The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio

Joe Kelleher, Nicholas Ridout, Claudia Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Romeo Castellucci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415354301
• eBook ISBN: 9781134258055
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio chronicles four years in the life of an extraordinary Italian theatre company whose work is widely recognized as some of the most exciting theatre currently being made in Europe.

In the first English-language book to document their work, company founders, Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, discuss their approach to theatre making with Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout.

At the centre of the book is a detailed exploration of the company's eleven episode cycle of tragic theatre, Tragedia Endogonida (2002–2004,) including:

• production notes and extensive correspondence giving insights into the creative process
• essays by and conversations with company members alongside critical responses by their two co-authors
• seventy-two photographs of the company's work.

This is a significant collection of theoretical and practical reflections on the subject of theatre in the twenty-first century, and an indispensible written and visual document of the company's work.

PART ONE
Makers and spectators,
Tragedia Endogonidia,
2002–4

Laboratory, 2001

11 MARCH 2001

Dear Scott,

Towards the end of March I’d like to do some work with a few people so I can know who to call when you get here. I want to record some cries and noises and ask these people not only to reproduce them but also to perform them before your arrival. I’m not thinking of texts but emulsions of sound, built up rhythmically and then covered with their own breath. I want to get between the folds of the specific sound that a machine makes, or get inside the cry of an animal and move it and shake it in a dramaturgical key. I’d like the cry of an animal or the screech of a machine to cause the sort of commotion that makes me want to intervene, to placate an anguish that doesn’t even exist. We need to make a lot of sound-filters: I want to see if an individual voice can sound not just singular but choral, like the voices of everyone gathered in one person.

I’m thinking more of whispers than shouts.

I’m thinking of voices in fragments rather than a compact block.

I’m thinking of a breathless voice and a voice made up only of breaths.

I’m thinking of a chorus that is variegated but barely perceptible.

I’m thinking of a voice that arrives unexpectedly like a fist.

I’d like to listen to my voice from inside my stomach or else put my ears far away from my body.

The beating of the heart will be going on deep down, and left there as always.

As you can see, everything is still unformed and, although I warned you it would be like this, I can’t bear it. The acoustic magma shaking up inside me awaits its dramaturgical catalysation. But it will happen.

Have you thought of any particular voices to do the voices of silence?

I’ll speak to you soon, dear Scott, and don’t be discouraged if I still sound somewhat vague and abstract.

Chiara

4 MAY 2001

Dearest Scott

We’ve realised that maybe by presenting the future show as choreography we can risk a new type of dramaturgy, unconnected to tradition. It’s not easy in the theatre working outside the Western tradition; for audiences it can make things seem incomprehensible and arbitrary, a work of abstraction. With choreography, perhaps, an audience is better able to participate in an act of creation which can take account not only of theatre but also the visual arts. And this is the freedom that we need now.

Anyway it will be necessary to identify the figures, the ‘characters’, so as to dig out in them all of the scenographic ideas, the sound ideas, the voice and light ideas that are already starting to emerge. The problem now is the same as it always was: the Figure must be set free from representation, which has something to do with the sort of feeling that gets into the flesh and the nerves. And this setting free happens through a fall. We must struggle, then, to bring about this fall.

A lot of the sounds we’ve found are sounds that shift the hearing, as if the ears might turn up in the heart, or in the stomach, or outside the body, as if the ears themselves were a body, equipped with movement and gravity. Often it felt as if my body were without ears, until I found them again, here, in this part of my body, or there, or further up or further down. My ears felt like bodies detached from me, responding to the provocations of my voice. I could see them clearly, or rather I felt myself as ear. My voice was another’s voice, and with my voice I could feel, for a moment, the vanishing of sounds that had barely been audible. My voice was a memory of hidden sounds. My voice was water and fire. I’ve been using the sound of some bones, and it sounds like the skeleton rising up against the flesh.

Always, before a fall, certain forces, that were already there, become audible. We haven’t worked on reproduction and invention, but we have given a sound to forces that are not usually heard. Now I would like to give a sound to time, to pressure and gravitation, to attraction and repulsion, to dilation, contraction, cracking, stretching and straining. These will be the themes that will engage us in our second phase of research. What do you think?

Ciao, Chiara

Making space

I live my craft like a duty. It is not a moral duty. I only know that I must do it. Everything we’d done in the theatre and everything we lived outside were squeezed together in a doorway, beyond which there was the future. It was no longer anything to do with what we’d done. The future was not an empty land, even if it did have space for things that even now aren’t there yet. It was very similar to the usual life, if not to say identical, except there was much more space. An enormous, disorientating space, to tell the truth, good for spinning tops a long way away from each other. Tragedy was an emptied-out space. The freedom which this space accorded us was intimidating, like a barely discovered country, where the sort of life that needs space could be established. Freedom existed in the future. And you could go into this future. It was immanent. You needed to occupy it naked. The nakedness of the flesh and the empty place are the primary conditions for the spatial occupation of tragedy. We are going deep into an art that belongs to the whole planet. Ours is a form of mime very different to African, Indian or Oriental mime; rather, it is similar to North American, South American, Euro-Asiatic and Australian mime. The ocean, the great icebergs of Greenland and the South Pole remain foreign and superior to our microbial existence.

