Romeo Castellucci Genesi : from the museum of sleep
directed by the author

An Interview with Romeo Castellucci by Bruno Tackels :


Bruno Tackels: If we consider reactions to your plays in France, we notice a rather peculiar situation: on the one hand, you've been recognised by important places like the Avignon festival, as well as receiving the active loyalty of places like the Maillon or the Kunstfestival des arts in Brussels, but on the other hand, we sense a sort of timidity on the part of programmers, probably because of the massive division of the audience that your plays create. How is your work received in Italy? Do you experience the same type of division and rejection there?

Romeo Catellucci: Our performances are prepared in Italy, in Cesena, but most of the time, paradoxically, our work is presented outside Italy, elsewhere in Europe. Our situation is not a bad one, far from it, and it's in the process of changing, thanks to the links we have with our cultural institutions. But I must say that the situation and the regulation of theatrical structures in Italy are paradoxical, to say the least. For example, the work we do abroad, all over Europe, is not recognised in Italy. This situation can be explained by the enormous power of the bureaucracy, which never manages to keep up with decisions taken on the political level. And then, the politicians themselves don't know how to manage their artistic resources, they have no real knowledge of the work being done in Italy. Those who decide cultural policy base their distribution work on very conventional things and they know nothing at all about the new trends that are developing.

B. T.: It's as if there were two speeds, one of the Institution which retains certain traditional values, and another, more underground, of creators who go beyond the Institution and meet the Italian public more often.

R. C.: Yes, that's fairly accurate. But I must say, the public is ready to accept theatrical forms which avoid conventions.

B. T.: Audiences in Itay seems more ready, or better prepared than in France, where reactions have been particularly virulent, at least at the Avignon festival.

R. C.: It's true that reactions were not as violent in Rome, even if people walked out of the theatre there too. I must say that audiences in Rome have been familiar with our work for longer than those at Avignon or in Strasbourg. It's also possible that the Avignon public reacts more strongly, because it's a festival with a strong, dominant tradition, with a very perceptible pedagogical weight. You can sense that this festival still bears the whole ideology of the post-war period, unlike in Italy, where theatrical institutions are weaker and therefore allow more freedom. On the other hand, they are much more ignorant and not at all ready, either intellectually or culturally, to support new projects. Money is distributed according to geographic policy, which follows social and territorial, even political criteria. Artistic value is not taken into account at all. The politicians have even invented a term straight from Kafka, the "artistic coefficient ", which shows clearly that the only criterion of money is money, and not the value of what is at work.

B. T.: In France, there is another decisive factor, and not necessarily the best, that is the press, which can have, according to what it writes, the power of life or death over a company's project. What is the relationship between artists and the press like in Italy?

R. C.: The influence of the press is not as great with us. There are only a few newspapers which have any impact. And it's not so much linked to the newspaper as to the theatre critic who has written the article. When Franco Quadri writes in "La Repubblica", everyone takes notice of his ideas, he really creates an aesthetic opinion; if it's another journalist, no-one takes any notice. If Quadri wrote in "l'Unita", people would buy this newspaper to read Quadri's articles. Another important critic is Bartolucci, who has done much, along with Quadri, to "de-provincialise" Italy. They closely followed all the artistic groups of the seventies, they made known in Italy all the important things that were happening in the United States, and they were genuine guides in the artistic landscape of the time.

B. T.: Concerning your own career, what were the theatrical shocks which made you discover the necessity of the theatre for you, the strong impressions which have marked and determined your work?

R. C.: I can think of two very strong experiences from my adolescence. The first was a production of "Richard III" by Carmelo Bene. The other performance which struck me was the work of a troupe from Florence called "Il Carozzone", better known as "I Magazzini criminale". Their show, directed by Federico Tiezzi, was called "Punto di rottura" (Breaking point), it was a dazzling piece of work by the strength it conveyed. They themselves defined their theatre as a work of "existential analytics". Their research also drew from "body art" performances. Those are the two most memorable events that I can recall, and I can't think of any others.

B. T.: What path did you follow to end up in the theatre? You didn't choose this artistic form in the beginning.

R. C. : I was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, along with my sister Claudia and my wife Chiara Guidi. Our background was not at all a theatrical one. Our cultural references were linked to painting, contemporary art in particular. As a result, we were received in the world of the theatre with a certain suspicion, a little like a foreign body. But thanks to the critic I was speaking of earlier, Bartolucci, we were noticed and we were able to begin working in Rome. At that time, Rome really was the reference in the theatre. Everything important that happened in performing arts, like in plastic arts, happened in Rome. It was also here that foreign experiments, American in particular, became known. Today, the city has become impossible, heavy and atavistic, no longer attentive to culture. It has returned to its old provinciality and is becoming a city of museum pieces. It's an old town putting on its make-up for its jubilee. Even left-wing parties are fully mobilised by this religious celebration, which is in fact purely commercial. It's totally obscene to see how everywhere, since Berlusconi, show business logic has taken the place of politics. The Left defends the same policies as the Right, only with more pettiness and meanness, and this has also caused it to lose a lot of votes. Whether in the social domain or in foreign policy, in particular in Ex-Yugoslavia, everywhere, its choices have been disastrous, and hypocritical in addition. Getting involved in politics today is a total dead-end. Politics no longer has any sense. It has to be reinvented. In "La Société du Spectacle", Guy Debord considered the Italian system as intermediate between the centralised Soviet bloc and the imperialist American bloc. But ever since a television chief became chief of government, there is nothing but chaos, politics no longer exist. Only the spectacular reigns.

B. T.: In this huge general collapse, do some pockets of resistance exist in spite of everything, like we've seen in France for Bosnia, the illegal immigrants and the committees of unemployed?

