Whole

Origins and Destinations:
Representation in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci.
Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio
Max Lyandvert
Masters of Arts by Research
2006
i
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: Lyandvert

First name: Max Other name/s:
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: Masters of Arts by Research
School: Media, Film and Theatre Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Title: ORIGINS and DESTINATIONS: Representation in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci.
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
This thesis: Origins and Destinations: Representation in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci, investigates the
working methodology of the Italian theatre director, Romeo Castellucci and his company, Societas
Raffaello Sanzio. It provides an account of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s history, working methods, a
detailed reading of the thematic and philosophical landscape in their works especially Genesi: from the
museum of sleep, and the cycle: Tragedia Endogonidia, and a discussion on the company’s artistic process
towards the formation of its compositions and performances.
This research and investigation is based on numerous viewings of most of the company’s theatre works
created in the last six years, interviews with Romeo Castellucci as well as other participating artists, two
privileged periods of observation (residencies) in Italy of the rehearsal and creation processes of three
shows, and the analysis and discussion of some of the key critical and intellectual responses to the work of
Romeo Castellucci. The thematic focus of the thesis is the notion of Origins and Destinations, and its
relationship with the language of representation in Romeo Castellucci’s theatre.
The theoretical discussion in the thesis is organised around Giorgio Agamben’s notion of Potentiality
within the composition and content of Castellucci’s theatre. This concept provides a link between the key
ideas of Origins, Destinations and Representation. Castellucci’s application of Agamben’s Potentiality
deconstructs dramatic structure, narrative and action down to the fundamentals of the act itself, separated
from its meaningful context. It is the conclusion of this thesis, that in the instant of this singular act, Romeo
Castellucci manages to represent a point where origin and destination meet, or a point where they both are,
for an instant, one and the same thing.
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works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.
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Contents
Preface iii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1.
Signification and Aesthetics in Genesi: from the museum of sleep 14
An Aesthetics of Potentiality 16
The exposition of flesh: Artaud and Auschwitz 18
The Grey Zone 22
Burial 25
Chapter 2.
The conception of TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA 27
On Language 30
The problem of tragedy 32
The episode 34
The First Five Episodes of the Cycle 36
P.#06 ENIGMA/LITURGY 41
The anonymous mother and the question of origin 46
R.#07 50
C.#11 57
Chapter 3.
The ‘Poetic Room’ 64
Destinations – a conclusion 76
Bibliography 78
Appendix 83
ii
Preface
This thesis will attempt to investigate the theatre of the Italian director, Romeo
Castellucci and his company – Societas Raffaello Sanzio. The investigation will focus on
notions of origins, destinations and representation in the content and philosophy of this
theatre. It will also consider how the company’s working methodology and its system of
representation forms a unique and constantly evolving aesthetic language.1 I am using
this notion of a system of representation here to mean “a repetitive structuring device
which gives shape to the aesthetic experience of the language of the artist.”2 The thesis
provides an account of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s history, working methods, a detailed
reading of the thematic and philosophical landscape their works: Genesi: from the
museum of sleep, and the cycle: Tragedia Endogonidia, and a discussion on the
company’s artistic process towards the formation of its compositions and performances.
The study itself is based on numerous viewings of most of the company’s theatre works
created in the last six years, interviews with Romeo Castellucci as well as other
participating artists, two privileged periods of observation of the rehearsal/creation
processes of three shows,3 and the analysis and discussion of some of the key critical and
intellectual responses to the work of Romeo Castellucci. Both Castellucci and many of
the key critics and intellectuals who respond to his work,4 cite notions of origins,
destinations and representation as articulated by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and
Walter Benjamin. The thesis aims to show how the principles of Agamben’s notions of
man and animal, sovereign power, bio-politics and in particular, potentiality, are the main
sources of influence on the philosophy and the work of Romeo Castellucci.
1
Societas Raffaello Sanzio have been operating as a theatre group for approximately twenty years, this
study focuses on their work since 1998 to the present. A biography of the company is included in the next
section of this thesis, the Introduction.
2
As articulated by Dr. Edward Scheer.
3
P.#06 (Paris, October 2003), R.#07 (Rome, November 2003) and C.#11 (Cesena, December 2004).
4
Academics and writers who have regularly contributed and published essays on this theatre and the
current ongoing cycle, and the writers who – apart from Giorgio Agamben – will be mainly referenced in
this thesis, are: Nicholas Ridout, Joe Kelleher and Celine Astrie.
iii
I originally had the idea for a theatrical trilogy work, whose complex intellectual subject-
matter demanded rigorous research. This research was the original inspiration for this
MA by research. The concept for the trilogy work preceded my discovery of the work of
Romeo Castellucci, in fact it was both (simultaneously and accidentally, in 2000) my first
experience of a Castellucci production – Gulius Cesare – and the discovery of the basic
premise of his other work - Genesi: from the museum of sleep – that inspired me to
investigate this theatre for it’s potential application towards my trilogy concept.
What struck me about the production I saw, was how intellectual and philosophical
concepts were presented in such an arresting, innovative, sensory, theatrical form. And
what struck me about the basic things I had learned about the production – Genesi –
which I had not yet seen, was that Romeo Castellucci had just artistically articulated the
point-of-connection with the very concepts I was aspiring (and struggling) to connect,
through my research, for my own trilogy work. This point-of–connection was a specific
philosophical notion of origins and destinations, and their representation as a cultural
beginning which meets an end. Following the international success of Giulo Cesare, the
premier of Genesi and its subsequent tours and awards, Romeo Castellucci and Societas
Raffaello Sanzio became one of the major artistic companies in Europe.
Over the last four years I have seen many of his productions – including Genesi – a
number of times, both live and on video. A friendship with Romeo Castellucci and a
professional relationship with the company has also evolved, including two residencies
with the company. At the same time, I came to realise that an adequate investigation of
the subject-matter of the trilogy I was theorising, would have to be a much longer and
broader work (than an MA thesis). The solution was to focus on the working process or
methodology and theatre language or form, in Romeo Castellucci’s theatre – Societas
Raffaello sanzio. How notions of origins, destinations and their representation inform
both the content and composition of the work, as well as the principles of its
methodology.
This is the trajectory of this thesis.
iv
v
Introduction
The Theatre Company – Societas Raffaello Sanzio5

Societas Raffaello Sanzio was formed in 1981 in Cesena, Italy, by Romeo Castellucci
[director], Chiara Guidi [dramaturg] and Claudia Castellucci [writer]. The name of the
company, in part, reflects the artistic education of these three core artists:- Romeo
Castellucci in Painting and Scenography; Claudia Castellucci in Painting and Chiara
Guidi in Art History. For these artists, Raffaello is the Renaissance painter whose work
combines the perfection of shape within the tension of a world which is quickly losing its
reference points; therefore he is the witness to a historical dramatic tension.6 The
collaborative nature of these three artists [who are also family members] go beyond the
definitions and specific crafts of their education, functioning rather as collaborators
without hierarchy. A more refined and updated description of their roles within the
company would be: Romeo Castellucci as director focusing on aesthetic and composition,
Chiara Guidi [his wife] as the realiser of the vocal and physical in the performance while
Claudia Castellucci [Romeo’s sister] provides the textual and philosophical trajectory of
the work.
It is the aim of this company to create theatre as art (as apart from drama), capable of
incorporating any and numerous artforms, in order to communicate - equally - to the
5
This section is a description of the history and philosophy of Romeo Castellucci’s company – Societas
Raffaello Sanzio. The description is based on program notes and a variety of manifesto-like literature that
the company itself has compiled and published over the last fifteen years.
6
Taken from the company’s own biographical material from their database. The company attempts to
implement these concepts in all their works.
1
senses and the intellect of the viewer. It is the company’s belief that the audio and visual
system [of representation] – using both traditional and new technologies – is capable of
creating a dramaturgy which disclaims the supremacy of literature (the hierarchical
master in conventional systems of drama). Research into the fields of visual and hearing
perception is therefore maintained by the company, it is aimed at studying the effects of
new instruments or, more often, at creating new machines.
In the early 1980s, the Company staged work of its own creation that often proposed
itself as an alternative to reality. In 1986, with Santa Sofia in Teatro Khmer (Holy Sophia
in Khmer Theatre), the Company staged its own performance manifesto - engaging a
Neoplatonic and iconoclastic theatre - whose main goal was to address representation
itself, which it believed was guilty of doubling a reality that should be abolished. The
project was aimed at freeing theatrical presentation from the predetermination established
by the Western tradition. This was later continued and evolved through the company’s
recovery of ancient mythical stories relevant to the foundation of the Mesopotamian
region (La discesa di Inanna /Inann’s Descent, Gilgamesh, Iside e Osiride/Isis and
Orisis).
In 1991 – with the presentation of Gilgamesh – the Company continued this “act of
protest against the codes of western reality.”7 In this production every means of mass
communication and reproduction was avoided. Pictures, videos, press articles were all
banned and an advertising system for direct communication was developed, an ad
personam statement: “nothing exists beyond the very representation.”8 In 1992, applying
a contradictory ideology, Societas Raffaello Sanzio staged what they defined as the apex
of the Western theatrical tradition: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, calling the
production: Amleto. La veeemente esterioriti della morte di un mollusco [Hamlet, the
vehement externalism of a mollusc’s death]. The work became one of the key-
performances of the Company, as they began to undergo a radical re-signification.
Hamlet was represented as an autistic child who could survive the hostility of the world,
7
A quotation from the company’s biographical database.
8
Ibid.
2
that is, as an autistic child, he elaborated a new genealogy, a new time, a new life-space
and a new language. This work was the culmination of their debate against tragedy,
which the company articulated as the origin of that very literary theatre [“aimed at
moderating the most disturbed human requirements through an analysis that is detached
from emotions”]9 which it opposed.
In 1992, Societas Raffaello Sanzio inherited and moved into their own theatre building:
Comandini Theatre – an old mechanical school, where the company conceived a
children’s theatre.10 The manifesto of the children’s theatre refers to the very origin of the
word infans: ‘not speaking,’ proposing the place where the aesthetic and relational
experience is still addressed to all senses equally and not yet mediated by words. In
Favole di Esopo [Aesop’s fables] (1993) - which involved three hundred animals of
various species - the concept of auditorium/stalls as opposed to the stage was abolished in
favour of environmental re-constructions where paths, caves, animals, woods, springs,
houses and palaces became present through magic. Following this, the company staged
Hansel e Gretel [Hansel and Gretel], employing a very long labyrinth as the stage, and
Pelle díAsino [Donkeyskin], where the floor of the Commandini Theatre was excavated
until its foundations were reached and then filled with water. With their staging of
Buchettino [Perrault’s Thumbkin], premiered in 1995, the stage was a single wooden
room, where children and audience can lie down on fifty beds purposely prepared for
them, as they listened to a story, while noises and sounds (generated live outside the
enclosed wooden space), filtered through the story and the walls.
In 1995 the complete trilogy of Oresteia (una commedia organica) [Orestea – An organic
tragedy] was staged. This was the company’s first incursion into the territory of classical
tragedy. The representation of the actor’s body was contrasted against the stage-setting
which made use of technology in order to bring forth the obscure shapes of the
characters’ mental compulsions. In the same year, the Company produced its first film:
9
Ibid.
10
[In 1988 Societas Raffaello Sanzio started two experimental schools: one for children, directed by Chiara
Guidi (Children’s Experimental Theatre School); and the other, a youth theatre, directed by Claudia
Castellucci (Theatre of Descent): both were concluded in 1999].
3
Romeo Castellucci’s medium-length, 35 mm work called Brentano, after Robert Walser.
Also in 1997, the company premiered Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). Considered in the
light of what the creators refer to as a ‘huge and transversal contemporary spiritual force:
RHETORIC, which was born in the classic age and which became so determining in the
struggles for power and the signification of Caesar’s death (here he is depicted as a
victim).’ Giulio Cesare was a production that toured extensively and won numerous
awards.
The next production - Genesi, from the museum of sleep (1999) - was an ambitious and
impressive meditation about creation considered from a human (and Judeo-Christian
Western) point of view. The Book of the Genesis - from which a fundamental aspect of
the work was taken - is another major mythological text about foundation and origin
evolving concepts about the beginning and creation of the world, leading to destruction
(here considered from the perspective of Auschwitz) and a representation of destiny
(Cain’s fratricide against Abel). Here, Genesis is represented as being already
posthumous, like an inventory where things and art are separated by experience and
history (the museum).
The ever-growing interest in the company about the ‘universe of sounds, music, sonics’
was then concretised by the creation of the ‘instantaneous symphony’ called Voyage au
bout de la Nuit (1999), after the book by Louis Ferdinand Celine. The result was a piece
for and about voices, instruments, machines and images; concepts which were later
continued and evolved in their production of Il Combattimento (The Combat, 2000), a
work of music theatre by Claudio Monteverdi and the contemporary composer Scott
Gibbons, whose composition and sound design, since 1999, has become the main
reference point for the innovative audio work of the Company.
In 2000 Castellucci returned to the iconological art making he had interrupted with the
foundation of his theatre. With Rhetorica. Mene Tekel Peres he inaugurated an exhibition
of plastic works and aesthetic-biological figurations which take their substance from the
invisible power of bacteria. The exhibition was shown in Palermo, at the former mental
4
hospital of Vignicella. This exhibition was later held in Rome, at the former Borstal of
the Istituto San Michele, with the addition of new works. In July 2002, the Festival
díAvignon hosted a major exhibition by Romeo Castellucci who, at the Chapelle de
Saint-Charles, displayed To Cartage then I came, a collection of works animated by a
repetitive motion principle which suggested the theme of the beginning as the real
enigma of the world.11
Despite the apparent variety of aesthetic styles and art forms there is a consistent thread,
or way of thinking, which seems to run through Castellucci’s art. The objects he presents
to the audience are always familiar, yet dismembered from the greater structure, the
narrative, for which they were originally created. The combination and juxtaposition of
these objects liberates them from the cultural and mythological hierarchy which
previously ordered them, often creating a conceptually shocking representation. Through
the added application of contemporary notions on history and language, the work of
Societas Raffaello Sanzio has always been exploring the cellular foundations of
representation.
The Thesis
In Genesi: from the museum of sleep, Romeo Castellucci powerfully represented an
origin and a destination, as both a beginning and an end of Western human culture. But
by the way in which he chose to represent the end, he was also pointing at the problem of
representation. In this case the beginning was the Biblical creation or Genesis, and the
end was Auschwitz. The reasoning behind the relationship of Bible and Holocaust, as an
origin and a destination, how this is represented, is discussed – with the introduction of
the thinking of Giorgio Agamben and other theorists – in conjunction with Castellucci’s
aesthetic language, in the first chapter of this thesis - signification & aesthetics in
GENESI: from the museum of sleep.
11
This discussion of the themes in the history of the company’s works is based on Castellucci’s personal
unpublished notes contained in the company’s database. Although sections of this material are scattered
between various theatre-programs, websites and articles about and by the company, I am paraphrasing
material from this database.
5
From these foundations, and since 2001, Romeo Castellucci has embarked on an eleven
episode cyclical work, in ten cities, spanning three years, called TRAGEDIA
ENDOGONIDIA. This work presents a complex network of perspectives on origins and
destinations, whose representation is questioned through the structures that determine
identity within a community, a city and a history. The second chapter of the thesis - The
conception of TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA - focuses on the intellectual properties of
this cyclical work, referencing a wider range of writers and critics. As well as articulating
the philosophical foundation of this cycle, this section describes in detail, three of the
eleven episodes of the cycle (the three which I was involved with), quoting and
discussing a variety of critical and philosophical reaction to, and analysis of, these works.
What comes into focus is a system of representation, an alphabet that has processed our
culture’s founding principles of representation, evolving a language which widens and
fragments the function of theatre. This theatre is one where the content, the text or the
score of the presentation, may be acquired from a variety of artforms, in a variety of
fragmented states. This formal multiplicity, does not depend on conventional structures
of drama or narrative such as plot development, the psychological justification of
character representation or action, or the realistic setting of space and time.
Within the compositional language, the system of representation of Castellucci’s theatre,

