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.
the animal being on stage
Romeo Castellucci
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 con-sidering theatre. A good performance should condense itself in an image, the image of an organism, of an animal.
It should possess that spirit. The animal is a presence, often a phantom, which permeates matter and takes me away with it. Matter is the ultimate reality. It is understood as holding the least possible communication. This is what is of interest to me: to communicate 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 completely forgotten, cancelled, erased. It has been erased because it involves a theatre connected to matter and to that which matter generates. It is linked to a presence with feminine dynamics. It is important to understand that the feminine (residing in the mystery that governs life and guards the dead) concerns the dynamics of an artistic expression which rediscovers a relationship with real life -from birth to burial – and which operates beyond the linguistic sphere. Since its beginnings theatre has contained a theological problem: the problem of God’s presence, a presence which moves through theatre. For west-erners, 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 consists in bringing the animal back on stage. In this way it implies a step backwards. To plough and to re-cover its ground, to see the animal on stage, signifies a move towards theatre’s theo-logical and critical roots. Pre-tragic theatre signifies, a priori, an infantility, an infantile theatre, in which ‘infantility’ refers to a condition beyond language. Therefore, if such a polemic concerning tragedy exists, it is certainly related to the role of the author, to the domain of writing and its incred-ible pretence towards the author, whose body; as well as the animal’s mainly consists in a simple and, at the same time, radical reality: ‘being there’.
Now the actor’s body seeks to be poor-of-world; its original ‘being there’ allowing an exact entrance. (In circus I confront human and animal entrances, and I am touched by the exactness of the latter). 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 The butchered meat portrays this sorrow, as every person that suffers is also meat. ‘The zone of undecidability between man and animal is a common factor; a ground of identity more profound than any sentimental identification.'(Gilles Deleuze).
It is necessary to avoid the expediency or tediousness of story-telling to reach immediately – (is this velocity?) – the communicable purity of the body. To impress velocity on the figure means to create a passage. There is nothing to hold on to. We ire in front of what is there. Even if I do not under-stand it. It is the visual narrative. It is the phantom’s primary art. The arrival of infancy Latin infans = unable to speak). Materially, the body on stage is already perfect. It means that every returning body can be on stage. The body becomes unspeakable [indicible], seen twice: before or above technique; either on its left or its right. Therefore, emptying the orbit.
The Super-Technique of the animal
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.
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 sur-roundings. The device of technique cannot be used by the animal, as it already possesses the greatest device: to be alienated on stage, immobile, in an alert state. This is the super-technique of the cross, I believe, whose wood forms even the smallest stage in the world. I don’t need technique because the paradoxical beauty of my alienation finally sets me free, in the most powerful affirmation of the body It is not a matter of sacrifice, rather of indifference. It is the cold indifference of every real beauty Super-technique is not acquired; it is there from the moment we take our first step. Super-technique is therefore a calling. It does not deal with mystique: it is about (re)turning to the womb, to the origin. As a fate. The body – animal, thing or actor – finds its connection to the stage long before all efforts of technique because it comes from there, where the origin nourishes it.
I loathe the mystique of the actor based on the muscular effort of shadowing a whole series of microscopic, unavoidable, grammatical errors which spring from his original ineptitude. The more the actor is deliberately confident, the more he appears pathetic to me, because of his honest belief in his mastery of the stage, trusting himself to be adequate and appropriate in that place. As if there were no gap; as if there were no aporetical, original or ontological inadequacy in the theatre; as if the alienation from the stage were only an embarrassing effect to be anaesthetized and overcome. It is actually on the stage that the actor should stay; turning alienation into a superior attitude. In spite of its endeavours, technique is always lacking. It lacks intuition. It does not connote the stage. It does not dream of it. The technical device prepares the stage in a lexical, despairing packaging.
The animal teaches me that technique is not necessary; as I cannot be wrong. And I cannot be wrong simply because I do not know exactly what iris I am doing. ‘Entering’ I am somehow cut out, sacral I do not have any more responsibility, not even en when everything goes wrong before a paying audience. From the very first look, the body finds in risk the perfect rhetoric of its own happening. The economy of technique will no longer save me. There is a presence: its wreckage. I am not interested in other paradigms. This is an issue which I believe requires the apodictic quality of epigrams. On the stage a body which dares the harsh propinquity of the spectator’s body, is audible and visible. I believe the carnal power of theatre, the peculiarity of its violence, lies here, as an act of extremism.
The body-figure is thrown with velocity into the savage frame of the gaze: like a hammer launched against glass. In this velocity details are missed, as the direct goal is the fulcrum of the thing; within a vibrating and vertiginous trajectory that leaves details behind. It is maybe because of this disre-spectful lack of details, and of the discontinuity of language, that the actor becomes closer to the dull perfection of animal being on stage.
Theatre is once more an event of nature:
The actor is boopis: he has bull eyes -divine, circular, slow, superior to the human eye because of its size, its regal posture, its gentleness. It perceives shape as having a mythical roundedness, not con-sidering what is beyond the surface, as only surfaces can unfold their real content. It is an eye that does not require any judgement. It is a total eye. Enough in itself.
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 unawareness of death, is always a mythical being. It is a lacerated and unrequited love for the scene.
In a theatre in which natural jus counts, a pine tree or a goat has a gravity equal to the human. Values are readdressed to a singular degree of affection, that of a mother towards her children: all the eggs look alike. Every living thing is actor. He talks about humanity – and the animal, who is carrying the soul, is the actor’s eidos hypostasis, and is his shadow, obstacle, dream, desire, tongue, body, his pathos, ethos, ruthmos. These are my reasons for looking at the actor,s movement amalgamated to the animal’s in a single magma.
An animal on stage teaches me to fight against Hellenism; trains me to perceive the stage as a profound deirna panikon event. By this I ask the animal to undo the ties bound by the state, Attic tragedy; by the archonpoet, the liberating herald. The cage containing it is that one: the thorax, my thorax cage. For me (actor) and for him (animal) it is a passion for chains we share.
The goat, that generously gave a name to tragedy (tragos), is taking back what belongs to him. Theatre again is an event of nature! The poet’s injury is deleted. In La Discesa di manna (1989) actors were cradling small goats in their arms. Throughout the performance the goats almost never touched the floor, as the actors held them breathing, at the height of their lungs, the larnax of space and time. The actor’s breath is doubled in the goat, the spirit of which inhabits the lungs, the lungs hosting the original goat element. The dis-turbing idea of a sacrifice is proposed where the open animal is identical to the open man: same organs, same heart, same lungs, junctions, nerves, fat and brain. Now the two beings are one beside each other, enjoying the performance.