Romeo Castellucci, one of the world’s most esteemed theatre directors, honoured with prestigious awards including the Golden Lion in Venice for lifetime achievement, claims that ‘theatre just happened to him’. 1 He had been predominantly interested in the world of visual arts, an interest that initially gave rise to performance-art shows, created first in secondary school and then during university, which later turned into theatre. In 1981, with his sister Claudia Castellucci, wife-to-be, Chiara Guidi, and her brother Paolo, the director formed Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 2 —an association fusing theatre, performance art and visual arts, which was to explore the potential of theatrical expression outside of narration. The company’s name refers to the Renaissance painter Raphael and points to the art-related roots of its founders: Castellucci graduated in painting and stage design from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, his sister in painting and philosophy, and his wife in literature with elements of art history. Castellucci was responsible for the initial shape of Socìetas performances, their direction, stage design and costumes, Chiara Guidi for voice work, and Claudia Castellucci for stage movement and the productions’ intellectual context—she wrote scripts for the company’s first performances, theoretical texts, took part in conferences and edited publications printed by the theatre. Since 2006, Romeo, Chiara and Claudia have been creating independent productions within Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Before then, productions initiated since the late 1980s by Castellucci were prepared by the company together, though with clearly defined responsibilities. One can say that Castellucci had the role of artistic director for the projects. The company functioned as a family institution and, despite changes in work organisation in 2006, it still does, which is a rarity in the European theatre world. The children of Romeo and Chiara have taken part in Socìetas performances. In several performances, the Castellucci siblings’ mother has appeared. Their decade-older sister also works for Socìetas. Despite the fact that, today, Claudia, Chiara and Romeo create independent projects, their work continues to share elements of the vision they originally forged in the 1980s, of theatre as a place to experience infancy, where audiences can be transported into a different world unrelated to day-to-day reality and, thanks to this, offering an opportunity to observe the human being from a distance. According to Socìetas, theatre is the field of art which has the greatest potential to suspend the laws governing everyday life, and institute a new reality.
In Socìetas productions directed by Castellucci, the primary instrument of constructing this new world is an image. Performances have a classical composition created within the frame of the stage watched by an audience member sitting opposite it—this spatial setting resembles the position of a viewer in front of a painting. Frequent points of reference for the world thus created are paintings, such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and works by Francis Bacon in Oresteia (1995), Mark Rothko’s works in The Four Seasons Restaurant (2012), and Masaccio’s fresco The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, with his Eve becoming an inspiration for the figure of Eve in Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep (1999). The space, the play of colours and forms, as well as actor scenes, are built in a plastic manner, and actors communicate with the audience at the level of visual meaning. However, for Castellucci, image is not only the instrument of building the stage language, but also the subject of a philosophical reflection, both aesthetic and ethical. The point is not to determine what an image is (in different periods of his work, the director has called it a form, then a symbol or an idea), but to define its roles. That was the nature of the reference Socìetas made to the notion of iconoclasm (Greek eikōn, image, and klao, break, which literally means ‘breaking an image’), an early Christian movement opposing the cult of icons and religious figures.
Why did theatre with image as its constitutive instrument refer to a movement characterised by the rejection of images? This is the question which lies at the heart of this book. The first edition was published in Poland in 2013 as To nie jest obraz. Romeo Castellucci i Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio [This Is Not an Image: The Theatre of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio] by the Malta Foundation and the publisher Ha!Art. 3 It was designed as a critical reconstruction of the Italian director’s theatre and the theoretical approaches accompanying it, hence as a meta-analysis aiming to present the theatrical project that has developed over the past 30 years, with its ethical and aesthetic framework designated by reflection on the image. The book is based on contexts suggested by Castellucci (including the notions of iconoclasm, the pre-tragic and infancy), which are analysed in consecutive chapters. An effort is made to confront the creator’s discourse with the philosophical and aesthetic discourses on which his project draws: the perspectives of Pavel Florensky, Giorgio Agamben, Jakob Bachofen, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig and Hans Blumenberg. It explores where these discourses meet and where they diverge from one another.
It is thus possible to distinguish the crucial categories in Romeo Castellucci’s theatre, to look at them with hindsight, to show how particular concepts functioned in different periods of the director’s oeuvre, how they evolved, mutated, and in which forms they recurred, testifying to the uniformity and consistency of his project. These categories find a different way of expression in each of Castellucci’s creative periods, but the field of interest has not changed. This theatre is a consistently developed project that continually surpasses itself.
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Four periods can be distinguished in Castellucci’s oeuvre. The first is designated by iconoclastic performances from the early 1980s characterised by a rebellion against theatre subjugated to literature and understood as a representation of reality, and by an attempt to redefine the role of art. At that time, Claudia Castellucci was the author of scripts for Socìetas’s productions. They differed significantly from other dramatic works, functioning as an organic part of the performance, and subordinated to the materiality of the stage. The Socìetas approach has its roots in the tradition of the Italian avant-garde, not only of the 1960s but also of the 1970s and 1980s, or the so-called post-avant-garde to which the works of the company from Cesena are considered to belong. That had been a period of great liveliness for Italian theatre—a time of formal experiments, touching upon subjects until then considered non-theatrical, and building relationships between different fields of art. Socìetas was part of this movement, grew out of it, drew inspiration from it and defined itself against it.
