On Romeo Castellucci

Ромео Кастелучи is how “Romeo Castellucci” is written in Bulgarian-cyrillic. I read this name in a post on Toplocentrala’s facebook page towards the 20th September. However, maybe because of the lack of double consonants due to its transliteration, or maybe because, in spite of my being in Bulgaria and using cyrillic daily, this alphabet is still something unfamiliar to me at first sight, I didn’t immediately connect these characters to the name of the great Italian director I knew. But the following day I received some other notifications and I realised that, yes, some of ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’s works would be presented in Sofia, anticipated by a documentary movie on him! 

This happened on 29th September-2nd October in Toplocentrala: four days dedicated to him, presenting the documentary film Theatron, the record of his Divine Comedy and the video-performance The Third Reich. 

To be honest, I didn’t and still don’t have a very wide knowledge of his work, but I was thrilled about these events because this time they would show the work of an Italian director who worked in the same region where I have studied, who is from a city where I have danced, who collaborates with people that I met in person. I was happy for a sense of belonging, I guess, because I imagined that a piece of the life I left as a student in Bologna would come here in Sofia to visit me. 

I recall two episodes in Bologna connected to Castellucci. The first one was watching his Democracy in America, in Arena del Sole, on the 12th May 2017, during my university internship in theatre journalism and critique at Bologna Teatri. We usually got very good seats for most of the performances, but this time the show was sold out! So, we were assigned to the farthest seats in the gallery and didn’t manage to see the piece very well (here is the article written by colleagues, sharing a “mutilated” review of the work). Despite that, I do remember very vividly the word plays of the opening scene, in which women in white uniforms hold a flag with a letter and compose different acronyms of the words “Democracy in America”, and the dialogue between two native Americans, whose script we were given at the entrance. What caught my attention more than anything else was the focus on words, speech, language. 

The second episode I link to Romeo Castellucci’s world is my assisting Dewey Dell, the company founded by his daughters Teodora and Agata, his son Demetrio and Eugenio Resta, in September 2017. I was working as an organisation assistant for Danza Urbana Festival in Bologna and they were preparing for the premiere of Deriva Traversa, an evocative performance with live voice music done in the courtyard of an ex seminary. I must say the high bar set by their parents (Chiara Guidi, their mother, is also a super important name in Italian theatre) was not an obstacle for them, very down to earth people, young capable artists, with their own vision and poetics, who impressed the audience with a great performance. 

 

So, with this personal background I went to watch Theatron, by Giulio Boato, on the 29th September. The documentary opens with Romeo’s sister, Claudia Castellucci, narrating about their childhood in rural Emilia Romagna and follows, in a chronological order, the main achievements of Romeo’s career through the points of views of the director himself and various collaborators or scholars.

The choice of keeping both the Italian original voice and the English dubbed ones, instead of having subtitles, disoriented me: since I understood both, it was a bit distracting for me to hear both languages. I also expected more insights, not much on his personal life, but for instance on the story of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (the company he founded with his sister Claudia, Chiara Guidi and Paolo Guidi), the creative process of his pieces, and how he deals with the different aspects of a performance. Instead, the focus was on the genius of Romeo Castellucci.

Besides that, I still found the movie interesting and valuable, as it gave me an overview of his works and allowed me to establish some comparisons. His Divine Comedy reminded me of Luca Ronconi’s Orlando Furioso for the huge “size” of the performance (many performers, big stage, long duration), which mirrors the huge imagination and belief in the power of theatre both directors have. Castellucci’s attention to the visual aspect of the pieces and the aim to provide a total artistic experience (through bold choices of lights, props, technology, performers), instead, made me think of Dimitris Papaioannou, whose Transverse Orientation I saw in Plovdiv a year ago.

A few concepts expressed by Castellucci got stuck in my head and can probably be leading elements to interpret his work: 1) animals and children onstage have in common the capability of remaining natural, authentic; 2) art is one of the few ways we can really experience something; 3) the body is a land of infinite possibilities. 

Two days later, on the 1st October, I went to watch the video-installation and performance The Third Reich, with sound by Scott Gibbons, presented as “the image of an imposed, obligatory communication”. On the stage, at a distance, a bone and a spine: white objects standing out in the dark. A dark figure, dressed in a coat, comes and inspects them. She almost chokes, but recovers. She starts moving as if in a dance, in silence, besides the sound of her coat. Her movements are precise, wavy, ritual, and rhythmical. She is hypnotic, anticipating what is going to come. Then, she takes the spine and breaks it. At that moment, an extremely strong sound is heard and a word (bone) appears on the screen. Then another one: thing. She eventually leaves the stage, and the video part of the work predominates.

Words appear and stay on the screen for a few seconds, while beats are unfastened like bombs and resonate. ABORTION. WHORE. ANUS. SANITY. Nouns and sounds follow one another faster and faster. It gets hypnotic, captivating, long, and tiring. Narratives build up in my mind based on the words I managed to capture: are we talking about feminism? Religion? Leisure? There is no time to think and elaborate, the word bombing continues, harsher and harsher. The music gets cooler, but the speed of the words is too fast, and I try an escamotage in order to be able to catch at least some words: I open and close my eyelids at the rhythm of the music. Yes! In this way my eyes can focus for a fraction of second on a word displayed. It’s easier when they are short. I think of what Castellucci said in the documentary Theatron: art allows you to experience something. I think that for the first time in my life I fluttered my eyelids so fast and for such a long time. Wow! I can catch some patterns: compounds with the word “water”, or “para”. Words in which the letter “O” appears in the very middle. Yet, it is so tiring that I can’t focus on it all the time, so I just let go and abandon myself in the music. I happen to think: are these words there by chance or is there a preconceived message? As said in Theatron, nowadays we are used to seeing so many things, that nothing really impresses us anymore. We can see whatever we want at any time we want, and that’s also why Castellucci tries in his works to be provocative, maybe through nudity, violence or unconventional choices. In this piece he managed to provoke through quantity and speed. Too much and too fast. Even after the performances ended, I still felt the post-effect: my eyes hurt and in my head the music vibes still resonated. As after the end of a dictatorship: the effects of such violence persist.

The third Reich reminded me of Democracy in America because of the concept of a form of government mentioned in the title and because of the importance given to words. It made me think also of Barbara Kruger’s work in the Biennale Arte of this year, at the Arsenale.

All the walls and pavement of a room are covered in capital letter inscriptions with imploring phrases of command (“PLEASE CARE,” “PLEASE MOURN”), sad statements (“THERE WAS SILENCE”, “THERE WAS CRYING”) and a storyboard of a “vomiting, shitting, numb, hungry, praying, dead body”. On the walls, a three-channel video shows the unfolding, letter after letter, of the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States, the wedding promise and the will. However, the key words are temporarily replaced by their opposite, or other words that put the American principles into question, having the viewers reflect on the possible counter-narratives of these written acts. After the three texts have been displayed, they all disappear, faster and faster, from the last word till the beginning. The video installation, the speed, the word play, and the subversion of fixed values link this artwork to Castellucci’s The Third Reich, and probably helped me to appreciate it. 

To make a brief resume, for me this program organised by Toplocentrala was a good opportunity to get more familiar with Castellucci’s work and be touched by his way of making theatre, and I am looking forward to next year when he will stage BROS. I hope I will decipher cyrillic more promptly, on that occasion.