nothing is for certain, and the meaning is ambiguous. In this theatre the form has evolved
to present a juxtaposition of disparate and isolated fragments from various artforms [and
sciences] such as film, painting, music, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, robotics…
while the form itself is such that it always retains the capacity to evolve and mutate, to
suit its own content.
Chapter three of the thesis - ‘The Poetic Room’ – towards a system of representation is
a study of the company’s working methodology and project-specific process, articulating
both the form of this evolving system of representation and its methods of production.
These conclusions are the results of observation and recordings of Romeo Castellucci’s
creation process, over two periods of residency.
6
The intersection of origins, destinations and representation comes to a point which can be
articulated at the end of the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle, and the last section of the
thesis, Destinations – a conclusion, is an attempt to articulate this in terms of Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of potentiality and it’s relationship with Castellucci’s theatre. What
will be discussed – both at the end of the Conception of Tragedia Endogonidia section
and in the conclusion – is the specific influence of Agamben’s philosophy on
Castellucci’s compositional language and system of representation.
Philosophy/Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose work blends literary theory, continental
philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art. Significantly for this
thesis he directed the Italian edition of the work of Walter Benjamin. Earlier in his career,
Agamben was concerned with the epistemological foundation of Western culture. He re-
read Freud and Saussure to articulate the impossibility of meta-language and of the
synthesis that could be reflected in the transparency of signs. Agamben's philosophy of
language, one of the themes of his work throughout the 1980s, led to a focus on the
problem of representation, and is informed by readings of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and
Benjamin. In recent years Agamben’s work has been concerned with re-definitions of
Man as a political and as an animal being. By exploring concepts and affects from
Aristotle to the Holocaust, Agamben has developed a profound philosophy on de-
humanisation and the problem of the contemporary social community.
This thesis refers to Agamben’s terms of sovereign power and bio-politics in chapters one
and two and elsewhere develops a response to his notion of potentiality. These terms
describe the redefinition of modern man – as a political and animal being – under state
power. How man’s capacity as a political being, has now put into question his status as a
living being. In his philosophy on potentiality, Agamben articulates the space between
potentiality and impotentiality as a point in between creation and its opposite. This space
could be said to be the origin of the act that starts what is to be, and it is this first act that
Castellucci represents as an origin of what is then an inevitable destination. Agamben’s
7
notion of potentiality – as well as other philosophies on representation – intersects with
Castellucci’s theatre at a number of points. There are numerous thematic and formal
resonances between the writings of Agamben and the art works of Castellucci. A key
argument in this thesis is that they meet at a point where notions of origins, destinations
and their representation are at the same point in space and time. They are, for an infinite
instant, one and the same thing.12
Theatre/Voices
The theatre of Romeo Castellucci can be said to assume, as a point of departure, an
Artaudian theatre landscape, whose aesthetic condition is not a traditional unit of drama
and theatre. His is the articulation of the paradigm of twentieth century theatre, the break
away from the parameters of the traditional dramatic text, a break away from a theatre
where a hierarchy of artforms serve a literary and dramatic master. Although Castellucci
may not be implementing specific contemporary theories directly, his theatre shares the
same principles as Hans Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater which picks up
some of Artaud’s ideas.13
In his Postdramatisches Theater, Lehmann compares the effect of the dramatic theatre to
that of perspective in painting. Both are structured according to an aesthetic logic that can
be characterized as teleological. On the contemporary post-dramatic stage, this logic is
deconstructed or rejected. Lehmann’s “concept refers to tendencies and experiments
defining theatre outside the paradigm of the dramatic text. Also known, somewhat
imprecisely, as postmodern theatre, it questions fundamentally the very tenets of the
dramatic theatre. Postdramatic performances usually eschew clear coordinates of
narrative and character and require therefore considerable effort on the part of the
12
Specific intersections and relations between Agamben’s philosophy and Castellucci’s theatre are detailed
at numerous points in the thesis. Agamben’s notions of potentiality, de-humanisation and representation are
discussed as a fundamental influence on both the content and the semiotic representation of Castellucci’s
theatre.
13
Hans Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). Lehmann defines and
categorizes an already existing movement spearheaded by artists such as Heiner Mueller, Pina Bausch,
Heiner Goebbels, Robert Wilson, Jan Fabre among others, and can be applied to the fundamental premise
of Castellucci’s theatre.
8
spectator.”14 Lehmann argues that the very essence of theatre, “that what makes theatre
theatre, namely the drama, is no longer present, which leads him to the introduction of the
notion of ‘postdramatic theatre’…. Postdramatic theatre, however, is not the mere
communication of a predetermined…construction; it is a shared rather than a presented
experience, a presentation rather than a representation.”15 Post-dramatic theatre points
towards a system of representation where the subjectivity of the spectator is the trigger
for meaning rather than the intention of the author, it is the experience one normally has
with art rather than with drama.
While Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty could be seen as a fundamental influence on

Hans Thies Lehmann and on Castellucci after him, Carmelo Bene – himself a significant
Italian theatre artist in the later half of the twentieth century – is a major influence on
Castellucci’s theatre and form. Bene was an innovative writer, director, actor and
filmmaker. His theatre and his cinema “emanates from the cartoonish dementia of the
performances, the disorientating speed with which one phantasmagoric image replaces
another and the jarringly non-naturalistic use of sound and music.”16 A visionary and
barnstormer of Italian experimental theatre, Carmelo Bene managed to represent the
Artaudian theatrical model within his own original and energetic form. Castellucci admits
that his own brand of experimental Italian experimental theatre would not be what it is
without the influence of Carmelo Bene. Artaud and Bene are influences on the work of
the company but they not the focus of this analysis of Castellucci.
14
Christopher Balme, Cambridge Journals Online, Vol. 29, Issue 1-3 (2004), Theatre Research
International published by Cambridge university Press.
15
Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Towards a Theatrical Narratology?, (2004), Online Magazine of the Visual
Narrative – Issue 9, Performance.
16
Maximilian LeCain, Carmelo Bene: A short obituary,
www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/bene.html
9
A Note on the Approach/Method of this Thesis
“…it is one thing to have such an experience (when one has it), another to know what to
do with it from an analytical standpoint. It turns out to be an immensely complex
problem.”17
In writing this thesis, I am attempting to balance my privileged experience as an observer

of the methodology and creation of this work by Romeo Castellucci, with a somewhat
problematic role as a critic of the work. The particular problem of critiquing this work
also lies in the fact that the work itself attempts to break down the meaning of any
familiar images that it presents, as well as consciously questioning the very medium of
it’s representation. The interpretation of Castellucci’s images must address the way they
may have functioned in the context from which they have been drawn from, as well as
the dislocated, un-contextualised presentation of these images presented by Castellucci’s
theatre.
One way of negotiating this difficulty when writing critically about the theatre might be
to develop something like the phenomenological approach as articulated by Bert O.
States:
“…when we speak of criticism in the phenomenological mode, we are referring
less to a relentless methodology or a deep philosophical concern for the nature of
consciousness than to an attitude that manifests itself with varying degrees of
purity and one that may come and go in a given exercise as critical objectives
change…”
The objective of my study of Castellucci’s theatre is to view his work closely and to
provide an account of it. This account is determined by how it affected me personally as a
spectator and how it struck me as a collaborator. These different positions might shift my
understanding of the works so I will focus on those works in which I have worked with
the company in producing the performances. My discussion of the company’s system of
17
Bert O. States, The Phenomenological Attitude, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle Reinelt
and Joseph Roach. University of Michigan Press, 1992, pp. 369-70.
10
representation is based on this embedded viewing position. Analysis and criticism of an
art object is always going to be subjective to a degree. This is especially true in the case
of this thesis because I have witnessed and have been part of the creation and formation
of some of the work.
“…phenomenology itself – tends to rely strongly on some variation of figural

description, or ‘proof’ by metaphor. On this account it is probably the most
personal form of critical commentary and hence is a useful counterbalance to the
increasingly impersonal methodology…”
In my writing about this theatre I have attempted to describe as closely as possible what I
have seen but I have allowed myself to describe the artistic power of this theatre
personally and passionately. For me the operating metaphors in the work are notions of
origins and destinations and my objectives are not so much to write a criticism of the
work but rather to investigate its relationships to these ideas. The thesis is not a
comparative study of Castellucci’s theatre with various schools of theatre theory or other
theatrical forms. It is personal writing which investigates the key metaphors within the
work.
“Phenomenological criticism, however, posits a stopping place, as it were, at the

starting place, not of all possible meanings but of meaning and feeling as they
arise in a direct encounter with the art object…”
Since the theme of my reading of Castellucci’s theatre is a relation with notions of origins
and destinations, or the ‘stopping place… at the starting place’, the meanings, feelings
and metaphors I articulate are biased towards links with these concepts. Numerous other
interpretations are of course possible, and this thesis regularly acknowledges the
ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning and subjective emotional responses to
Castellucci’s theatre. An example of this is the chapter named The Poetic Room. In
discussing Castellucci’s methodology and artistic process, the poetic space of
11
potentiality, as articulated by Agamben, responds to the ambiguous processes of this
creativity.
Bert O. States defines the foundational problem of phenomenology as the “frontality of

everything in the world before the eye of consciousness…”18 regardless of the potential
multiplicity of all the unseen meanings and representations. But even if the complete
perception of an art object were possible, “we would be no better off because language
itself contains an even more virulent form of frontality.”19 For States as a critic, and for
Castellucci as an artist, this is where the founding problem of phenomenology leads us to
the problematics of semiotic meaning. For one of the central functions of the frontality of
an art object, is the implication that there is more in terms of meaning and representation
beyond, unseen. The central terms of this problem are: repetition, presence,
representation.
This problematic relationship between the issues of representation and language with the
phenomenological–semiotic methodology of critical writing is the precarious terrain of
writing this thesis. It is for this purpose that I have attempted to fuse somewhat passionate
and poetic description and analysis with analytical readings based on Giorgio Agamben
and others.
States quotes from Patrice Pavis’s Languages of the stage to show the space where the
phenomenological and the semiotic can fuse, by describing the dialogue of a mime as the
one between what he does and what he does not do. The experience this installs in the
viewer and the critic is the point where they did not know that they knew it. This point is
the tension and the fusion of the present and the absent, and it is at the core of the
problem of representation. Similarly, Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality and
Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia – as this thesis will argue – meet at the origin of the
language of representation, the decision to make the first, singular Act.
18
Ibid. p. 372
19
Ibid. p. 372
12
In analysing representation in Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia using the scheme of
Agamben’s potentiality, I am still reacting to the presence, the frontality of what is on the
stage. This image has a definite perceptual impression on the viewer and the critic, but
because this image is self aware, it lures the critic into the in-between-ness of perception
and representation. The articulation of this co-existence demands analysis and expression,
description and poetry, certainty and ambiguity. Interpretations and meanings are
derived, but always subjective. To conclude my opening statements let me quote States
again:
“Thus phenomenology is forced, through the sheer poverty of scientific language in the
face of subjective experience, to say (to itself and to its reader), ‘It is like this.’”20
20
Ibid. p. 378
13
Genesi: from the museum of sleep. Photo: Gabriele Pellegrini
Chapter One
Signification & Aesthetics in GENESI: from the museum of sleep
In 1999, Romeo Castellucci – with his company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio – created a
work called: Genesi: from the museum of sleep. Taken from the name of the first book of
the Bible, the production was presented in three acts titled Bereshit,21 Auschwitz, Abel
and Cain, respectively. The first act depicts key foundational events from the first book
of the Bible, the second act alludes to the historical significance and the
unrepresentability of the extermination camps, while the third act returns to the original
two brothers within the alien landscape of a new world – our world at it’s origin.
Genesi engages a complex array of semiotic structures and theories on language and
myth, which this thesis has to acknowledge and describe, but cannot treat in any
exhaustive way. I will therefore concentrate on the key aspects of Genesi which are
consistent with Castellucci’s current cyclical work: Tragedia Endogonidia (the main
focus of this thesis), and the way the work relates notions of origins, destinations and
representation.
In referencing Genesis the production presents a version of creation as the beginning, as