The first wave of the avant-garde, including Mario Ricci, Carmelo Bene, Carlo Quartucci and Leo de Berardinis, touched upon the subject of the autonomy of theatre, looking for that which makes it different from other fields of art. This question, posed already at the beginning of the twentieth century and developed by the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, recurred at this time with redoubled intensity. What differentiated it then was interdisciplinarity. The avant-garde of the 1960s drew from film, conceptual art, contemporary dance, happening and new trends in music in the vein of John Cage. Performances were shown in galleries, art houses, museums, and at exhibitions including the Biennale in Venice and Documenta in Kassel. Its most significant creators, Carmelo Bene and Carlo Quartucci, were educated at Accademia Silvio D’Amico and Stabile di Genova respectively, but these were only episodes in their artistic biographies, needed only to affirm them in their choice of which artistic path to follow—antagonistic towards conventional theatre. This choice had a political character. In the 1960s, Italy experienced rapid economic growth. Traditional, literature-based theatre symbolised the bourgeois ideology preaching the myth of economic advancement that intellectuals and artists linked with Italy’s fascist past. The avant-garde began to deconstruct this myth connected with the bourgeois class, its hierarchy of values and lifestyle. Demythologisation consisted of the destruction of theatrical conventions, confronting the text with the stage through aesthetics rather than a theme or meanings contained in the text of the performance.
This shift in emphasis from the text to that which is happening onstage was precisely the second feature of the Italian avant-garde. The artists either rejected the text completely or embedded it in a composition in which it was but one of many elements. The works of Bene, one of the best-known and most valued Italian directors of that period, creator of controversial adaptations of classic texts including Pinocchio, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, were of particular importance for the output of Castellucci. Bene has underscored that, once a performance has started, ‘everything has already happened’ and all we are left with are ‘the rests, oral fragments of a scenic palimpsest or a past perfect poetic’. 4 The space and narration of a performance in Bene’s theatre were determined by manipulation of the word: screams, whispers, excessive movement close to parody and profanation. The work on voice made it possible to break the language of a classic text, depriving it of its initial meaning. In this way, the text of the play was created anew.
The breakdown of form and work on the physical aspect of theatrical signs that is characteristic of Bene’s theatre is also typical of Socìetas works from the 1980s and 1990s in which the word acquired plasticity and became a mere sound. What mattered was the voice’s very rhythm, pulse, vibration and volume, rather than sense contained in the words uttered.
A significant role in shaping the Socìetas approach was played by Federico Tiezzi. A little older than the group members, Tiezzi had started his work in 1972 in Florence by founding the company Il Carrozzone, which in 1979 changed its name to Magazzini Criminali. His works are already considered to belong to the post-avant-garde distinguished by Giuseppe Bartolucci, 5 the legendary Italian theatre critic, from the avant-garde of the 1960s.
The post-avant-garde definitely sped up and developed the practice the avant-garde had opened up to earlier, based on interdisciplinarity and the critique of bourgeois culture. 6 Texts of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault played an important role in its formation. These described the breakdown of the modern paradigm of the world as a whole, underscoring the lack of continuity and heterogeneity in contemporary times and for the individual themself. Along with Tiezzi’s early companies, the 1970s also saw the formation of other companies of significance to Italian theatre: in 1976, in Rome, Gaia Scienza (Barberio Corsetti, Marco Solari and Alessandra Vanzi) began its activities; in 1977, in Naples, both Falso Movimento (directed by Mario Martone) and Teatro dei Mutamenti (Antonio Neiwiller and Renato Carpentieri) were formed; in 1978, Teatro Studio di Caserta (with Toni Servillo); and in 1979 the Milan-based Teatro Out Off (headed by Antonio Syxty). Then, in 1980, Il Teatro della Valdoca was established and a year later Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, both in Cesena. .
Tiezzi, similarly to Carmelo Bene, focused on breaking the conventional theatrical signs. In contrast to the surplus that characterised the theatre of the director of Pinocchio, however, the creator of Magazzini Criminali reduced theatre to the minimum of expression. Tiezzi’s productions were characterised by the reduction of theatrical means: ‘We considered academic recitation tantamount to the chatter stigmatized by Pasolini,’ he stated. ‘But the point was also to gain some distance to the theatre of screaming, so fashionable at that time, which was spreading in the performances under the trademark of the Living Theatre. Originally, our theatre was the theatre of silence.’ 7 His theatre was defined by references to limits (of representation, body, subjectivity) and an opening towards the image. In such productions as Presagi del vampiro (1977), Vedute di Porto Said and Studi per ambiente (both 1978), and Punto di rottura (1979), the conceptual work on theatrical language meets the language of visual arts, and that which is real, an element disturbing theatrical representation, forces its way into a theatrical world that has been reduced to its minimum.
The third point of reference for the Castelluccis was Arte Povera, which emphasised the austerity of ‘poor’ material—rags, newspapers, metal, stone. Their company’s first performances, such as Popolo zuppo [Soaked People] (1982), referred to the activities of Jannis Kounellis and Joseph Beuys. In I fuoriclasse della bontà [The Master of Goodness] (1983), there are references not only to Arte Povera but also to Dadaism. However, as Romeo Castellucci notes, these references were not expressed directly:
There are references but never direct quotations. You cannot say: this is Zorio, this is Kounellis, this is Beuys. There is a sensitive connection, a kinship, but nothing more. I find that during a performance one should be able to forget intellectual and cultural references. […] The fundamental thing in theatre is the emotive weave, the sensitivity shock. 8
Also today, intellectual references—philosophical, ethical, theological, cultural and iconographic—are often covert in Socìetas performances. The point is, above all, to involve the audience in the emotional and physical implications of an image, story and idea.
It was precisely their inspiration by Arte Povera and the works of Bene and Tiezzi, which introduced reflection on the physical reality of a performan...