THE UNIVERSAL

The Simplest Place Possible

Romeo Castellucci, Societas Raffaello Sanzio

interviewed by Valentina Valentini and
Bonnie Marranca
Translated by Jane House

R
omeo 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.

Much of your theatre work has been the staging of classics by Shakespeare and the Greeks.
What draws you to tragedy?

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.

16 䊏 PAJ 77 (2004), pp. 16–25. © 2004 Valentina Valentini and Bonnie Marranca
How does it relate to your work?

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.

In what way is a city involved in the spectacle?

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

CASTELLUCCI / The Universal 䊏 17

production that supplies, within itself, the mechanism of endogonidial reproduc-
tion, 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 Endo-
gonidia also includes a Film Cycle and a Travel Diary of the displacements: “Idiom,
Climate Time.”

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 disap-
peared 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

18 䊏 PAJ 77
The character Bruto [Brutus] in Act I of Cicero (background) and Cesar (foreground)
Giulio Cesare. Photo: Courtesy Societas in Giuulio Cesare. Photo: Courtesy Societas
Raffaello Sanzio. Raffaello Sanzio.

Brutus and Cassius in Giuulio Cesare.

Photo: Courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

Amleto. Photo: Paolo Tonti, Photo:

Courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

La Prova di un altro mondo. Photo: Luca dal Pia,

courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

CASTELLUCCI / The Universal 䊏 19

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.

How do you work with actors in relation to the Italian tradition?

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 unacknowl-
edged 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.

Can you give some examples of the difference between type and body?

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 Shake-
speare’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

20 䊏 PAJ 77
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.

In what way is technology present in your productions?

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

CASTELLUCCI / The Universal 䊏 21

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, tech-
niques for breeding certain animals, acoustical physics, robotic components, but
also little pieces of sacred wood that have been badly nailed together . . . in short,
whatever.

What is the spiritual dimension of your work? Can you describe its place in your theatre?

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.

The universal allows you to dig inside yourself, to extract, to add.

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.

Do you feel that you have any “fathers” or “sons”?

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.

22 䊏 PAJ 77
 Clitennestra and Egisto in Orestea. Photo:
Luca dal Pia, courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

Oreste in Orestea.
Photo: Courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

Oreste and Pilade in Orestea.

Photo: Luca dal Pia, courtesy
Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

The company’s experimental theatre

school for children, directed by
Chiara Guidi, Photo: Courtesy
Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

Hansel E Gretel. Photo: di Silva,

courtesy Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

CASTELLUCCI / The Universal 䊏 23

In your opinion, is Pirandello relevant to present-day theatre?

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.

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.

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.

The theatre of this century, of our century, does it go beyond the text and literary
language?

24 䊏 PAJ 77
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.

Does a new theatre of Europe in the 21st century exist?

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.”

VALENTINA VALENTINI is an Italian critic and curator who lives in

Rome and teaches at the University of Calabria. She has published several
books on performance and media, including Teatro in immagine and Dal
Vivo. She edits a theatre series, with volumes on Franco Scaldati, Squat
Theatre, Teatro della Fortezza, Peter Sellars, and Eimuntas Nekrosius. Her
essays have been published in Biblioteca Teatrale, Ariel, The Drama Review,
Theaterschrift, FilmCritica, Drammaturgia, and Performance Research.
BONNIE MARRANCA currently teaches at Princeton University.
JANE HOUSE co-edited, with Antonio Attisani, 20th-Century Italian
Drama, An Anthology: The First 50 Years (Columbia University Press, 1995)
and has translated works by, among others, Ettore Petrolini, Pier Maria
Rosso Di San Secondo, Manlio Santanelli, and Natalia Ginzburg.

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