the origin, and as a function of ‘the word’, that is, it immediately engages the problems of
language and representation. The related Kabbalistic concept of creation that this
21
The first word of the Bible in Hebrew, translated as “In the beginning…”
14
production also artistically acknowledges is that an infinite being (God) had to contract
himself, through numerous levels of representation, in order to achieve a finite creation,
the physical world. This world is such because it is representable through language, while
others (non–physical worlds) are not, and that the tools for creating the world are the
letters of the alphabet, the signifiers of language.22 This production – on numerous levels
– articulates creation as an act, a self-aware and self-defining birth through
representation.
So, as we sit in the theatre waiting for the production to begin, we hear a recording of an
audience murmuring, waiting for a production to begin. "The noise of the room where
you are sitting is already the beginning of everything,"23 we are made self aware through
a representation of ourselves. This feeling is offered to us at the very beginning because it
is the essence of Romeo Castellucci’s own connection to the act of creation, …that of the
artist. In Western civilization, in the context of monotheistic religions, the artist “is
inevitably confronted with the problem of God, for the birth of Western theatre marked
the death of God through the transfer of human sacrifice from the religious to the cultural
sphere.”24
In the beginning of this performance, a black veil obscures the stage, the darkness
symbolising time not yet invented. Upstage, the façade of a laboratory can be seen, we
see a group of people in Marie Curie’s Laboratory [Eden], it is the discovery of radium –
the only substance which naturally emits light. Lucifer - "he who brings light"25 steps
forward [out of love], caresses the discovery [the light] which killed its discoverer, and
sings an unearthly Hebrew lament. His song is melancholic for it is the lament of
unfulfilled experience, of eventual non-being [without identity]. He is therefore the artist,
because only with the awareness of non-being can he re-create in art. He must be exiled
from this garden, and by perpetuating myth, arrive [the actor playing Lucifer takes off all
22
The concept of God’s contraction is called Tzim-Tzum – the foundation of Lurianic Kabbala – and it, as
well as the concept of the creative function of the alphabet, originate in the key work of the Kabbala – Sefer
Yetzirah – translated as the ‘book of formation.’
23
Romeo Castellucci, Program notes for Genesi: from the museum of sleep.
24
Lorraine Hebert, Program essay for the Montreal premier of Genesi: from the museum of sleep.
25
Romeo Castelluci, Program notes of Genesi: from the museum of sleep
15
his clothes and squeezes through two parallel poles] into a world of despair and darkness
– as do the audience who are assaulted by Castellucci's formidable audio-visual
representation.
An Aesthetics of Potentiality
The possibilities of creation are seemingly infinite, everything is potential. This potential
is the blind terror of beginnings, the uncertainty that lies between creation and
destruction, felt by the physicist, the politician, the artist; by human beings. It is at this
point that the first of numerous links between the theatre of Romeo Castellucci and the
philosophy of Giorgio Agamben can be detected. Interpreting Aristotle's Book Theta of
the Metaphysics, the Italian philosopher states:
"….in its originary structure, dynamis, potentiality, maintains itself
in relation to its own privation, its own steresis, its own non-Being.
This relation constitutes the essence of potentiality. To be potential
means: to be one's own lack, to be in relation to one's own incapacity.
Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own
impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They
can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being.
In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to
ignorance, vision to darkness."26
In this sense, the beginning is defined by its inevitable end [and being creation, its end is
destruction], and so becomes the origin of the end. Castellucci equates this origin with its
destination on an intellectual, psycho-emotional and sensory level, interconnecting
Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, with Primo Levi’s notion of the ‘grey zone’ [a
particular state of non-being, to be discussed later in this section], while catapulting the
audience through a growing series of sensory and representational assaults towards the
inevitable [they know that the next Act is called Auschwitz], the negative potential of
creation.
26
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities – Collected Essays in Philosophy, (Stanford: Stanford University press,
1999), p. 182.
16
In this production the audience are alerted to different and multiple levels of potentiality:
Lucifer’s song is the Hebrew prayer for the dead, in this context it becomes a lament for
unfulfilled experience, the possibility of non-being, as well as a reference to the death
camps. Radium is the only substance which emits light, “a light that gets into the
bones,”27 a discovery which marks the beginning of modern physics and a light that
“little by little, penetrates the nucleus of things until they break.”28 Lucifer’s naked exit
[through the parallel bars] brings forth theatrical nuclear fallout, earthquake tremors,
apocalyptic noise, plumes of smoke, showers of dust, flashing apparitions, gallows,
cacophonous machines and ghostly figures ejected from the bowels of the earth or from
the depths of hell. In a glass cage lies what looks like a random pile of flesh, until it starts
moving to the accompaniment of a compressing machine which is squashing an animal’s
scull, the sound of bones cracking, clearly audible. The flesh becomes a man - Adam -
the actor, a contortionist. Downstage a naked giant of a man - God - smears his body with
rock-dust and earth. Two stuffed mechanical sheep have sex in a glass case upstage, an
amputated mechanical writer's arm scribbles helplessly on the floor and a human figure
revolves at top speed on a turntable. An elderly woman rises, after a scene where the
floor of the stage appears to be breathing, with this woman - Eve - sleeping on its lung.
She moves forward, exposing her naked body and her tragic face, and then withdraws -
pulling a thread, which is connected to a huge weaving machine - and begins to cry.
Both the imagery of Romeo Castellucci’s program notes and the power of the
representations on the stage, embody the notion that the eye does not know what the
retina has registered. The body experiences the terror of being face to face with the
creator, with what it has awakened, revealed as the inevitable destination of its potential.
The stage is a museum of history and humanity, and a museum is a place where living
things, through non-being, become artefacts. All the figures in this first act, are rendered
in this way, as artefacts.
27
Romeo Castellucci, Program notes for Genesi: from the museum of sleep
28
Ibid.
17
The exposition of flesh: Artaud and Auschwitz
“The speech of bodies alone is a scandal of reality.”29 It is the exposition of flesh, it is the
presence of living or sacrificed animals on stage juxtaposed with mechanical bodies or
parts of bodies, of bodies throbbing with blood, organs, water, fire and life – an invasion
of bodies of sound, groans, vibrations of organic and inorganic material, bombardments
of luminous bodies.
The core of this theatre resembles a type of alchemy, a vision similar to that of children,
who experience a reality with language that fits the body. No matter how complex the
semiotics may be, Romeo Castellucci always tries to search for the feeling, the sense, the
breath, the body of the concept. His tools are the stage, lights, music, sound,
scenography, and the way they are wielded – in attack formation – toward our senses. We
see, or experience, images that are familiar to us – almost genetically – through
generations of cultural history, or maybe through our sub-conscious memory of
representations propagated by the media. Either way, the representation, the image, is
stripped from the narrative, and the historical context or source from which we recognise
it. Just like the concept which is presented in such a way that we can feel its body… the
image which is familiar, is presented as a freed entity, as screaming potential – for it is
displaced from the role which it was created to play.30
There is an interval.
When the audience return - with the theatrical power of ‘In the beginning,’ the first Act,
still fresh in their memory - they are expecting to see the next Act, ‘Auschwitz.’ The
name of this Act – this word – provides almost all the meaning in this Act, it is the
problem of representation.
29
Quote from Romeo Castellucci during public talks about Genesi: from the museum of sleep.
30
A proper investigation into the form or the unique theatrical language of this theatre, through a study of
its methodology, is the focus of fourth section of this thesis: ‘The Poetic Room’- towards a system of
representation.
18
A completely white, curtained space is illuminated. We watch everything through a white
veil. It is the whiteness of limbs, a cocoon of innocence suspended in a timeless era,
soothed by muffled melodies from the 1930’s, coming from far upstage. Six children
appear, they are the only actors in this Act. Acknowledging a Lewis Carroll fairy tale
world – with toy trains, a small china tea set, a boy in a white rabbit suit, feather snow
and cushion clouds – the children are at play. Nothing is depicted, nothing horrible is
seemingly represented, yet all that the audience can think of, and then feel, is the passage
of time and the horror of Auschwitz. The presence of the name with the absence of its
representation, causes us – the audience members – to imagine a reality which art cannot
represent, because this name, is the name of the un-representable.
Later, some of the children are seated together on a big armchair, whose mechanical
rocking or vibrating motion may be ambiguously indicating the trains. The word
‘SLEEP’ is hand painted on the back plastic, body parts descend as a child announces
specific historical events. Three children loitering outside a dolls house cut the throat of
their older brother, his body continuing to dance. Huddled together in a cluster under
what might be a shower nozzle, the children, one by one, fall asleep under a shower of
fine white mist.
Whatever representation there may be here, is not only raw, minimal, ambiguous,
foundational, but also possibly a children’s game, or a children’s dream. Suddenly,
excruciatingly loud, we hear a mad loop from the voice of Antonin Artaud screaming: “Je
ne suis pas fou! Je ne suis pas fou!” (“I am not in delirium! I am not mad!”), the sound
saturating the space, and the children go mad, deliriously running on, off and around the
stage, screaming. For Castellucci, Artaud’s body “finally without organs”31 is
accomplished scientifically, taking on another meaning in the Nazi evisceration chamber:
“Artaud’s description of the violation of his body during the years of his
confinement corresponds to that of the body of a deported convict. And for
Artaud, the promise of the body to come is that of a child. The child in Artaud’s
Messiah, and the child that is the first victim in the camp – children were the first
31
19
ones to be gassed, the voices of children don’t reach us from the camps (except
for the testimony of a few survivors which come from ‘adults’).”32
The representation of Artaud himself, through his voice, points not to the form theorized
by Artaud as Theatre of Cruelty, but to the central theme – as postulated by Jacques
Derrida – by which all of Artaud’s work and ambitions can be attributed: that of the
closure of representation. Derrida articulates33 a number of points by which, according to
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, modern theatre fails to be adequate, because it relies on
representation, and “…nothing could be further from addressing total man than an
assembled totality, an artificial and exterior mimicry.”34 For Derrida, Artaud describes a
force, a totality of man and theatre, and the “…European ideal of art…attempts to cast
the mind into an attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation.”35 The closure of
representation as the central reading of Artaud is firmly articulated by Derrida – ‘Artaud
wanted to erase representation’ – in the same essay:
“For him, repetition was evil, and one could doubtless organise an
entire reading of his texts around this centre. Repetition separates
force, presence, and life from themselves. This separation is the
economical and calculating gesture of that which defers itself in
order to maintain itself, that which reserves expenditure and surrenders
to fear. This power of repetition governed everything that Artaud
wished to destroy…”36
Romeo Castellucci does not attempt to employ the methods of The Theatre of Cruelty, he
uses a trace of Artaud himself. For the second Act, named ‘Auschwitz,’ engages the
impossibility of representation by asking the audience to imagine the horror, the force
that is described by the name, but cannot be represented. And in Castellucci’s quest to
express the core of an experience through the body, he presents Artaud’s own voice.
32
Ibid.
33
Jacques Derrida, The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation from L’Ecriture et la
difference. (London: Routledge 1978) [Writing and Difference].
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., Derrida quoting Artaud.
36
Ibid.
20
The Act ends with a transparent cross turning red as it is filled with red liquid [blood] and
then drained, and a girl is scanned by a penetrating light, eerily similar to the bone
penetrating glow of radium from Marie Curie’s laboratory.
The grouping of Genesis and Auschwitz within the same event; the very naming of an
Act as ‘Auschwitz;’ and the self-conscious philosophical signification within the overall
aesthetic presentation, all point towards the much published philosophical notions of
‘Auschwitz as the end of language, history and representation.’ Discoursed at one time or
another by many post war thinkers, these philosophies have been famously articulated by
Theodor W. Adorno and Jean Francoise Lyotard.37 On a variety of social, cultural and
philosophical planes, Auschwitz signifies that which is beyond understanding because it
cannot be represented by language, and language is how we understand, create and
represent the world. If Auschwitz can be, and be outside of language, then language is in
crisis. Auschwitz signifies this because it is a point in the human condition that is de-
human-ised, a point of destruction which is the end, the destination of creation, of the
origin.
Castellucci, through the form of his theatre, seemingly incorporates these complex
concepts into a singular image, action or sound. The force of the aesthetic crystallizes an
idea which, reaching out for interpretation, can be named by the various schools of
thought which articulate Auschwitz as the signifier of a cultural end, and Genesis, as a
mythological beginning.
By freeing the familiar image from its original narrative, Castellucci is able to show more
directly the conceptual core of the problems his theatre seeks to engage and embody. In
37
Adorno for his essay After Auschwitz and for his famous quote ‘there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.’
Lyotard has repeatedly articulated how Auschwitz signifies the end of language and representation, and
cites this as a fundamental aspect of The Postmodern Condition.
These philosophies – to do with the problems of representing Auschwitz – cannot be investigated or
discussed in any justified way in this thesis, the subject is simply too great. Inevitably, certain fundamental
assumptions must be made in this thesis towards the awareness of the principles of this school of thought
by the reader. The current paragraph – without any investigation – overviews the fundamentals of these
assumptions.
21
the case of Genesi, the foundation of his theatrical alphabet is – literally and physically –
the body. With the body, through the body, Castellucci metaphorically unites two
separate strands of the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben with Primo Levi: the body as life,
the body as corpse, the body as non-being.
The Grey Zone

