primo levi – if not now, when?
Tag Archives: Italy
michelangelo antonioni
Blowup was one of those films that changed how I look at cinema, and then how I imagined performance. Early in my life in Melbourne after discovering him through a flatmate who adored L’Avventura, I spent a week in the library watching as many of his films as I could find. I bought and read books on him and when I was in China, to discover his films on DVD was a special treat. I still have yet to see his documentary on China during the Cultural Revolution, Chung Kuo – Cina. It seems to be a year of deaths of people who have deeply affected me.
michelangelo antonioni – blowup
Tragedia Endogonidia – Romeo Castellucci in Melbourne
Mostly I am remiss. Three weeks since I arrived in Melbourne, and only today did I finally hang out with proud owner of a new Mac Book Pro (fuck. fuck. fuck. bitch!), Emile, whom I last saw being driven unsteadily across the Pearl River in the arms of a red Hunan taxi in mid-May. Yes, there were many memories to dredge up, and photos shared (naturally these will appear here as soon as I’ve scanned them), and more facile meditations on future art horribleness together.
When he said, “Romeo Castellucci. Melbourne Festival. Brussels show”, I replied, “mmmllllluuughhh!”, and “destruction of language”, and “uh! I mean, Waah! Romeo Castellucci in Melbourne!”, who is of course one of the few theatre companies I rave effusively about, or more accurately, he is the director of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, that along with Jan Fabre’s Troubleyn has benn an enormous influence on me and I can’t think of many better ways to spend a few years than to be in these ensembles.
Visionary director Romeo Castellucci returns to Melbourne with an episode from his latest epic visual theatre work, Tragedia Endogonidia. Founded in the Italian city of Cesena in 1981, Castellucci’s company Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio has staged some of the most controversial theatre work of the last 25 years.
Tragedia Endogonidia is a single work created over three years that has evolved in various stages, called episodes. Each episode refers to the city in which it was created and after which it is named, but each stands alone as a theatrical event. For the Festival Societás Raffaello Sanzio presents the fourth episode of this cycle – BR.#04 Brussels, an intense production that will stay with audiences for a long time.
The opening scene of BR.#04 Brussels thrusts audiences into what will be the central question of the episode, the question of time. The episode is set in a room entirely covered with white marble, like the wide foyer of a public building, with neither doors nor windows, nor any kind of furniture. The place is plain and conveys a feeling of emptiness, devoid of warmth. Text is abandoned. It is the language of the body that speaks, the language of physical and moral danger, of myth, expressing the futility of struggle and the void of history.
Audiences who remember the 2002 Festival’s presentation of Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep will need no introduction to the powerful work of Romeo Castellucci. Visceral, profoundly provocative and deeply disturbing, this is not theatre for the faint-hearted.
tragedia endogonidiaperformance of the damned
There’s some weird Italy thing going on for me right now. Actually ever since I saw Fellini’s Satyricon when I was at a very impressionable age and loaded on drugs that made me even more susceptible to the manipulations of the prince of darkness, I’ve had an intellectual and conceptual fondness, not to mention gratuitous pleasure in Italian Grotesque that I think makes mincemeat of vacuous, ‘whimsical’ French Surrealism.
Something I’ve heard a few times about hell was variations on, “more dance please”. To which I replied variously, “more money please”, “more time please”, etc. While in a practical sense my replies are truthful, they also omit certain things. In fact there isn’t enough time to make ‘dance’ when there is so much else to also make, when making dance in itself is meaningless, and in order to make movement that actually has a purpose in existing at all beyond asinine chains of blah steps there’s a desperate need to start from nothing. And I think in some ways the extremely simple choreographic processes that resulted in scenes like Vampiros Lesbos in hell are the nascent germs of a process that ends in a choreography that can make scenes like Botticelli.
So while I was in Hong Kong, John Utans mentioned Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio:
I despise technique: it is miserable and lacks the courage to declare its misery It feigns artfulness in order to sell itself easily It pretends to be modest, to be a discipline surrounded with mystique. Technique cannot pretend; it is not skilled. The other side of the coin is the ideology of spontaneity; it is its destiny Technique must be overcome: economy should have nothing to do with theatre. My goal is a technique that moves beyond itself- a super-technique resting on its own, vanished, agnostic and unprotected operation. Close to chance, to invisibility as well as touching its opposite – the super-technique of the animal. Not being afraid to be wrong, but having a ‘panicking fear’[deima panikon] of ‘being there’ on the stage.
romeo castellucci 1
romeo castellucci 2
romeo castellucci 3i love Italia
From one of the mailing lists I’m on, undo.net comes Le Invasioni Barbariche, curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi at Galleria Continua, the former cinema theatre of via di Castello in Siena, Italy.
LE INVASIONI BARBARICHE is an exhibition of the works of present-day Asian artists from such widely varied cultural backgrounds as Pakistan and Japan. The common bond that unites them is their roots in densely populated countries with long-standing cultural and civil traditions. Now, as we stand at the dawn of the third millennium, in western chronological terms, these parts of the world are no longer far out regions of the exotic, but a necessary and integral part of the world in which we live. The art produced within them is of immediate and vital presence and vivacity on the horizon of civilization in this era of globalization. The formulation of art today is the result of a progressive development that started in eighteenth-century Europe at the time of the first industrial revolution, and the changes in production processes this caused. Thus it remained, until a few years ago, an almost exclusively western cultural domain, with the art system being composed of a centralized structure with complementary centres and peripheries. This structure entered a crisis as processes of economic globalization began to move forward and European cultural primacy began to fade.
yang fu dong
zhang peili
huangshihchieh