Playing Slaughter: On Staging Animal Deaths and Entangling Art with Life

On 19 July 1985, about a hundred people, mainly from theatre circles, were allowed inside a working slaughterhouse (upon invitation, after hours) in the Italian town of Riccione. There, as part of the Santarcangelo Festival, the company Magazzini Criminali were to perform a shortened version of their 1984 play Genet a Tangeri. The actors were reciting fragments of their lines while walking in the yard, stables, and other spaces of the building that held slaughterhouse machinery, drainage gutters, carts, stone tubs, and metal hooks – all clean but emanating the smells of animals and blood. In the stables, slaughterhouse workers held and stroked a horse. Then in the next room, with a veterinarian present, they killed the animal with a shot to the head, then skinned, disembowelled, and cut it into pieces. The workers were performing their daily tasks and the horse they were processing into meat was already scheduled for slaughter – the audience had been informed of this fact before entering the building. Actors and slaughterhouse staff made no contact; they were functioning separately and independently in the space. When butchering had been completed and once the equipment was methodically cleaned, the actors wrote Jean Genet’s name across the room’s white walls, and then, while sitting on the floor under one of the building’s walls, they read excerpts aloud from his article ‘Four Hours in Shatila’, written in 1982 following the massacre of Palestinian refugees in camps in Sabra and Shatila, in West Beirut. Genet was among the first foreigners into the massacre sites shortly after the attack had been carried out by Lebanese Phalangists who, with the consent of Israeli commanders, had murdered hundreds of camp inhabitants. The Magazzini Criminali performance at the festival soon sparked off a heated debate in the Italian press and resulted in the company being Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 422–437, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969555