Primo Levi’s notion of the “grey zone” is derived from a particular psychological and
existential state – which was engineered in the concentration camps – by displacing
human beings through a cruel, socially authoritative hierarchy. The term itself though,
encapsulates a greater notion of non-being and de-humanisation. It names an engineered
industry of death which treats its human stock as a production line, it names a reality38
where humans can no longer recognise themselves through other humans, where humans
are no different from animals or machines, it names an existential human zone between
life and death.
For this reality to be possible, an extreme state of psychological displacement had to be

enforced on the humans on both sides of this production line of death, as articulated by
Primo Levi: “…they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are
beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle
the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already
in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death
by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they,
the Muselmanner,39 the drowned, form the backbone of the camp,
an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical,
of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead
within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call
them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of
38
Articulated by Hannah Arendt as ‘the banality of evil’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem – A report on the
Banality of Evil, (New York: Penguin Books, 1977)
39
‘Muselmann’ was the term used by internees in the camps to describe ‘the walking dead’ of the camps,
those who through exposure to starvation, deprivation, violence, displacement and brutality, experience –
as described by Agamben as – “a fundamental loss of consciousness and will.” The inhabitants of the ‘grey
zone.’
22
which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”40
Romeo Castellucci applies the notion of the “grey zone” as a historical inevitability -
triggered by the first act of creation, Genesis - and implies that it is a zone which, in a
metaphorical sense, we are still inhabiting. His self-conscious naming of his second Act
Auschwitz points to the death of culture through the end or impossibility of
representation, as Castellucci himself states:
“Auschwitz is the extreme and inconceivable consequence of
Man’s Genesis. We know that for the whole of human kind, a
‘grey zone’ now exists. It exists now. It has existed. It was
conceived, planned, accomplished. This ‘possibility’ was put into
practice. It is the nadir of human experience after which nothing
else exists. Primo Levi wrote that death itself was put to death.
We can no longer find sense in any human landscape. Its only
production was of corpses, the genetic of the non-man. It is highly
significant that this happened through a people that speak a language
that has generated and named the world and its inhabitants. In Hebrew,
the sense of beginning and destruction is more potent than in other
tongues. Hebrew accomplishes a full circle with regard to ‘Bereshit’
(In the beginning) and to the ‘Crystal night.’ Working on Genesi, once
rehearsals began, I was filled with the horror of this reality. I thought
that it would be possible to look at the Genesis, only from below. Only
in this way Genesi would have had its own human projection. Then I
understood that I couldn’t ignore this name, not once I’d thought of it.
Believe it or not, I tell you I was obliged to use this name. But the doubt
still lingers: here I am, shall I use that name? In a theatre performance?
At what price?41
40
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, published in If This Is This A Man, (Great Britain: Abacus,
1987) p.96
41
23
Castellucci constructs a kind of theatricalised grey zone an intensely ambiguous aesthetic
space which connects Primo Levi with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of potentiality. The
types of “non-being” articulated by both these thinkers also relate to Agamben’s
understanding of the processes and techniques of this de-humanisation, the production of
man as animal. For Agamben, violence perpetrated by humans against other humans
involves a dehumanisation, which is a product of extreme biopolitics,42 reducing humans
to the barest point of their biological functioning: animals. There exists a ceaseless
constitution of the man and non-man, human and animal. In describing the state reached
by the ‘Muselmanner’ or the ‘grey zone,’ Agamben writes:
“The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the
production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually
infinite survival. In every case, it is a matter of dividing animal life
from organic life, the human from the inhuman, the witness from
the Muselmann, conscious life from vegetative life maintained
functional through resuscitation techniques, until a threshold is reached….
Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the
absolute separation of the living and the speaking being, zoe and bios,
the inhuman and the human.”43
Romeo Castellucci’s aesthetic focus on the body, is not limited to the human body, which
he consistently represents in various forms of formation and malformation [crippled
42
Agamben’s fundamental notion of ‘biopolitics’ is the problem of the previously separate Aristotelian
concepts of: zoe [basic life attributed equally to all living entities – animals, men and gods], and bios
[indicating a form or way of living proper to an individual or a group ie. political]. For Aristotle and the
classical world, zoe could never be contextualized with polis [The Greek model of the political structure of
city/state]. It is Agamben’s reading of Foucault – from his first volume of the history of sexuality – where,
at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of
State Power, and where politics turns into biopolitics: “For millennia” writes Foucault “man remained what
he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an
animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.” [Agamben citing Foucault].
Agamben compares Foucault’s reading of the biopolitical with Hannah Arendt’s notion – in The Human
Condition – of ‘homo laborans’ and how, biological life as such, gradually occupies the very centre of the
political scene of modernity. For Agamben, the inevitable destination, the exemplary place of modern
biopolitics, the place where the bestialization of man – achieved through the most sophisticated political
techniques – is in the concentration camp, in Auschwitz.
43
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen,
(New York: Zone Books, 1999), p.155-156.
24
bodies, anorexic bodies, injured bodies]. In this theatre – just as a beginning can only be
defined as such relative to an end, or by it’s own end – the human body is shown in the
context of animal and robotic or machine bodies. There may not be animals on stage in
‘Second Act: Auschwitz,’ but animals [real and unreal] are seen in the first and third
Acts, and bodies – animal and mechanical – are evident in much of Castellucci’s work
before and since Genesi also. Watching ‘Auschwitz’ on stage, is a mechanical body,
sitting outside the performance area, who rises, and with accompanying motorized
movement and sound, applauds the show when it is complete.
Burial
The third Act brings us back to the book of Genesis, to the gesture which inserted the
seed of death into the history of humanity – the murder of Abel by his brother Cain.
Behind a translucent veil, the now blood red stage is shameless in its illustrative
representation, the site is defined by walls of molten lava and a floor covered in ochre
dirt. It is an alien landscape, a new world, the surface of Mars, a painting. Two huge dogs
roam the stage, and two men dressed only in black underwear. Multiple images, diagrams
of a circle, a triangle, a cross, are evolved through lighting and action. A sword and a
crown offer up elements of recognizable Judeo-Christian symbolism: from the silent eye
of God and the guilty eye of Cain, to the sacrificed body of Abel lying, arms outstretched
like the cross of Christ, with the crown of God as a pathetic ornament on his head.
Out of the depths comes a breath, a whiff of compassion and human hope, for when Abel
is strangled a child’s cry is heard. The murderous gesture of Cain reveals a crippled arm –
the instrument of murder – a man in love with his brother, a man terrified to discover
death, the first murder (therefore the child), a king mad with guilt and despair who wraps
round his throat old magnetic tape (a prop introduced in the first act as the recording
instrument with which God created – through representation as recording – the world)
unwinding furiously from the ceiling.
The last site evokes human time which has borrowed from myth, the cyclical structure of
life and death, of death and life, an origin defined by it’s destination, and a destination by
it’s origin. What finally emerges - as though a blind spot had been discovered in the
25
tableau - is the force of remorse, melancholy and love. Castellucci represents this through
a powerful oratorio by the Polish composer Henrych Gorecki and arresting lighting
(allegedly inspired by the way in which Rembrant lit his canvasses). Through the
overwhelming power of his remorse, melancholy and love, Cain invents the ritual of
burial, the first burial, and in so doing, discovers humanity, for the origin of the word –
human – is from the Greek: humanis, meaning, burial.
Genesi: from the museum of sleep photos: Agence Enguerand
26
Chapter Two.
The conception of TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA
Genesi: from the museum of sleep was the apex of Castellucci’s meta-narrative of
theatrical thought. Growing out of this, in 2001 the company embarked on a new major
project, a cycle of eleven productions called Tragedia Endogonidia. This cycle is an open
system of representation that, like an organism, changes in time and according to
geographical location, assigning the name ‘Episode’ to each phase of its transformation.
This system forces a radical re-thinking of production, staging, organization, distribution
and economy: in other words, the whole theatrical system. The aim is to represent a
tragedy of the future.
In this next section I am especially endebted to the work of Joe Kelleher – one of the
major interpreters of Castellucci’s work in the English language and who has written
more about Castellucci’s cycle than anyone else – for his analysis of Tragedia
27
Endogonidia. The word Endogonidia refers to those simple living beings which are
made up of, or have within them, gonads – reproductive organs which produce
reproductive cells, such as testis or an ovary, enabling them to reproduce themselves
unceasingly. “Endogeny, or reproduction out of its own resources, implies an immortality
for the type.”44 Tragedy [Tragedia[, to the contrary, involves an end (of the hero). “Let us
say for the moment it is a mode of exposure of human being among other humans, but
comprehending already the archaic strangeness of such everyday metaphors as ‘tragedy’
or ‘human being.’”45 Joe Kelleher, in his essay Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas
Raffaello Sanzio’s ‘Tragedia Endogonidia,’ defines Tragedia Endogonidia to be both the
‘genus’ and the ‘species’ of the work. This could be described as a particular type of
“remaining: an organism that plays with itself, gathering against it, like gold gathers
light, whatever cries, whatever stench or infection, reach out of our mortal remains. This
is a theatre organism that… in one way or another keeps itself apart. It will, though, be in
the grain of those remains, that is to say in the places where we live, – bodies, cities,
memories, selves – that we have been and continue to be, touched by this work as it
passes from place to place, if not exactly putting down roots then shedding spores, like
the not-at-home heroes of the old tragedies, or like the theatre itself which, to the extent
to which it is translatable between this or that place and tongue and another, is by the
same token in flight or pursuit,”48 always and “anyway, on the run.”49
The Endogonidic Tragedy [Tragedia Endogonidia] has developed over a period of three
years, touching ten cities. Each an interdependent Episode, but complete in itself - is
represented, and it’s name is formed by the acronym of the city of reference with it’s
progressive number. These are: C.#01 [Cesena], A.#02 [Avignon] in 2002, B.#03
44
Joe Kelleher, Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia,
http://www.bris.ac.uk/goatislandschool/pdf/kelleher
45
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
49
Romeo Castellucci: ‘It will be a process of evolution. There will not be many performances, there will
not be one large performance. The final result will be an organism which is on the run.’ – Program note for
C.#01, Cesena, 2002. As quoted by Joe Kelleher in his essay Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas
Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia.
28
[Berlin], BR.#04 [Brussels], BN.#05 [Bergen], P.#06 [Paris], R.#07 [Rome] in 2003,
S.#08 [Strasbourg], L.#09 [London], M.#10 [Marseilles] and C.#11 [Cesena] in 2004.
This section of the thesis deals in particular with three of the eleven episodes of Tragedia
Endogonidia. Writing about all eleven episodes within one section of an MA thesis
would be impossible, but because I was actually assisting – while on residency – on
episodes six, seven and eleven, I feel that I am especially qualified to write about these
three works. I will describe many of the elements, objects, scenographic compositions
and actions of these three works, as well as comparing some of the key critical and
intellectual responses to the works, focusing particularly on notions of ‘origins,
destinations and representation’. But before this is possible an attempt must be made to
introduce, and to provide a springboard, for the conceptual basis and the trajectory of the
overall cycle of Tragedia Endogonidia. This is followed by three short arguments under
the headings of: on language, the problem of tragedy and the episode, as a foundation
towards the cycle’s conceptual and formal properties – before the discussions of the three
episodes under the headings of: P.#06, R.#07 and C.#11 respectively.
The figures living on the stage within each and all of the episodes, do not resemble any
recognizable figures from myth; instead, they follow each other in frames that are
themselves separate, and the thread joining them is not that of a narrative, but rather that
of a synchronic memory, where images alternate according to an alogical and
simultaneous sequence. Each figure refers to its own frame. No biographies emerge,
rather biological instances, bio-political themes. “In any particular episode then, one will
neither be getting the ‘whole thing’ nor a fragment of a totality. What we encounter in
this theatre are remnants. Indeed, we might wonder how it could ever be otherwise with a
twenty-first century return to the ‘tragic’ ethos.”50 It is useful, in this case, to think of a
remnant, as “neither the whole... nor a part... but, rather, the non-coincidence of the
whole and the part...”51 This is “not even an in-between-ness exactly but something more
50
Joe Kelleher, Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia,
http://www.bris.ac.uk/goatislandschool/pdf/kelleher
51
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 163-4. As quoted by Joe Kelleher in his essay Lessons in
a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia,
29
like a suffering that might appear to beg redemption in the inventions of our thought. At
the same time, however, the remnant begs nothing of us at all. It remains, or it passes on.
And we remember, or we do not… he is reminded of the dramatis personae in post-tragic
poems such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Dante’s Inferno, a gathering of legendary,
historical and fictional figures translated within the poetic fiction to a status which is at
once something immediate, locatable – a flower, a weeping stone, or the autonomy of
sheer gesture – remnants of a particular human impulse. These are impulses remembered,
in the telling of the story, although at the level of the image such poems bear testimony to
an immemorial forgetting, an irreversibility, something that will not now translate ‘back’
into the life. This is the peculiar status too of the corpse. That thing of sheer ‘similarity’
that is ‘like’ nothing on earth, that stays with us,”52 as Maurice Blanchot has suggested,
“because it has no place.”53
Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia provokes us into encounters with remnants such as

these, poetic fictions and material facts that remain as it were alien and indifferent to the
thought that we might construct upon them. Nor, from Castellucci’s point of view, will it
serve to prop such thought with the terminological scaffolding of a theoretical
tradition:”54 “Our time and our lives are completely detached from any tragic concept.
Redemption, pathos and ethos are words that cannot be reached, having fallen into the
coldest of abstractions. The theatre I respect, now, is a theatre that makes you cry.”55
On language
Joe Kelleher eloquently applies Giorgio Agamben’s notion of language as remnant,
within the context of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia:
“Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his book Remnants of Auschwitz, cites a 1964
German TV interview with Hannah Arendt where, in response to the inquiry as to
52
Joe Kelleher, Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia.
53
Joe Kelleher, quoting (in his essay: Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia
Endogonidia) – Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]), pp. 257-60.
54
55
Romeo Castellucci, from the C.#01 program. As quoted by Kelleher in his essay Lessons in a Lost
Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia.
30
what, for her, remained of the pre-Hitlerian Europe of her experience, Arendt
replies “What remains? The mother tongue remains.” In an attempt to think of
language as something that ‘remains’, and ask what it might mean to speak in a
remaining language, a language that has survived – in us, so to speak – the people
that spoke it, Agamben imagines the case of a poet who writes in a dead or a lost
language. Latin, for example.57 In the relative isolation of that work, in the
regeneration of the sayable and the unsayable, (even as they continue to write and
speak in their ‘mother tongue’), the poet may return that lost language to living
speech, but returns it in the form of a shadow, thoughbeit a shadow to which they
offer their voice and blood. This shadow of what remains in language, of speaking
subjects who did not ‘survive,’ this ‘background noise’ that flickers and growls in
the work like an other side of language, these are modes of that ‘undecidable
medium’ that Agamben calls testimony. To give testimony then, ‘to bear witness
is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it,
to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language
as if it were living.’58 It is a speech that bears witness neither to the body of
knowledge, in the sense of the ‘corpus’ of things-that-have-been-known-and-said,
nor to that body’s articulations, the ‘archive’ of statements. It does not bear
witness to the documents, but to that which the documents are incapable of
recounting. It issues as an articulation of its author’s own ‘incapacity to speak.’
As such it is a poetic event, we might say a creative maybe even a performative
event……. This performance gestures towards a nocturnal horizon upon which
‘the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness that, according to cosmologists, is
nothing other than the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine, so
57
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 159-62.
58
This point by Agamben can be applied to matters concerning Auschwitz and representation, matters
which were introduced and defined in the Genesi section of this thesis. Although some more discussion of
these matters will be made in the conclusion of this thesis, ‘Auschwitz and Representation’ cannot be
adequately discussed in this thesis. But, since this notion of language by Agamben is a consistent and
constant foundation of both Castellucci’s theatre and this thesis, it is important to raise this idea at this point
in the thesis, somewhere in-between the two inadequate references to ‘Auschwitz and Representation.’ This
articulation on the relationship between dead and living language by Agamben, also serves to support the
notion that a thing [an origin or a living language] can only be defined and understood in relation to it’s
opposite [a destination or a dead language].
31
the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in which human beings did not
yet speak; and so the testimony of human beings attests to a time in which they
were not yet human.’59
The problem of tragedy

