discussion, and the actual possibility of another parallel world, another language which, suddenly, as Alice knew, stops being “other.”