The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio

Abstract

Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, The Theatre of Soctetas Raffaello Sanzio (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) In their introduction to The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Nicholas Ridout and Joe Kelleher explain what it is for writing to capture the terms of a theatrical project that places the spectator 'already in the archive, re-examining the state of the imprints' (12). As the first English-language book to contribute to the growing archive on this internationally feted Italian theatre company, The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio formally wrestles with the very spatio-temporal logics posed by the company's signature architectures of image: eviscerated bodies, a myth cut in half and made abject, peripatetic thuds spliced against the precision of an electronic bow and arrow, a child on stage, cooing alone. The images created by Societas Raffaello Sanzio are viscerally impossible - they leave us sweaty and tangled in our seats, having glimpsed the self, the world, the wound of hypermodernity, in all its rotten but tremulous complexity. The ability to articulate in language that which the company has been chasing in such raw mise-en-scene for over twenty years is a difficult task for any enthused spectator. For scholars of their work, it seems that no one angle is ever quite enough to get at what, exactly, their theatre is able to produce. To be already in the archive, re-examining the state of the imprints, is to be placed in a position of clinical observation. This archive - Societas Raffaello Sanzio's roaming four-year, city-based repertoire Tragedia Endogonidia - contains the rapidly fading imprints of the West's end-of-millennium atrocities. In Cesena (C.#01), a near-naked body lying in a gilded room is actually that of Carlo Guiliani, a young protester killed by police at the 2001 G8 summit. In the Berlin episode (B.#02), an unspeakable homage to the 'mute, tragic stature' (73) of Germany's revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof is envisaged in the figure of an anonymous, mourning mother masturbating desperately on the edge of her bed. As referents of recent histories, these images are less about staging specific events and more about naming a state of deep but impenetrable loss. As the company members explain, their work is about city, post-tragedy and erasure - a 'mim[ing] [of] the images of tragedy' in a context in which tragedy has become farce - where 'redemption, pathos and ethos are inaccessible' (30). Tragedia Endogonidia mourns the sanctity of tragedy as a formal code, forcing the spectator to enter a logic that inverts the European theatrical sensorium as well as the symbologies of the late capitalist West. Ridout and Kelleher have collaborated with founding company members Romeo Castellucci (director), Chiara Guidi (dramaturg and designer) and Claudia Castellucci (performer), to construct a monograph that is itself a restaging, an assemblage of critical essays, process logs, scriptural scores, artist discussions and archival documentation that grapples with the monumentalism of their practice. As editors, they make plain the complexity of such a manoeuvre, where 'gathering the remains of ... [Societas Raffaello Sanzio's] work and making these available for retrospective reflection' needs itself to replay the 'livid rhetoricality' deployed by the company's theatrical language (6, 7). While the task of Tragedia Endogonidia is to re-perceive the erased in the act of erasure, the task of the book is to animate this doubled moment of re-perception in writing. For an audience, the abstract affective state imposed by the Societas Raffaello Sanzio image forces a kind of liminal exorcism - our bodies are deeply engaged, but we don't know quite in what. In response to such a refusal of 'narrative or illustrative justification' (75), the rich textual assemblage collated by Ridout and Kelleher offers insight for those still stuck in the realm of not-knowing. …