“An Attic tragedy is a part of the heroic fable which forms the whole.”60
The contemporary impossibility to repeat tragedy, as a concept, is the central question

and assumption of Tragedia Endogonidia. This impossibility is not simply determined by
our inability to re-create the Greek model, for the Greek model is foreign to us, the bed-
rocks which made this model – a particular language of myth, a tragic concept of life
where man is innocent and guilty at the same time [ethos and daimon] – was the real
essence of the tragical, it was the real communion between life and art.61 For Castellucci,
modern society is displaced from the originating Greek model of Man and politics, but
the essence of the problem is the fact that we now speak of this tragedy as a model.
“The strength of the Attic tragedy lies in having its own people, the need that
moves the tragic author finds its answer in the audience. The answer is not
decryption, nor acknowledgement of reality, but strong testimony of a desire for
purity which does not pursue the formulation of a style, but the spoliation of the
accessory, which shows the human enigma in its meagre essentiality.”62
The contemporary impossibility to experience the roots, or bed-rocks, of tragedy marks
the impossible rapprochement between the human and the divine, between art and life.
Tragedy is not the creator of a model, but rather of an essence, a conscience, of tragic
thought. Tragedy does not create a theatrical model in which the polis identifies itself,
and which illustrates the culture of an era, it is not a reflection of a world or the
59
Kelleher discusses and quotes Agamben who cites Holderlin in Remnants of Auschwitz.
60
Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Baroque Drama, trans. John Osborne, (London: New Left Books,
1973), p.112
61
Similar to Agamben’s discourse on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (see recent footnote – above).
62
Celine Astrie, C.#01, published in IDIOMA #1. [IDIOMA is a series of large format magazines
containing essays on Tragedia Endogonidia by various writers and regular contributors/thinkers]. Celine
Astrie, along with Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, are regular essayists/contributors to the IDIOMA
publications. The nature of these publications will be defined under the upcoming heading: the first five
episodes.
32
expression of a world view, but a vital question on the possibility of action, on the nature
itself of acting. Therefore tragedy is not testimony, but epiphany.63 The impossibility of
tragedy, is the impossibility to track down the language of myth and the experience of the
tragical. It is the impossibility to imagine the sphere of action, of acting, of the possible,
the potential. This impossibility is perhaps the function of theatrical representation, or,
when the form is used to investigate the nature of the act itself, the theatrical
representation becomes the function. The form becomes the narrative.
In Tragedia Endogonidia, tragedy is a vital question to the possibility of acting. The

impossibility to reconcile man and his origin and his own essence overwhelms the human
with indescribable existential suffering, in an endless procrastination on which tragedy
projects its bloody glare. In the drama of tragedy, the suffering and horror of life become
the expression of purity and intensity. For Castellucci, tragedy seems to accompany us to
the heart of what we are made of and shaped from, in order to release a vital force in
response to the inhuman power of fate, our inevitable destination. In tragedy, the man
who is subject to suffering, recovers his own dignity by turning his suffering into a
strength in action, that of cruelty. In this suffering, lies the essence of the tragical, for our
impossibility to hold life is the sign of our impotence against the strength of fate. Here
tragedy is at the limit, a limit where human acts articulate invisible forces.
The hero is innocent and guilty, he is no longer part of the human sphere, he is animal on
one side and divine on the other, he is double – ethos and daemon. This tragic conscience
is an awareness that must become a crisis, and this crisis is generated by a tragic
representation of reality as a closed world that does not allow action, a world, as we have
already seen, of potentiality. It is a pre-established universe in which man moves, and
from which man is formed, without knowing his origin, or his destination. Tragedy as an
inner human representation, in which man recovers himself only when he is penetrated
irresistibly: “an obscene body penetration, a seizing of body and desire.”64 It is on the
body that the violence of judgement is exerted, and it is the body that suffers, and not us
63
Again, this reflects the same Agamben discourse, from his book – Remnants of Auschwitz – dealing
primarily with the problem of the language of testimony.
64
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 65.
33
suffering through the body,65 a schizophrenic and tragic dimension of man as the
synthesis and the tension between two worlds that oppose themselves and compose man.
From this tension tragedy arises, manifesting itself as the space of tension between
mythos and logos. This space of tension between the culture of social belief and the
culture of the absolute word of God is, in a sense, the revision that Tragedia Endogonidia
applies to the traditional structure of tragedy.
The episode
“A series of spores will depart in order to be collected by other bases.”66
It is because Tragedia Endogonidia is structured through episodes that the question about
the model of the Attic tragedy arises. In order to receive the tragic experience, tragedy
interacts with the spectator’s senses – not with their feeling or reason – but through a
dramatic mechanics which is it’s own. “The ‘base’, C.#01, consists in an episode which
ends with a stasimon.”67
“In ancient Greece the episodes were sections of a tragedy that presented only the
facts, without commentary; commentary was left to the Chorus. In Tragedia
Endogonidia there is no Chorus. Out of the episodes emerge basic recurring
figures and forms, themes and ideas, which make the spectators aware of their
existence, their state of being.”68
The ‘episode’ in Tragedia Endogonidia is not re-creating tragedy, – substituting the
Greek form, or giving life to new forms – for “…tragedy uses the myths of its own age to
give shape to the base of drama. It is a strategic use of the misrepresentations which form
the world, the Greek cultural foundation….”69
65
It is the crystallization of this point, that Artaud expresses as the notion of Theatre of Cruelty in The
theatre and its Double. It defines both the impossibility of representation – through the failing of empathy
as drama – and the trajectory of a spiritual condition of representation through the suffering, the judgement,
the corporeal penetration and the sacrifice… of the body.
66
Romeo Castellucci, in the program notes to C.#01
67
Celine Astrie, C.#01, in IDIOMA #1.
68
Romeo Castellucci, from an interview with Valentina Valentini and Bonnie Marranca titled: The
Universal – The Simplest Place Possible, online publication, (PAJ 77, 2004).
69
34
The theatre space is a place of passion, not because it is the figuration of the suffering of
man, but because it is the place of form, of representation and repetition. An episode does
not represent anything, but it gathers reality in order to generate matter-energy,70 action,
tragedy, which rises from inevitable momentum.
A tragic representation is not a form of expression; it takes a different path to narration,

illustration and figuration to deal with reality, it generates pure, tragical sensations. The
function of the episode is to engage a procedure of isolation, aiming to elude narrative,
illustrative or figurative character, to dis-articulate the representation. Episodes are pure
and accomplished acts, they connect with reality in a way that theatre [usually associated
with narratives which represent through theatrical manipulations of reason and feelings]
itself usually doesn’t, because the episode is where these tragical sensations are real, the
place and space where they are not functional representations. A fundamental principle of
the design in many of the episodes is the sense of isolation, the impossibility of escape.
There is nothing outside nor inside, like the series of ‘bases,’ the episode does not belong
to an order of succession, nor to filiation, but it belongs to becoming. The tragic
mechanism is fulfilled, the stasimon is paused, an absolute suspension of action which
prevents the natural succession of the episode.
The design of the space – from its architecture to the reflectiveness of its surfaces –
cannot portray any context, possibility of narrative, or perspective. Perspective means
“seeing clearly,”71 in terms of representation, it defines a context, a point of view. The
narration and figuration in the space must be human for the spectator to find himself
structurally involved as a point of view.72
The three dimensional space of figuration and the temporal-logical succession of

narration, as founding conditions of theatrical representation are denied in the episodes of
70
A founding Einsteinian philosophical notion, the basis of E=mc2 and his special theory of relativity,
where energy is mass ie. mass becomes energy at a certain velocity (speed of light squared). This metaphor
for a cyclical relationship between origin and destination is expanded in the conclusion of this thesis.
71
72
The relationship between reality – or what seems to be reality – and point of view, is the greater
extension of the Einsteinian metaphor introduced earlier.
35
TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA. The absence of perspective produces a close-up view, the
absence of point of view, the absence of a meta-narrative, creates an inhuman space
which projects the spectator into action only. Its mode of diffusion is reproductive,
animal, it is that of contagion, of epidemics, it is a Becoming, a ‘tragedia endo-gonidia.’
poster/program from Tragedia Endogonidia Episode C.#01.
The First Five Episodes of the Cycle

“During the performance some words must be heard but they must not have a literary
origin. They must have an objective, final and alien valence. The text is a thing among
other things and, like these things, it is subject to the destiny of a shape. There is no
poetry, no vertical principle that can justify its presence like it happens, instead, in the
presence of a poet, an Author and a Writer. The text must come from a goat. The word
tragos, after which ‘Tragedy’ is taken is taken, means the ‘song of the goat.’ Now the
time has come that the eponymous animal takes back what belongs to it: the name. The
word comes from the name and from the word a whole series of words: a text-testicle.”73
73
Romeo Castellucci, Letter about the goat that once gave its name to tragedy, from the letter to Scott
Gibbons, in IDIOMA #1.
36
This introductory paragraph from Romeo Castellucci to his composer, articulates the core
and the originating intention of the work: the genesis of a language that is without
context, that is to say, a form of communication or transmission without an origin, and
therefore without a destination. To describe such a proposition as abstract or non-
sensical, would still be describing it in terms of the logic of a language which has an
origin and a destination, as a re-arrangement of letters and alphabet towards a language
which is not an historically accepted form of communication. But – in response to
Agamben – this first episode of Tragedia Endogonidia is attempting to go further, it is
attempting to take the very act of drawing a line, or a dot, away from the human, who
does not know how to do so, when displaced from origin and destination. By drawing
purely from an etymological source – the derivation of the name of the goat – the work
can attempt to spawn a language from it’s seed form, articulating the testicle or the sperm
which makes the very possibility of such creation physically possible. This gonad,
becomes the centre of the work, and the place where the whole cycle derives it’s name.
“Having a text that comes from a goat in the context of a tragedy means to
disclaim and suspend in just one blow the whole tradition of the very tragedy and,
at the same time, it also means to confirm a meaning that is brutally traditional,
etymological and literal. It means to have at one’s shoulders an animal instead of
a poet.”74
Episodes I – V of Tragedia Endogonidia introduced, re-introduced, began a cycle of

repetition, a system of representation, of objects, figures, characters, spaces, which by
P.#06 – the Paris episode – had already become familiar. With every episode, these
figures, characters and objects from previous episodes would re-appear mutated, inside-
out, upside down, or, in juxtaposition with something like its antithesis. How these
objects were evolved is the core matter of the next section of the thesis.
To contextualize the discussions of P.#06, R.#07 and C.#11, I have attempted to list, in a
fragmented and somewhat abstract form – Romeo Castellucci’s preferred method of
74
Ibid.
37
explanation and description – some core objects and concepts, which by the Paris
episode, had become somewhat familiar:
History is the human story of life on earth/

It is an existential tragedy of conception & evolution/
Theatre is an existential space representing conception & evolution/
In the space, there is a need for places/
Occupying a place is a space act, it is possessing/
Cities are necessary places which (through occupation) have lost their link with
the earth/
Tragedy (among other things) is the loss of this link/
The theatre is the existential space which reflects tragedy/
The core of tragedy is in the ‘look’ of the spectator/
But is the ‘look’ of the spectator within the community still possible?/
This look re-launches and re-creates the object being looked at by the ‘text’ being
recited on stage – revealing a common belonging, a community/
The Alphabet/
Rejection of the Myth – it belongs to a culture which is commonly acknowledged/
Target/ Arrow/
Golden Room/
The narrative of Tragedia Endogonidia is outside of myths, created by a people/
It’s sources are more archaic than historical ones, these narratives mix with
contemporary history through the ‘exodus’ transformation of metropolitan cities/
The plot cannot be explained by the chorus anymore/
Impossibility of the Hero and Tragedy/
The NAKED FACT remains [unexplained by the chorus]/
The occupation of and escape from, the Earth/
Box-letter machine (like the information boards of train stations)/
Hair/
Tablets of the Law/
Fluorescent light tubes/
38
A new principle of possession of a place which cannot depend on founding myths
but an instantaneous human community – a chemical – which occupies the theatre
and rebuilds/
A new reason for thinking about its own existence on Earth/
Law/
Polis/
Goat/
milk/
blood/
Aria/
Within these first five episodes a conception has started to evolve, where the drama does
not develop around a fact or an account. The action of inhuman forces on the body is
taken back to its origin – fate – whose revelation is encompassed in the language of the
oracle. Here the enigma pushes towards what can be born: a founding violence, the
revelation which opens the doors of the tragic universe. Instead of answers or
conclusions, there is the ambiguity and unknowability of growth and evolution, of
potentiality.
The violence in the tragedy is original and founding precisely because it is revealing, the
tragic crisis is the struggle of the body and the inhuman forces that attack it, the
becoming animal. It is the violence of sense, and not what is sensed. The violence is not
connected to memory or history – which is representation – but to desire. The unleashing
of violence does not generate catharsis, but rather releases a vital force. This is the
essence of the tragical. This is the role of the figure that gives up the violence of the
performance in order to achieve a violence of sense. The sensation is body, subject and
object together. It is what is produced in and by the figure. It is in this visibility that the
body struggles with inhuman force, inhuman because it is without reason, taking on the
appearance of deity, and myth. The oracle is bringing the word of fate onto the stage.
39
Possibly the clearest notion to arise in the first five episodes – and one that connects to
the heart of the whole cycle as well as this thesis – is the notion of the singular act. The
first action is the place where potentiality makes its final decision to be. The first act
which sets in motion a tragic voyage towards an inevitable destination. The first action –
as the discussions of the further episodes will show – is the origin and the destination in
one space and time, at point zero. What is accessed, and found inaccessible, in the early
episodes of the cycle, is not the structure of drama or tragedy, but the constituting
foundation of the tragic universe: the tragic sense. It is in this impossible correspondence
with the Greek model that the vital question on the possibility of action has its beginning.
This problem of acting rises from the function of the enigma, a concept and an evolving
representation through the episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia. The origin of myth – the
enigma – characterises the ambiguity of reality. Through the enigma, daily realities
become foreign entities, or, as signifiers, vehicles of a foreign force.
As always, the action must be vital, alive, while this same action as object, is a signifier
within the drama. Every representation and every deconstruction of a representation can
be seen simultaneously in these contradictory ways, articulating the crisis of an artwork
which is investigating its own form.
Language makes its appearance but we are not yet in the universe of discourse. Words
and sentences are scrambled, discourse is disjointed, the word without author, it is before
history can define an origin and a destination, it is the dehumanisation of language. In
Tragedia Endogonidia, the origin of writing and language comes from the goat, the poet
of tragedy.
Through the progression of the first five episodes, a historical trajectory for language and
writing is slowly formed, and through the accompanying evolution of Law, a polis, an
articulation of a community. A child; an anonymous mother; a mystical tall red figure;
policemen; a clown; an old man; all continually re-appear conveying various states
embodying and representing of the tragic condition. In Cesena and Avignon – C.#01 &
A.#02 – there was a gold box, a child, blood and milk, the language of the goat. In Berlin
40
– B.#03 – the front rows of the auditorium where filled with life size rabbits, and the
theatre went from black to white. In Brussels – BR.#04 – the space was a marble cube
with fluorescent lights, with a robot tirelessly reciting the letters of the alphabet to a
newborn baby, to begin the show. In Bergen – BN.#05 – the blood of a child on a white
stage, a clown who breaks into the theatre from outside, the potentiality of a name.
P.#06 (18-31 October 2003)

