‘Romeo Castellucci or the Visionary of the non-Visual’, in: The Great European Stage Directors, ed. by Luk Van den Dries & Timmy de Laet, vol. 8, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018, pp. 87-117 & 204-212 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Semiotics of Images in Romeo Castellucci's Theatre
The Visual in Performance Practice. Critical Issues, 2012
The Italian director Romeo Castellucci suggests a new, interesting, daring and provocative way of presentation in the field of performance and visual art. In the early 21st century Castellucci accomplishes on stage Artaud’s theory about the abolition of the text of the play and the creation of a new theatrical language. In an attempt to find a different kind of communication between the artist and his audience, the director excludes the text and gives shape to universal and non realistic images. This contemporary representation fills the spectator with intense feelings and deep emotions. The audience considers Castellucci’s performances as a strong experience, because, as the director explains, the images he creates remove living matter from time and space . Making use of the grotesque, the director creates a nightmarish universe. In this world the monstrous depicts all modern man’s hidden desires, metaphysical concerns and terrors. Using as a point of reference the performance of Dante’s Divine Comedy directed by Castellucci and presented by Societas Rafaello Sanzio in 2008, this paper will explore the pioneer, delirious environment in which human beings, animals and modern technology combine and depict the trilogy Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise.
2011
Romeo Castellucci is one of the most radical avant-garde European directors of our times. Although the performances of his Group, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, constitute a theatrical event of high aesthetics, due to their often provocative and iconoclastic character have also incited such reactions that they have often been censored. Dimitris Tsatsoulis' study approaches Castellucci's stage images in a heretic manner: in the light of both the photographic and visual art images of another provocative and revolutionary movement of the beginning of the 20th century, that of Surrealism. He attempts thus an inter-artistic dialogue between the images, drawing on various theoretical tools from the fields of performance and photographic image analyses: semiotic, sociological, anthropological, etc. Throughout the book we read descriptions of photographs or paintings of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Raoul Ubac, René Magritte and other Surrealists, all in the writer's effort to locate direct and indirect references to them from the stage images of Castellucci's performances: from the trilogy of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the eleven Episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia, and earlier performances as Amleto, Genesi, Giulio Cesare, Orestea, Santa Sofia -Teatro Khmer, Hey Girl!, and others. At the same time what it is attempted is a parallel reading of the ideology and aesthetics of the Surrealist Movement, as it was expressed by its prominent members like Breton, Bataille, Dalí or Caillois, and that of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, as it has been stated in various occasions by its founding members, Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, and Chiara Guidi. The book so comes to suggest that the theatre of Castellucci, despite the director's affirmed aversion for Surrealism, constitutes the most complete manifestation of the ideology and aesthetics of the Movement in the area of theatre at the beginning of the 21st century. The writer develops his hypothesis by looking into the photographic logic prevailing most of the stage images created by Castellucci, and interpreting the Group's aesthetics and ideology, filled with surrealist references, through the concepts of iconoclasm, the walled artist, mimetism and the aesthetic amorphous, and the notion of beauty. The study concludes with a chapter devoted to the rhetoric of the image where what is successively studied are the material substance of speech, the image of writing and the rhetoric of the body.
Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, 5 November 2010.
Session A 1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia 2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico 3. Lina Wertmüller regista-burattinaia Federico Pacchioni, University of Connecticut-Storrs Session B 4. Manzoni’s Count of Carmagnola and Kleist’s Prince of Homburg: History between Fiction and Factuality Maria Giulia Carone, University of Wisconsin-Madison 5. Teatro e teatralità nella poesia del primo Palazzeschi Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin Madison 6. Mario Luzi’s Plays: A Plurality of Voices Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin-Madison Session C 7. Distinctive Nature of Masques of Commedia dell’Arte in their Relationship with Food in 18th Century Paola Monte, Royal Holloway, University of London 8. Arlecchino is Lying: Deconstructing Goldoni’s II bugiardo Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College 9. The Spectator in Dario Fo’s Performances: From the Foyer to the Post-Performance Debates Marco Valleriani, Royal Holloway, University of London
Journey into the Unknown. Romeo Castellucci's Theatre of Signs
The Dark Precursor. Deleuze and Artistic Research, Vol. I, 2017
Fundamental doubts on the nature of representation constitute the essential theme of the work of Romeo Castellucci, the co-founder of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The paper analyses how, through very specific scenic devices, Castellucci confronts spectators not only with the power of theater but also with its tremendous darkness. Exposed to violent attacks on the senses, the spectator is forced to see beyond the image and to think the unthinkable. The paper argues that what constitutes the key elements of such a theatre is what Deleuze, and before him Artaud and Proust, called “signs.” Signs testify to the power of nature and spirit, working at a deeper level than words, gestures, characters, or represented actions.
Language under Attack: The Iconoclastic Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio
'TRI - Theatre Research International' 34:1, 50-65, 2009
The Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, led by Romeo Castellucci, began its passionate incursion into Italian theatre in the 1980s. Through an analysis of their most challenging critical texts and manifestos, as yet unpublished in English, this paper will examine the theoretical foundations of Soc`ıetas Raffaello Sanzio’s oeuvre and the profound implications of the iconoclasm of their performances, and propose new means of deciphering their work. During the 1980s the company forged new linguistic and visual theatrical techniques, which were further developed through the 2002–2004 project, Tragedia Endogonidia. I argue that the relevance of their early work lies in their theoretical and practical widening of the parameters of representation. Excerpts from manifestos and texts written by Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, along with critical texts related to their work, are unless otherwise indicated translated into English by the present author.
International Symposium - Towards a History of Sound in Theatre: Acoustics and Auralities, CRI/University of Montreal – CNRS/ARIAS, Montreal, Quebec
The theatricality of today’s performance greatly relies on its own orality/aurality, that is, dramaturgy of sound. The current emergence of dramaturgy of sound is not merely an issue of artistic technique or theatre style; rather, it demonstrates a conceptual change in our theatrical discourse. The theatres of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Robert Wilson are examined here as the case in point of the legacy of the historical avant-garde’s sound poetry and performance in which vocal gesture has been used to dislocate verbal meaning and make words/sounds resonate both within the body and in the space In contrast to the way logical speech flattens theatrical space, as Jacques Derrida interprets Artaud’s point, sound reinstates the volume of theatrical space: “Once aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, and onomatopoeia, the theatre must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs.” Such hieroglyphic “writing” of theatre and performance that coordinates phonetic elements of language with visual, pictorial, and plastic elements of stage clearly prompted the corporal/erotic and the abstract/architectural impulses in Castellucci’s and Wilson’s current production practice