R. C.: Hardly at all. I must admit that the Catholics do the ground work, very organised, very structured, in particular on the humanitarian level, even the far left acknowledges this. A few militant movements exist, but they are minuscule and have no impact on people, compared to what we saw in France with the illegal immigrants at Saint Bernard's church. The Italian political community is suspicious of these groups and block all access to the media.

B. T.: To return to the plastic origins of your theatre work, what made it necessary for you to turn to the stage? What prompted you to move from two dimensions to three? How did you come to work with such sensitive materials as bodies, human and animal? In the same way, you cannot say that your plays are simply performances. On your stage, narration is obviously present. Your theatre is very strongly narrative. Whether it be the Orestie, Giulio Cesare or Voyage to the end of the night, there is, in all three cases, a faithful and explicit reference to writers who tell stories, with the clear desire to see them played. Your plays live up to this expectation perfectly, in that they make a story visible, and in this way, they are eminently theatrical.

R. C.: More than the term story, I prefer the word drama. We didn't set out with the intention of working on narration, if by this word we mean the desire to perform and to illustrate a story. Narration implies an illustration which sheds light on a story. Our work seeks, rather, to give body to a drama. As for what pushed us towards the theatre, I don't know what it was. I think we just fell into it without really making a decision. For us, the theatre has always been a kind of game, ever since childhood. Even today, when work goes well, I burst out laughing. In the beginning, the idea of theatre is entertainment, even when it's not really funny. Laughter is a nervous release, an outburst which anticipates death and which protects from death. This relationship between laughter and death is highlighted by structuralists such as Levi-Strauss or Propp. Walter Benjamin also speaks of the importance of the comedy within a Greek tetralogy. Opposing three tragedies is a comedy, a satiric drama or farce. This comedy is absolutely necessary to counter the failed catharsis in the drama. Unlike Aristotle, Benjamin believes that tragedy lacks catharsis. The comedy allows the immense roar of laughter which resolves the nervous and hysterical, the biological and social tensions which accumulate in the tragedy. This laugh allows the catharsis of the tragedy, but not in the tragedy. It's a liberation "from" the tragedy itself, not "in" the tragedy. This view is absolutely anti-Aristotelian.
Aristotle is probably the only one who speaks of this question of catharsis, but he remains ambiguous, because he never says who is affected by the catharsis, the hero or the audience. It's true that he speaks of this at a time when tragedy has already disappeared. Euripides, the last of the tragedians, is already dead. If we observe carefully, neither Oedipus nor Orestes, the tragic heroes, are freed from their tragic weight at the moment of the so-called denouement. When Orestes appears before the Areopagus to be judged, the votes for and against him are equal. Only the intervention of the goddess Athena will give him his freedom. But this is a "trick", it resolves nothing. Although he's free, he's not necessarily liberated and purified. From a social point of view, for the audience of the time, Orestes' end could not appear as a liberation. It is thus the presence of farce which offers the authentic ritual structure capable of giving rise to this liberation. This authentic ritual structure is not at work within every tragedy or in all the characters. It only appears when examining the macro-structure of the dramatic agon (conflict), the overall plan of the tetralogy: three tragedies followed by a comedy. For the competition, each writer had to present the overall structure of the conflict, by preparing three tragedies and a comedy. Here, we can understand the close links between the theatre and sport, which developed as a way of working out grief.

B. T.: According to this view, the theatre presents, dramatically, tautly, with tension, a situation that it will not resolve directly. This is exactly what you do in your plays. And this is probably why some of the audience are literally shocked by what they see. In no way do you say: Celine's a bastard, Celine is right, Celine's exaggerating, etc

R. C.: The theatre which tries to produce a resolution is unacceptable. It gives me the impression of being back at school. It's worse, actually, because this type of theatre would like us to believe it's telling us the truth. Even Brecht made the mistake of dogmatic pretension. It is much more accurate for the theatre to convey anxiety. It's preferable because then we ask the people who are watching to continue the story, to produce the missing part.

B. T.: In the face of this kind of theatre, you must acknowledge that "Voyage to the end of the night" was, for some of the audience, a missed appointment. Many people don't come to the theatre to work, to invent this missing part.

R. C.: No, they come to recognise what they already know and to be consoled intellectually. This should end with school where you discover what you wish to see. This type of consolation produces inertia, a stagnant marsh for the mind, whereas the theatrical experience should be a journey, a path into the unknown. An adventure.

B. T.: The distinction you've just made between these two attitudes towards the theatre can also be found in the work of dramatic critics. There are those who agree to write on the unknown, and those who refuse out of laziness. This is particularly the case of journalists like Fabienne Pascaud, who, in Télérama, 28th July,1999, denounced "the "falsely avant-gardist, truly pretentious and stupid" rantings of Voyage to the end of the night". Such rash judgements express the fear of not recognising and identifying what one sees - hence the reference (without foundation) to the avant-garde. And then there's the incredible lack of humility in the generalisation of a rather peculiar perception: "We will no longer put up with falsely avant-gardist rantings". In the name of what alleged superiority can a critic implicate us, by this "we", in her own limitations (which could be fine, if they were recognised for what they are, the limitations of one view)?

R. C.: The term "avant-garde" really has no meaning when defining our work. The avant-garde is a sort of back-to-front belief, needing things of the past in order to exist. The problem with these kinds of critical formulas is that they remain vague and general. What avant-garde is she speaking about? To what plays is she referring? What artists is she talking about? Bob Wilson? Or the European avant-garde? A long debate would be needed to be able to seriously sustain this kind of critical judgement. Here, this scandalous mediocrity makes people lazy.

B. T.: It's clear that the most intelligent article written on the play was
by Frédéric Ferney in the Figaro.

R. C.: That's true.




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