ENIGMA/LITURGY
The Paris episode of Tragedia Endogonidia begins with two washing machines that are
automatically – and in sequence with each other – set in motion. These are the only
elements that decorate this grey and bare stage. It is worth mentioning that until this show
at Odéon - Theatre of Europe in Paris, all of the work has either been on a Proscenium
stage, or a space which has been transformed into an even box, a room. Odéon is a huge
and cavernous hanger-style space, with ornate windows to the street, the city, at the end
of the space-stage. At the beginning of the performance, the audience is looking at a
small orchestra, sitting, in front of the front row, watching the space-stage, ready to play.
Two men, dressed only in black underwear, slowly crawl on all fours – in sequence with
each other – from far upstage towards the washing machines. When they arrive, they
41
methodically – and with exceptional detail – act out the sacrifice of Isaac, ending by
forming the same figure as in the Caravaggio painting of the scene. Here the angel arrives
also, another man dressed only in black underwear and little cut-out black angel wings,
but he is late. Abraham has already sacrificed Isaac. The actor representing Abraham lets
the Angel know by pointing to his watch! The angel points upstage where a grey (same
colour as all the surfaces) rectangular screen flies up to reveal a goat. Isaac is then stuffed
into a garbage bag by Abraham and the angel, while a tall figure dressed in red – who we
recognise from earlier episodes – comes and takes the goat. Isaac then wakes up, gets out
of the garbage bag, and all three proceed to take soaked silent-movie-era police uniforms
out of the washing machines, and in silent-movie-style fast motion, perform a complex
and nonsensical sequence of actions.
This scene was entitled ‘enigma’ by Romeo Castellucci, alluding to the fact that, even to
the creator of the work, the meaning and sense of the action is a mystery. This scene did,
though, incorporate many objects and props which, in a different form, had already been
introduced in previous episodes: the tablets of the law – this time black rather than white,
and with the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph and Beth inscribed on them; a
[cardboard prop like] silent-movie-style film camera, painted black; a neon light rainbow;
a keystone cop cleaning a cardboard submachine gun in a container filled with dirty
water; and water. Lots and lots of water. Water from the washing machine, water from a
hose which is alternatively pointed and sprayed at actors, at all the props, until – as
though from God – water falls from the heavens, on everything. The entire stage is
soaked. Eventually, and at the culmination of this enigma scene, the protagonists gather
all the objects into a type of cart, and in a ridiculous procession (they are still silent-
movie-style cops), including a flag bearer (the flag itself also has esoteric Hebrew text
inscribed on it), they exit, leaving only the washing machines and the water.
The stage was also cleaned in A.#02 and in BR.#04, but there the action was linked to the
theme of time, or the omen of a massacre [its inevitability, before it has actually
occurred]. The appearance of the mop that removed the remains of a bloody episode
which has not yet occurred, not only had a narrative function, but also connected the
42
spectator with something unacceptable and abject: the proximity of the corpse. In P.#06,
the cleaning looks like a purification ritual; there is a liturgical, formal coldness. A liturgy
in which a specific form of humour is the main feature, an American silent-movie-style
humour employing attributes of French mime. This humour darkens as, after the
processional exit, two huge French flags enter through a wall, and seemingly on their
own – and again in sequence – they begin to flap and smash against the wall
accompanied by a synchronised deafening explosion of sound with every hit.
The sham enacted by the cops feels like a liturgy, not because it looks like one, but
because it seems that everything is absorbed in acceleration, that everything is reduced to
zero. The policemen’s cleaning and purification ritual/enigma – and indeed the
significance of the washing machines themselves – is a ‘tabula rasa’ that produces zero
intensity, or what Celine Astrie identifies as the “production of what is real at a great
intensity that starts from zero.”75 The problem of representation seems to be the problem
of the context and culture associated with an object or an action. To achieve a zero
intensity where the object or the action is not associated with its culture or context, where
it’s identity is reborn, from a zero point… is what is at the core of the investigation
applied by the Tragedia Endogonidia.
“Liturgical time is that of repetition, but also, and especially, that of waiting:
everything is absorbed and concentrated in the suspense of waiting. Someone has
to come.”76
The stage is deserted and calm has returned. A statue of the Sphinx rolls onto the stage.
Outside of the windows at the end of the space the view of the outside world has been
screened by black curtains. Slowly, these black curtains are now lowered, backlit by
powerful lights, presenting a mesmerising theatrical effect and unveiling the outside
world. A figure appears outside, he breaks into the space through one of these windows
with a crow-bar, it is Jesus. The outside environment invades the stage, we can see and
hear the city. Jesus enters and steps towards the audience. The orchestra at the front of the
audience and the stage, get up and leave. They never played. Jesus stands in front of the
75
Celine Astrie, P.#06: “Year zero”, from IDIOMA V, quoting Deleuze and Guattari, [Mille plateaux].
76
Celine Astrie, P.#06: “Year zero”.
43
Sphinx and looks at it for a long time. There is a skull at the foot of the statue, he takes it
in his hand and looks at it for a long time. As Astrie describes it, “At that instant, and
thereafter, the face of the one who incarnates Christ remains impassive, he has no
expression, and his traits are fixed like those in a print or a photograph.”77 He
communicates solely through his presence, through the affect of his name. He comes
from outside, he has broken into this universe – a space which now resembles an after-
hours museum – where he remains a stranger. He is a stranger to the world of Tragedia
Endogonidia, which up until now had generated its own figures. For the first time in the
cycle, there are figures or actions we might put a name to: Abraham, Isaac and the angel
on the mountain of Moriah, Jesus Christ, and later, Charles DeGaulle.
The hero of this episode bears a name that tells a story. Unlike the heroes of the other
episodes he is not anonymous. Around him, a community forms, which exists outside the
performance. The prophet – a figure which has been curdling through biological and
chemical reactions over the previous episodes – is the representative of the law of God of
the Old Testament. The affirmation of the contract between man and God, the inhumanity
of destiny, where the divine paths become law, something which is formulated by and in,
LITURGICAL speech. A language which names an origin and determines a destination.
We are in the realm, perhaps, of what Walter Benjamin in 1916 diagnosed as
‘overnaming:’ “Things have no proper names except in God… In the language of men,
however, they are overnamed. There is, in the relation of human languages to that of
things, something that can be approximately described as overnaming – the deepest
linguistic reason for all melancholy (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate
muteness.”78 The finiteness, the definition, the choice of naming, is a decision at the
exclusion of other possibilities. Naming brings with it a culture, a history, an identity.
Overnaming is also the human linguistic naming of a thing, unrelated to the language of
the thing itself, it is an arrogance because it applies a certain – at the exclusion of others –
naming which is related to the politics of the namer and not the named, it is therefore an
77
Ibid.
78
Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, as part of REFLECTIONS:
Essays, Aphorisms, autobiographical writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York &
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p.330.
44
overnaming. It is a type of melancholy, a mourning towards the potential excluded by the
name. The concept of no name converts to possibilities and potentialities, toward all the
‘deliberate muteness’ which have remained outside the name.
The figure of Jesus does not belong to the world of tragedy, he is a religious figure who
does not have a ‘tragic’ vision, since he is a figure who incarnates salvation. The earlier
episodes of The Tragedia Endogonidia broke from the model of Greek Tragedy because
the hero broke from tradition by having no name. The distinguishing feature of the hero
in this work is precisely not possessing a history, an identity, a face, a sex, an age. He is
therefore a man, a woman, an animal. He eludes meaning and representation. This hero
does not belong to or attract any community, because he is displaced.79 So the sudden
introduction of Jesus in episode 6 represents another break from the tragic tradition.
Why then, is the figure of Jesus – who is an integral part of Western history and culture –
imposed, represented, as the hero of this episode? This is a significant turning point in the
system of representation of Tragedia Endogonidia.80 For Castellucci, these scenes
starting with the sacrifice of Isaac, and developing to comic police as an allusion towards
polis, form a dramatic comment on law, and open the space between Hebrew and Greek
philology. This space is a key ongoing strand of Tragedia Endogonidia. In explaining the
stylised representation of Jesus in P.#06, Castellucci suggests that since tragedy itself is a
Greek structural and dramatic form, which requires a mythological platform, Tragedia
Endogonidia bridges Judaic and Greek traditions and thereby both tragic and non-tragic
cultures. Judaism, not a ‘tragical’ culture, and Greek combined together, form the basis of
Western cultural traditions. For Castellucci, Jesus on the cross represents both the essence
of tragedy, and the spark for contemporary [tragic and anti-tragic] culture.81
79
Displaced in the sense articulated by Agamben in the Genesi section of this thesis.
80
During the final rehearsals in the theatre in Paris, and after the premier, I interviewed Romeo Castellucci
on various details of his process and methodology, as well as signification and representation in P.#06.
81
From the same series of interviews/discussions with Romeo Castellucci – The Poetic Room. The main
topic of discussion was process and methodology – which is covered in the next section of the thesis. The
above comments are not direct quotes, but rather notes I took during the discussions, and have since tried to
clarify through my own articulations of Romeo Castellucci’s responses.
45
The anonymous mother and the question of origin
The figure of Jesus appears as the negation of the tragic hero, he incarnates the negation
of death, victory over death, salvation. Jesus knows his destiny, it is never hidden from
him, it is the destination of humanity. He is also aware of his origin not just as the son of
God, but the opposite, as the son of the mother whom for many religions remains
anonymous and marginal.
Two fundamental and ongoing investigations of representation in Tragedia Endogonidia,

