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AGAINST DIDACTICISM IN THE THEATRE
"The theatre that tries to produce resolution is unacceptable. It gives one the impression of being at school again. It is even worse, because this type of theatre wants to give us the truth that it calls the truth. Even Brecht has fallen in this crossing and this dogmatic pretension. It is more correct for the theatre to leave a disturbance. This is preferred because one demands thus that people help to continue the story, to produce the part that lacks."
-Romeo Castellucci in an interview with Bruno Tackels, trans. by Daniel Sack
ICONOCLASM
from "Le syndrome de Platon dans le Théâtre des Opérations" by Claudia Castellucci, June 20, 1995, trans. by Daniel Sack
"Our first preoccupation was to destroy that which exists, not out of a need for an empty space, but with the need for a rupture in the representation of the world as it was proposed to us. We need to recommence something from nothing. In effect, even if iconoclasm tackles the reduction of images, the word is not negative at all, it is positive. ... Iconoclasm does not signify the "anti-icon", nor "without icon", but "I break the icon". This is to say that it needs to be something that remains visible. This is why iconoclasm is always figurative."
"The icon is not a simple image. ... It is contiguous with military discourse, because it is an image that prepares and arranges, that unites and terrorises. It possesses this efficacy because of the effect which characterises the mechanism of the natural disaster. The flag counts among the most dense icons in history: for it one kills and sacrifices oneself."
"...The Baroque period, where there was an intimate line between representation and its rupture. ... The Baroque image is tumorous: the trick and the suspicion of its degenerance erodes the interior of the figure. I know that it is mad to affirm this and I am not able to, truly, but Raphael seems to me some sort of atypical cell of the Baroque metastase which ensued: perfect and tense on the surface, but intimately shaken to the core."
"...Iconoclasm is not an annihilation of forms, but a figurative transformation, a genuine transfiguration."
"The iconoclastic orientation of the theatre is a movement towards the essence, a step towards the essential. The essence, this is the bios, the full biological movement of the work, its fomenting heat and its seductive capacity...That which is not vital for the body of the theatre should be remorselessly discarded...In essence, one does not want to speak of synthesis, but of a resulting intimacy: Not of the situation of our place in the world, but of the world in us, living among the living."
THE ANIMAL BEING ON STAGE
Selections from the text of the same name by Romeo Castellucci, translated by Carolina Melis, Valentina Valentini, and Ric Allsopp. For the complete text, please visit http://www.e-state.org.uk
"Each theatre work I face assumes, for me, an organic quality which moves towards its own specific animality - I can summarize it in an animal form. This is an Aristotelian way of considering theatre. A good performance should condense itself in an image, the image of an organism, of an animal."
"...Matter is the ultimate reality. It is understood as holding the least possible communication. This is what is of interest to me: to communiciate as little as possible. And the lowest level of possible communication is the matter's surface. In this sense, paradoxically, it is a theatre made of surfaces, searching for emotion."
"The pre-tragic western theatre tradition has been compltely forgotten, cancelled, erased. It has been erased because it involves a theatre connected to matter and to that which matter generates....Since its beginnings theatre has contained a theological problem: the problem of God's presence, a presence which moves through theatre. For westerners, theatre was born as God died. It is clear that the animal plays a fundamental role in the relationship between theatre and God's death. In the moment that the animal disappeared from the scene, tragedy was born."
"The polemical gesture we make regarding Attic tragedy consistes in bringing the animal back on stage....Pre-tragic theatre signifies, a priori, an infantile theatre, in which 'infantility' refers to a condition beyond language."
"...Now the actor's body seeks to be poor-of-world; its original 'being there' allowing an exact entrance....Humans and animals signal literally what they want to say before opening their mouths."
"...The body is a passage, an exit, a resolution of tragic writing where there are no distinctions. An animal about to be slaughtered is a metaphor that most suits each character in tragedy."
"...We're in front of what is there. Even if I do not understand it. It is the visual narrative. It is the phantom's primary act. The arrival of infancy (Latin infans = unable to speak). Materially, the body on stage is already perfect."
"...On stage, the animal is comfortable (being not perfectible) in the confidence of its own body; at the same time it feels uncomfortable in its surroundings. The device of technique cannot be used by the animal, as it already possesses teh greatest device: to be alienated on stage, immobile, in an alert state."
"...The actor enters the stage, but he does not assume it, in the same way that the animal does, who, in its ignorance of language, ignorance and unnawareness of death, is always a mythical being. It is a lacerated and unrequited love for the scene."
Castellucci, Romeo and Claudia, translated from the Italian by Karin Espinosa, Les Pelerins de la Matiere: Theorie et praxis du theatre, Les Solitaires Intempestifs: France, 2001
Tackels, Bruno, Les Castelluccis, Les Solitaires Intempestifs: France, 2005