Romeo Castellucci - Anna Tabaki, A Tribute to Romeo Castellucci: Meeting with the audience (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Regenerative Ruination of Romeo Castellucci
2015
This article proposes an expanded understanding of Romeo Castellucci's radical performance work as a genuine theatre of ruins. While various scholars have already addressed the iconoclastic desire of Castellucci and his company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio to break with existing traditions in the history of art and theatre, less noted is the manner in which they exploit ruination not only as a gesture of destruction but also as an act of creation. In this essay, we uncover this often overlooked aspect in Castellucci's oeuvre by demonstrating how his reliance on ruins as a structural element of creation goes against the prevalent view that ruination equals the disintegrating loss of a material world. We first undertake a critical reading of the dominant discourse on the theatre of SRS, highlighting those ideas that may be suggestive of a more ambivalent model of ruination but which need to be further elaborated in order to understand how Castellucci's work discloses a particularly constructive side to the notion of the ruin. To this end, the notebooks of Castellucci provide crucial yet largely unexplored resources that, by charting the preparations and conceptions of his pieces, exemplify what role the ruin plays in Castellucci's aesthetics. Analysing a representative sample of Castellucci's notes, we elucidate how these documents visualize what Castellucci calls the “via negativa” of his creative process. As a sculptor who chisels statues out of stone, he works according to a procedure of elimination, filtering out those scraps and fragments that eventually make up the ruinous landscapes of his productions. In Castellucci's hands, we argue, the ruin becomes profoundly ambiguous, as it hovers between the hostilities of destruction and the potentialities of resurrection. But it is precisely this complexity that may explain the powerful appeal of Castellucci's ruinous theatre to contemporary audiences.
Anabases (2019) 29, 2019
In 1783, Vittorio Alfieri, one of the most prominent cultural figures of 18th-century Italy, published his first tragedies, amongst which both Agamennone and Oreste. Standing between humanistic freedom when dealing with the ancients and his rationalistic world, Alfieri endeavors to expand and question the linguistic, theatrical and political limits of Italian theatre, challenging his contemporaries with a new notion of the tragic. Particularly interesting is his Agamemnon, which stands out as a new Italian classic: its contemporary strength originates from an emulation of Aeschylus’ homonymous play, which he reads through Brumoy’s Théâtre des Grecs, and of Seneca’s Agamemnon, which the critics have always been prone to recognize as Alfieri’s main source. However true this might be on a superficial (and linguistic) level, I will argue that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, via Brumoy, plays as essential a role in the creation of Alfieri’s masterpiece as Seneca’s tragedy. The craggy Aeschylean representation of the gods and fixity of the characters are transposed on the figure of Clytemnestra, becoming tyrannical inner forces: in other words, Aeschylus’ play converts into a tragedy about the inner tyranny that our psyches exert on ourselves, an interpretation that will enjoy widespread appreciation throughout the centuries. In the history of the reception of ancient drama in Early Modern Europe, Alfieri stands at the end of the chain: a hybrid figure, anchored to the ancients, yet inevitably imbued with modern anxiety.