involve the notion of the anonymous mother, and the sacrificial and messianic problem of
the actor and the artist. Castellucci’s representations of these figures and these concepts
in the first five episodes of the cycle, are like laboratory investigations dissecting actions
and aesthetic compositions, down to their fundamental motor function. Actors both
experience things themselves and represent experiencing by simply ‘being’ within space-
time. In multiple performances of one anonymous mother figure or another, they seek to
discover – like children – their own, original, tragic, experience. Banality, sacredness,
profanity, history, sex, death… are all experienced without the meaning or context of the
culture from which they are derived, without judgement or intention. It is the first time, it
is the sense of the origin. Tragedia Endogonidia does not provide the answer as to the
origin, it provides the only necessary but ambiguous event which sets in motion a
trajectory towards an inevitable destination, one that can only be tragic. The act, and only
the act. The singularity of the action not associated with any context is the first and
necessary origin of an inevitable tragedy. It is creation and art encapsulated into a
moment, it is the impossibility and inevitability of representation, it is the sacrifice of the
actor on the stage and of Jesus Christ on the cross.
The figure of Christ is alone on the stage and stares at the skull in his hands. The three
‘keystone cops’ enter again (in silent-movie-style fast motion) close the windows and
cover the Sphinx’s head. They then take a urine sample from Jesus with a glass tube,
afterwards slotting it into an appropriate inlet in the wall, and light begins to shine
through the urine. They place the tube into the cardboard cut-out movie camera and it
begins to shine light as they record-film Jesus, until the tube is eventually reset into the
wall. The rear half of a white horse slowly enters through an appropriately sized arch in
46
the other wall, and stops. We only see the back half of the horse. The policemen
disappear, and Jesus is again alone on stage.
After a while, the audience hear footsteps behind them, then to the side, getting closer as
a woman with groceries appears – the anonymous mother – dressed in a raincoat and a
headscarf. She notices the figure of Christ, looks at him insistently and with interest. She
puts down her bags, leaves, and returns with a child’s bed. She signals to the infant –
Jesus – to come and lie down but he remains impassive. She offers him cake, a baby’s
bottle, her breast, but he remains impassive. She then begins a relentless action of
repeatedly squeezing her breasts and exhaling audibly to try and produce milk. For what
seems like a meditative eternity, the space is stagnant with only the sound of her
exhalations. Suddenly, and with the ultimate theatrical shock, a car falls to the ground
from the extremely high ceiling, spraying water as it smashes on the ground. The woman
continues the repetitive action and Jesus remains impassive. Just as the audience is
catching their breath, a second car falls, again spraying water as it smashes. The second
shock is as great as the first, and as the audience finally settles, a third car drops. Jesus
lies down in crucifix position on one of the cars as the keystone cops return and navigate
a system of motorised chains to push the cars to the back of the stage. The stage is again
clear.
The figure in red, who was seen in the beginning taking the goat, returns, this time he
takes Jesus in his arms and places him behind the wheel of one of the cars. One of the
policemen begins to direct and navigate – with similar gestures to the way aircraft are
directed to land on aircraft carriers – the entrance of a huge Chinese dragon onto the
stage. This dragon is about fifteen metres long when ‘fully stretched’ and is operated by
over ten people. Its entrance and subsequent ‘performance,’ taking up the whole space, is
an extraordinary theatrical feat. The dragon pauses halfway through its sequence and
rests. During this time the policemen have put on black hoods like the ones worn by those
who lead the Holy week processions, and pull the urine tube out of the wall. They take
the tube to the exposed red genitals of the dragon in its resting position, and inseminate
the dragon with the tube of Jesus’ urine. They then place the anonymous mother – who
47
was still repeatedly squeezing her breasts and exhaling – on the ground near the dragon’s
genitals (in a sexually exposing or inviting position), to be subjected to a sexual and
reproductive union with dragon. She ends up disappearing into the belly of the animal.
Here the dragon, brings us back to the core trajectory of Tragedia Endogonidia, and from
where the cycle derives half of it’s title: endogeny. In particular, how endogeny – as a
fundamental of reproduction – is the singular act, the origin, which sets in motion a tragic
history, towards an inevitable destination, as discussed earlier. The infant Jesus creates a
break in the cycle of births, since he is not born of sexual love, but from the Immaculate
Conception, which abolishes sex and genitals, and he is also, eventually, the subject of a
second birth in death. He denies the two conditions for life: birth and death. He represents
a destination for endogeny as origin.
“The eschatology that revolves around the body of Christ represents the
antithetical and inconceivable process that is Tragedia Endogonidia. It is (the
anonymous mother’s) effort to extract milk from her sterile breast and the lack of
filiation that lead to catastrophe, a catastrophe that causes the setting to explode:
to be the object of a new birth, a parthenogenetic birth.”82
The policemen begin a formal procession, waving a flag that is black on one side and
white on the other, with Hebrew letters inscribed on both sides. They arrive at the white
horse, proceed to ceremonially wipe its behind with the flag, until the horse walks and
moves off stage through the arch in the wall. The rear of a black horse then walks
(backwards) out through the arch, replacing the white one. The policemen snip a sample
of hair from the horse’s tail – a sample of hair is a re-occurring image in almost all the
episodes of the cycle – and attach it to the dragon’s snout. The dragon then rises and with
a final flurry, exits the stage to a huge and multi-coloured confetti drop. Once the stage is
calm and empty again, a figure slowly walks into the space from the distance, it is
General Charles De Gaulle – an actor wearing an extremely sophisticated and exact mask
of De Gaulle. He investigates the space in the same displaced manner as previous
characters who have entered the stage of Tragedia Endogonidia, he is now the old man
82
Celine Astrie, P.#06: “Year zero.”, from Idioma V.
48
from BR.#04 who touches [feels] the wall, looks at his watch, adjusts his hair and
uniform, and eventually, departs. The episode ends with the black horse slowly walking
out of light.
These coups de theatre, unforseen events which damage, explode, the fabric of the scene
as they stun the senses of the spectator, are a key feature of the Paris episode of the cycle.
However, the explicit acknowledgement of the name and the figure (of Christ) is its most
significant contribution to the logic of the cycle. All images of Tragedia Endogonidia
converge on this figure. If, previous episodes were more about geography rather than
history, in the Paris episode history has now made its entrance into the vocabulary of this
tragedy. This intrusion of myth and history does not re-introduce any religious or
philosophical filiation, it is no longer the mirror of theatre that feeds on reality, it is the
mirror that brings fiction into contradiction, contaminating and terrorising the
representation.
R.#07 (21-30 November 2003)
49
In the seventh episode of Tragedia Endogonidia at the Teatro Valle in Rome, a classical
Italian proscenium theatre, a white curtain – similar to those of previous episodes –
prevents the audience from seeing the stage before the performance begins. When the
lights go down, the curtain opens to reveal a huge wall of glass totally ‘sealing’ the stage
from the auditorium. In this classical Italian theatre, there are now three frames in play:
the curtain, the glass separation, and the proscenium. Everything that is placed between
the spectator and what is to appear is designed, or so it appears, to represent a framing
device.
What we see when the curtains part, is a large, completely white cube shaped room,
identical to the marble cube of the Brussels episode, but white and behind thick glass.
Unlike the uncontrollable and expansive volume of the space in the Paris episode, here
the stage is absolutely controlled and self-conscious. The only figure – and the only
visible object – on the stage, is a chimpanzee. Just like the baby – a performer without
consciousness of being a performer, a representation of the real – starting the show in the
Brussels episode, this black animal, alone in this serene white scene is a statement about
the origin of the act which becomes an inevitable, tragic representation.
The chimpanzee cannot be controlled. There is a white sheet, plastic microphones

(functional…), and discretely spread out bits of food to entice the chimp to move, play or
eat. But the chimp – on one particular evening anyway – chooses to efficiently collect all
the food (disregarding everything else) and sit with his back to the audience (very much
aware of them) and do nothing (except eat). After a while, the curtains slowly close again
to a rising and deafening noise wall. In front of the curtain descends the familiar ‘box-
letter’ strip – the same as the departure/arrival boards at big train stations – and
articulates: ‘O …OH OH …’ An expression, a message that is somewhere between a
literal rendition of a human cry (of delight, of despair, of astonishment or recognition),
and the literal transcription of the linguistic sound the chimp has made. The box-letter
machine continues: ‘SONO FELICE’ and (translated): ‘Happy that everything is going
well. The last scene was perfect. Perfect.’
50
In the Bergen episode – BN.#05 – the box-letter machine, appearing at the same point in
the dramaturgy – after the departure of a goat from the stage – stated: ‘It is I, the goat,
speaking.’ In the Avignon episode – A.#02 – the idea that the goat might speak to us
through the language of theatre was processed through a means of translating the goat’s
physical passage on a floor marked with codes of it’s amino acids. These results are then
spoken and sung as linguistic syllables. What message has been transmitted by the chimp
to warrant such description by the box-letter machine? That the chimp and the theatre
machine should be taking joint credit, as it were, for whatever has happened may be just.
The ape has aped itself by virtue of its representation, of being simply what it is, on this
stage. The animal might be said to have reproduced itself – endogonidically. Perfect.
After another deafening sound wall, the curtain part again to reveal a black void. Slowly,
the abstracted sound (a subterranean, aquatic effect) is heard, and dark figures moving
around can just be made out as the lighting, ever so slowly, begins its fade. Eventually,
enough is visible to make out priests from Rome – in full body black robes – playing
basketball. They are wearing body microphones, which are effected, causing their voices
and stage sounds to sound aquatic, or similar to the deep drones one hears of other
people’s conversations, through walls. No priest can get a basket, however hard they try
or concentrate. Once they work together – again as a community – they finally reach the
basket. The result is a religious miracle-like worship and gratitude to God, for when the
ball reached the basket, it did not come down, it remains in the hoop. The priests – now
like the police [polis] in the Paris episode – get busy, walking on and off stage.
From out of the white walls a figure emerges, he has been there all along, wearing white,
white on white. Hooded and cloaked like a prize-fighter returning from retirement is
Benito Mussolini. He is fragile and scared, newly hatched and sacrificial, while the
priests are preparing for an interrogation, confession or a contract of some kind.
There is a feeling here of the various faces of power and the control of the law. The
Church and the state, both aspects of polis, entering into a tragic pact. Specifically in this
episode, it is the origin of the tragedy of modern Italian history, the 1929 Concordat
between the Catholic Church and the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. An alliance
51
that established the Vatican as a sovereign state, and legitimated a power that until very
recently, still haunted Italian public life.83
Castellucci and his collaborators are always looking for tension and conflict through
contradiction. By always trying to find and bring out the antithesis of the apparent
meaning, he thereby creates a binary effect, a collision, where the presence of the thing’s
opposite, dilutes the thing itself. Through the binary effect of the thing’s resultant,
polarised meaning, the possibilities of a multiplicity of meanings emerge. This somewhat
structuralist method is a consistent way of thinking for Romeo, and a fundamental aspect
of his system of representation. Through this binary meaning, or collision of meaning, the
figures open a multiplicity of meaning, meaning which is dependent on subjectivity or
individuality. Like the binary encoding structure of ‘1’s’ and ‘0’s’ from digital
communication languages, which then gets decoded into a multitude of information and
variety, and like the encoding/decoding mechanism of our (human) senses like the ear for
sound or the eye for vision and the way the brain interprets this process.
Apart from this effect with meaning, a sensational theatre representation of this kind of
binary collision can serve to shock the audience. In a sensory way at the moment of the
representation, and in an intellectual way once the image has been processed. The cars
dropping in the Paris episode while Jesus was on the stage, and Jesus eventually climbing
into a crucifix position on a car, is a brutal example of such a binary clash. This
composition is evident on many subtle levels, both in terms of the semiotics of the image,
and as the sensory presentation and impression of the performance.
In Rome, the priests efficiently prepare an interrogation situation with detailed, Vatican-
like arrangements of aprons and symbols. Mussolini is barked at by the priests, given a
pen and repeatedly shown where to sign, he eventually does. The signature is sealed with
chocolate liquid, and a lot of it. Mussolini, the all powerful fascist, whose every word is
law, is represented as a fragile, weak, sensitive being, while the chocolate (both as what it
83
Referring to the numerous references Silvio Berlusconi made towards the politics of Mussolini – both
literally and figuratively.
52
is literally, and as what it literally looks like: shit) – like the cars in Paris – is a simplistic
symbol of banality, banality defying the sacred.
Since the beginning of this episode all sound – from the chimp’s voice and movements,
the priests’ basketball game, the interrogation of Mussolini – has been muffled, aquatic,
like eavesdropping through a wall. This is until a priest walks down to the glass wall,
removes a previously invisible palm-sized circular cut of the glass, and audibly whispers
to the audience: ‘He doesn’t want to make chocolate for all Italians,’ and pours chocolate
through the hole, smearing the front of the glass. A little later, this same priest, while
body-frisking Mussolini, finds a common ape mask in his pants and barks: ‘Mussolini…
you have been told before.’ The priest then transforms – has a costume under his robe,
and puts on a long blonde wig as well as the ape mask – into a Harlequin-like version of
the same character who has appeared in previous episodes in a red suit. This character
then attacks Mussolini – a clear reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey –
in the manner of an ape, eventually biting him like a vampire and Mussolini slowly
sinking to the floor. Three walls of prison fencing is brought on and erected around
Mussolini’s body. There proceeds a transformation in the light and atmosphere of the
empty stage.
The re-occurring, ambiguous, figures of the Tragedia Endogonidia are like vampires, in
that they are shadows who are transformative and eternal, perpetually fading, perpetually
coming back again to bite. It is possible to suggest – after Agamben – that the potentiality
of such figures to appear, to be, to do, goes hand in hand with a potential not to be. In the
theatre, these figures bring their impotentiality with them, even as they appear before the
audience. Or – after Aristotle as cited by Agamben – they can be seen to bring a potential
to suffer, to suffer destruction of a sort even in the process of creation. But also, in
creation – in that moment of arriving on the stage, that moment of birth which is nothing
like a birth really, where one is always born fully grown, therefore already loaded with
memory and forgetting. The ambiguous origin of the stage ‘birth’ represents the salvation
53
of all the tragic possibilities, of everything that remains in potentiality, all that remains
unborn, yet is represented in the present space-time.84
At the point when the stage is empty again, the audience has witnessed Vatican priests,
Mussolini, and a lesson in modern Italian history in the contract between the fascists and
the church sealed in cioccolato (chocolate). It is perhaps appropriate then, that the
enigmatic Arlecchino (Italian Harlequin character archetype), the “first poet of acrobats
and unseemly noises,”85 the peculiar figure who arrives through a tranformation – of the
priest who became the harlequin variation of the familiar Tragedia figure who attacked
Mussolini – to assume command of this unholy alliance between fascism and the church.
What paves the way for his re-incarnation onto this stage, is a sort of explosion of the
theatre, a dismantling of what, by now, the audience would have assumed would be
impossible to dismantle.
But first there is an interlude. A woman enters wheeling a supermarket shopping trolley,
the anonymous mother in another stage of the evolution of her representation. From time
to time, smaller, seemingly trivial details from our daily lives seem to get inhaled into
this tragic cycle: a baby buggy in Cesena, washing-machines, cars, a woman – the
anonymous mother – with her shopping bags in Paris, a woman cleaning the floor with a
mop and bucket in Brussels, and now this woman – another incarnation of the
anonymous mother – with her shopping trolley. It is as if there is an alchemic experiment
in progress, to see whether base metals from everyday origins – representation as
theatrical naturalism – might be processed into the kind of gold we seek out in the tragic
dimension. The woman is naked except for a head scarf, and one high-heeled boot, which
she takes off and places on one of the few metal wire chairs in the space. The chairs are
shelves in a supermarket, and she is shopping with her trolley. She picks up the boot from
the chair-shelf, puts it into her trolley and continues ‘along the aisle.’ She seems to
84
Aristotle, De Anima 417b, cited by Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.46.
85
Pierre Louis Ducharte, The Italian Comedy. The improvisation scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits and
Masks of the Illustrious Characters of the Commedia dell’ Arte, cited by Joe Kelleher, in his essay: The
Italian Comedy, published in IDIOMA VI.
54
perform paying at a check-out counter, and then puts her purchase back into her trolley.
She seems to grieve, cry for the body of Mussolini lying within the caged enclosure. Is
she his widow? Or is it a more figurative and historical cry, a cry for tragedy. Suddenly, a
loud, harsh multi-layered voice barks commands at the woman. At first, the articulations
are like those of the Berlin episode, – B.#03 – to ‘drink my water,’ and ‘kiss my metal,’
but they soon become contradictory, with ‘look at me,’ ‘don’t look at me,’ ‘cover
yourself,’ ‘show yourself.’ All the while, the naked woman is pressed against the glass
wall, trying somehow, to literally execute the violent instructions of the voice, wearing
nothing but a head scarf.
At the completion of this scene, the previously mentioned ‘explosion’ of the theatre
begins. With a powerful shift in the soundtrack, the audience begins to notice the whole
white cube room start to come apart at the seams. Panel by panel, the room dismantles as
every panel either flies up into the unseen ceiling of the theatre, or is carried off by one of
about twelve black robed Vatican priests. While this is happening, the huge glass wall
slowly flies up and disappears. For the first time, the audience can see clearly, but this
moment is brief because a moment after the glass wall is gone, a transparent plastic wall
descends and replaces the glass. When all the panels – which made up the white room –
are gone, numerous basketballs are bounced onto the stage from the wings, and the
priests engage in frenetic and simultaneous ball games. With the room gone, curtains
reaching into the heights of the theatre are revealed, covering the stage on three sides.
The curtains are composed of a cathedral of colours – yellow, red, brown, white, blue,
orange – in long vertical stripes, colours which somehow seem particularly Italian.
A huge, 300 kilogram bell is wheeled on, and a priest – ceremonially – approaches it and
strikes it. With this chiming, the priests scurry into a well-formed line, the atmosphere is
solemn and familiar to all, their actions are uniform. It is as if the world was something
which had to be redeemed by abstraction, then absorbed again and again into a pattern of
system and command. As if, in the theatre, there was some sort of sovereign principle at
work, a power which feeds off the forms of life it gives birth to through its own,
55
endogenous, system of representation. This sovereign principle is, in Castellucci’s
theatre, a kind of redemption of the thing from itself, where potentiality is actualised.
A priest brings a microphone on a stand and places it in the middle of the stage, pointing
it towards the floor. The priests leave. The floorboards of the stage crack apart as the
Arlecchino – like Jesus in the Paris episode – breaks into the stage from the ground,
knocking over the microphone. This time, this Harlequin is costumed in black and white,
classical Comedie dell’Arte style, and is armed with a rifle – a bandit Arlecchino.
Agamben has written about the bandit as that which is not outside the law, but abandoned
by the law, as a figure that ambivalently links sovereign power to ‘sacred’ life.86 The
‘bare life’ that constitutes sovereign power while being designated as somehow beyond
the pale, a trajectory that inflicts harm and tragedy. Agamben goes further in linking the
‘bare life’ of the bandit to the Hobbesian concept of ‘the state of nature’ and its relation
to the foundation of the modern city. A relation, which Agamben insists, is nothing like
the one between a prior and a subsequent stage of development, but rather, a “non-
relation….is never settled….never resolved….by which the state of nature dwells within
the city…as an always operative presupposition;….In truth, a state of exception, in which
the city appears for an instant…. Tanquam dissolute.”87
At the end, the Arlecchino steps forward and aims his rifle at a point in the theatre
ceiling’s actual decorative painting, a representation of an Arlecchino who looks exactly
like the performer, or visa versa. Having had the glass wall and the apeing of reality, here
is the final question of representation in the space between the actor and the audience. As
the Arlecchino begins to move off, the barked, distorted vocal commands restart:
‘Guardarmi!’ ‘Non Guardarmi!’ (‘Look at me,’ ‘Don’t look at me!’), the Harlequin
bandit stops in his tracks. The representation is now impossible because it has confronted
itself in public, it is torn between two contradictions, literally, and philosophically. The
curtain closes, as it has to, therefore it could only be the end. But as our eyes and senses
are getting used to the blackness of the end, there are sudden blinding flashes of light.
86
A concept taken from Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
87
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 106, 109. See also: p28f, 58-60.
56
The sensory effect is extraordinary, the flashes are relentless, the contradiction is also in
the light – the light that illuminates is also blinding. The impossibility and the problem of
representation has left the stage, and migrated to the realm of the audience and the
auditorium, Tragedia Endogonidia has arrived at the here and now.
Tragedia Endogonidia photos: Marco Iorio
C.#11 (16-22 December, 2004)