Our Euro-Asiatic mime is not linked (any longer) to an earth to which we feel we belong. Language, cooking are nothing more than warm kennels, foundation myths, nocturnal callings of the blood. Religion is an excuse to make war. And culture is war’s lackey. It is always being dragged in.

Personifications, incarnations of concepts, symbols. We are on similar ground. But ours is still a mime. What, then, does our Euro-Asiatic mime amount to, in a world in thrall to the technologies of vision and spectacle? Can we make sense of this confusion?

The theme of tragedy is violent death. Whenever destiny knocks, a chorus rises up: whose job is to orientate, to explain, to communicate . . . Nowadays it is all chorus. The chorus is continuous, pervasive, gaseous. Either it expresses me, or it forces me to express myself. In practice, it co-opts. We find ourselves stuffed with analogy; fused to the same words: death, tragedy, spectacle. The word ‘surface’, perhaps more than any other, bears witness to the extent to which the same word can contain opposite meanings. Surface is the part of the body that appears. It is an immediate offering of reality. It is capable of producing the maximum communicative effect with the least possible communicative means. It is a field of torture. It is the material that we are, and have. How can we not see now, in this one word – surface – the common concentration of advertising, of fashion, of televisual communication and of theatre?

As long as the theatre cannot admit that it hangs out in the same places – the worst sort of places – of human expression, it will be incapable of any greatness or understanding. As long as it claims its distinct superiority over these potent forms of human expression, it will be nothing more than a small maestro with a baton, and there are so many of those. We are aware that we find ourselves in this same place, but we cannot waste time declaring ourselves to be in the right, while everyone else meanwhile . . . This attitude is always folding things up so as to have something to unfold again, an explanation to lay out, always reacting . . . never creating, never throwing itself forward, into the future, beyond the sort of weighty inducements that crush and take over the mind, forced only ever to respond, to be moulded in this way and that, while the loss of certainty about things and the loss of judgement remains as dangerous as ever.

This is the main reason, I believe, why mime always survives in times of war. In times of war, theatre has always been a way of suspending the yoke of reflex thought. This is why performances have gone on wherever there was still a room to perform in, along with a vigorous flowering of cabarets and sketches, which is deeply significant, it seems to me, with regard to the means of resistance and the conquest of life. Every creation, however stupefying, however strange or otherworldly, that springs up in conditions that would appear to demand other kinds of thoughts, other preoccupations, other sorts of reflections altogether, shows us how the capacity to project oneself into the future can be a form of flight which is something very different from escapism; which is, rather, a founding; a creating of unconnected thoughts; a making of artefacts that serve life and that put fresh water side by side with cooked food.

There is nothing more active than an escape. It is the opposite of the imaginary. The same goes for a forced escape, not in terms of forcing others to flee, but running something off, causing a run off in a system, like when you drill a hole in a pipe. George Jackson wrote from prison: ‘I may be running, but I’m looking for a gun as I go.’ To flee means tracing a line, or lines, a whole cartography. They reveal their worlds only through a long, fractured flight. [. . .] The great error, the only error, would be that of believing that a line of flight consists in an escape from life; the flight into the imaginary or into art. On the contrary to flee means to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon.¹

We mime the images of tragedy. We put figures in a golden room that destroys the sense of perspective. The gold walls mirror the forms, but not exactly; they meld together in an indistinct depth which can be related to the Ionian philosophers’ concept of nature as ‘origin of all the species of being; reality of the possible, with the features of that apeiron (indeterminacy), which Anaximander saw gushing from every individuated form’.²

One of the political tasks of the theatre as I see it now is to get right to the bottom of its own specific language. Without fear either of incomprehension or the impossibility of communication; without translation or commentary or explanation; without anxiety about the absence of speech on stage or anxiety about speech in general; with a strategy for words and a strategy for images that is capable of organising a new reality. This, in short, is what the movement of Tragedia Endogonidia is all about, a cycle of eleven episodes extending over three years. It is not a finished show that is moved from city to city. Its moving around is the show; a rhythm that strikes; a transformed organism, like the different phases in the life of an animal or vegetable. The economy must change; the economy of touring must change.

Tragedy fixes death. ‘Endogonidia’, on the other hand, designates the perennial life of an individual that, splitting itself, continually self-generates. And so Tragedia Endogonidia produces the continuous fixing of those deaths that succeed each other ceaselessly. Anonymity, nocturnal darkness, the privation of words, alphabetic and microbial invasion in league with the law, these are the initial conditions of our tragedy.

Cities, places of civil history and expectation; lands which bear an idiom; lands which support a climate, these are the spatial conditions of our tragedy. The immense melancholy of a prophecy that is about to take place. The face of so many Italian Virgins holding a child in their arms that will die on the cross. The resurrection will come, but first death must pass through and break up the perfect fullness of the face with the putrefaction of time. So as to defeat time and take flight. The silence of Andrei Rublev,³ the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE Makers and spectators, Tragedia Endogonidia, 2002–4
• PART TWO Conversations
• PART THREE Disjecta Membra
• Theatography
• Bibliography