The last episode of the cycle returns to Cesena, the location of the first episode, the
destination is at the origin. The cycle truly becomes a cycle, through this rebirth, this
reproduction [of the episodic geography of the cycle]. A kind of endogeny is achieved
through this repetition of the point where the origin and the destination are one.
The show itself is split into two parts, in two different spaces. That same, white, beautiful
curtain, veils the scenography from the audience once they are seated on ornate wooden
theatre seats, in the first space (what the company calls Sala Nero). There is a blackout.
When the lights come up again – in this episode all the lighting is ornate and practical,
naturalistic: a round chandelier complete with a moth bouncing around inside, a bedside
lamp, a corridor of lighting from the door) – the audience sees a dreamy, familiar room,
complete with an ornate ceiling and carpeted floor, wallpaper, carved wooden features
and railings along all the walls surrounding the room. At the end of the room there is a
57
door with a foggy window, and at one end of the room is a single, child’s bed and a
bedside table. The view of the stage itself is bordered and framed on all sides – up, down,
left, right – by a black cinemascope proscenium. There is a boy (Sebastiano Castellucci,
Romeo’s son), dressed in an older style full-length nightgown, kneeling at the bedside
table praying, and a cat. The boy catches the cat, and takes it outside. A woman enters –
the anonymous mother – she puts the boy to bed and tucks him in. She then slowly walks
backwards across the stage as the lighting fades to black. There is a long blackout. In the
black there is an increasingly loud noise wall of sound and, breathtakingly, wind. From
the black blind nothing that is this stage, comes a strong, cold wind, a purely
environmental effect. The sound of the wind as well as the sound-wall soundtrack,
eventually subside into the naturalistic sound of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. As the lights
slowly come up on the stage, we see the same African cleaning woman as the Brussels
episode, vacuuming the stage in a circular pattern.
Everything in this setting of the final part of the cycle seems to question representation.
Starting with the significance of the event itself being in Cesena – the location of the
origin of this cycle – to the real (and un-theatrical) wind on the audience, to the
perspective change of the sound of wind to the vacuum cleaner, to the cinemascopic
framing of such a seemingly naturalistic stage. The cleaner stops the Hoover, checks the
door to make sure no one is nearby, then sits in a chair, takes off one of her shoes and
rubs her tired foot. It seems to be, or to recall, a familiar classical image – one that is
familiar because it quotes from Renaissance paintings – within an ordinary setting, a
sculpture, a moment. The scene asks for empathy from the viewer because the audience is
lured into what seems like a naturalistic and familiar action within a representational
setting, but the point of these images are soon to be shown as archetypal. The human
condition is what is represented in this image, in this moment… rather than a realistic
situation within a narrative. The African cleaner adjusts herself to be comfortable on the
chair and falls asleep. For a while nothing happens, there is no change in the presentation.
Suddenly, and frighteningly, the African woman opens her eyes wide, exaggerating the
white of her eyes, and stares out at the audience. Blackout.
58
Like in a filmic dream, or nightmare, or a flashback, when the lights come up again the
room is empty. The door at the back opens, and a man dressed impeccably in a 1940’s
suit and hat enters. He walks around and inspects the room with the formal seriousness of
the clergy and the ‘sniffer-dog’ quality of a Mafioso (played by Romeo Castellucci).
Soon after him, six old men – in similar impeccable 1940s suits – enter and walk around
inspecting the room. They do not speak to each other, they acknowledge each other with
gestured respect and are completely co-ordinated and synchronised in their movements
and actions. Choral Mass music by Arvo Pärt plays loudly through the scene, it has
nothing to do with the action, it plays across the performance. It is a figure of
representation – evoking great emotional and sentimental power – without association, a
figure alone with no ground. The collective stage compositions that the men create are
carefully constructed and based on selected paintings by the artist Piero de' Franceschi.
At a certain point, Romeo’s character goes to the door, and formerly ushers in the
anonymous mother, slamming the door closed behind her, immediately – and as the
anonymous mother walks towards the front of the stage – a big decorated board slowly
descends and covers most of the stage from view. The sound environment instantly
changes to a distant perspective. The beautifully decorated board sits neatly within the
cinemascope frame of the stage, where only the feet of the performers can be seen.
Through a series of pre-recorded questions not dissimilar to the barked commands of
previous episodes, but this time including an ancient Greek text, the woman is
interrogated (the sound quality resembles that of old films) about the whereabouts of the
boy. She eventually cries and blood is seen to run down her exposed leg on the stage,
some kind of violent act is performed on her, unseen. The curtains close. An actor who is
recognizable from many of the previous episodes steps forward, in front of the audience,
thanks them, and asks them to follow him to the next part of the episode.
The second space is bigger and painted white (the space is called Sala Bianca by the
company). The audience sits on rostra with cushions, while the actor who led the
audience here is standing in the back row ready to turn on a classic old-style film
projector. A similar black cinemascope proscenium borders the stage, and completely
covering the space within the black borders and the stage, is a projection screen. The film
59
that is projected is black and white and grainy – and prefaced by an old-style twentieth
century fox screen introduction – it is a film of live sperm swimming, gathering and
migrating, under the microscope.
When the screen is raised, a huge, twenty metre deep, dense forest is atmospherically
exposed. All of the tree and plants are real, unlike conventional crafts of theatrical
representation, the audience can smell and feel this forest. Through the windows running
down one side of the space, regular passing headlights can be seen and heard, but the
perspective and acoustic is that of a nearby road from a forest outside the city. It is
raining in the forest. Through momentary flashes of light, the audience sees the little boy,
hiding in a dense shrub near the front of the stage, he is sobbing, and the word ‘mama’
can be deciphered mixed in with his breathing and crying.
In the very distance, through fog and rain, numerous beams of light can be seen, it is a
search party – dog and all – dressed in raincoats, looking for the boy, and the boy is
hiding from them. After missing him once, two of the men return and discover him. The
two men look at each other, a look that clearly represents an unspoken knowledge of
what must be done. One of the men pulls the boy out, and seems to slap him, and talk
angrily at the boy – like an angry parent who has just found their child after he went
missing – before turning him around, pulling out a knife and cutting the boy’s throat until
the boy is decapitated. After the man is finished, he turns and holds out the head of a cat.
This seems to satisfy the party as they throw twig and leaves over the child’s body before
they leave. Their exit triggers a final piece of music – a Benjamin Britten work for
children’s choir – for the final frame of the Tragedia Endogonidia, which is accompanied
by a slow and beautiful final fade to black.
The detailed naturalism in the representations and the actions of this episode are almost
uncanny in the scheme of the cycle. Tragedy seems to be present everywhere – literally
or naturalistically – in this episode, it is no longer a cell, it is now a story.
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Originally, there were meant to be ten episodes, the eleventh was a later addition. The
final episode of the cycle is a filmic theatre, where real landscapes are framed, rather than
the artistic, theatrical landscapes representing the atmosphere of the mythical in the
earlier episodes. It is an episode – as mentioned before – where the origin and the
destination are at the same place at the same time. It is an episode that is directly
concerned with representation rather than with the referent, for it paints images that
resemble the sense of a narrative. But it is a dream episode which hovers in suspended
time, the only place and space of the beginning and the end, the end re-becoming the
origin, reproduction, re-birth, endogeny.
Giorgio Agamben begins his chapter On Potentiality (from Potentialities) with a

statement about the concept being at the core of our history and philosophy:
“The concept of potentiality has a long history in Western Philosophy, in which it
has occupied a central position at least since Aristotle….. I could state the subject
of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb ‘can’ [potere].
What do I mean when I say : ‘I can, I cannot’?”88
He then goes on to give an example through a story about Anna Akhmatova:
“It was in the 1930’s, and for months and months she joined the line outside the
prison of Leningrad, trying to hear news of her son, who had been arrested on
political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day,
one of these women recognized her and, turning to her, addressed her with the
following simple question: ‘Can you speak of this?’ Akhmatova was silent for a
moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question:
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I can.’…..for everyone a moment comes in which she or he must
utter this ‘I can,’ which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is,
nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this ‘I can’ does not
mean anything – yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and
bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.”89
88
Agamben, Potentialities, p. 177.
89
Ibid. p. 177–178.
61
This articulation of the essence of potentiality, is also the articulation of the singular,
alone, first, action. The decision to say, to acknowledge, to embark on [the inevitable
trajectory] the potentiality of action, is the singular, displaced act that is a fundamental of
the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle. Romeo Castellucci’s investigation of this act, displaced
from its historical and cultural context, is the ‘I can,’ spoken by Akhmatova in the
Agamben story. But it is the nothingness, the ‘I cannot,’ the realm of potentiality, which
defines and contextualizes the nature of the act.
Agamben’s notion of potentiality uses the ‘Bartleby’ character from the Melville story:
Bartleby the Scrivener in Billy Budd, Sailor and other stories, as the personification of
his discourse:
“This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs.
As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the nothing
from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most
implacable vindication of this nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener
has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet…”90
The blank canvas, action at the point of zero intensity.
90
Ibid. p. 253–254.
62
Tragedia Endogonidia photos: Marco Iorio
63
Chapter Three
The “Poetic Room”91 – Towards a system of representation
The theatrical and representational core of Tragedia Endogonidia concerns the

potentiality, the impossibility and the inevitability of language. To this end, the cycle [11
episodes in 10 cities over 2 years] explores itself exploring language. This is a theatre
which – acknowledging the relativity of the past, the present and the future – explores a
mythic history which is before, at the root of, but apparently outside of culture. Tragedia
Endogonidia investigates the act of presenting this kind of mythic theatre to a
contemporary audience. The process which enables the company to achieve its ambitious
and complex goals – as this section of the thesis will attempt to show – functions by the
same structural principles as the philosophical and narrative trajectory of the work.
It is difficult to form any certain and conclusive arguments about meaning and
representation in Tragedia Endogonidia, any interpretation or analysis could only be
subjective and not definitive because the presentation is always ambiguous. Romeo
Castellucci's own preferred form of expression on matters analytical and intellectual
within the content and meaning of his work is ambiguous and consists of fragmented
inspirations, images, particular philosophical and musical excerpts. Both in his writings
and in conversation he makes use of a palette, a code of signs which make up a coherent
system of representation in a theatrical language which engages a subjective response. I
cannot hope to shed light and clarity on the abstract relationship of signifiers – often
purposefully in contradiction – which are repeatedly presented in a multiplicity of
variations, and which make up the language of Tragedia Endogonidia. My statements are
based on my experience of being in the privileged position of observing and assisting in
the rehearsal and production of three of the episodes from the cycle.
I was first introduced to this cycle when I began my first residency with the company in
2003. At that point in time, the first five episodes of the cycle had already premiered, and
91
A term taken from Giorgio Agamben, from his work: Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,
trans. Ronald L. Martinez, (Minnessota: University of Minnessota Press, 1993) referring figuratively to the
achievement of an enclosed space, the ‘poetic room’, allowing poetry to possess its object.
64
the company had started rehearsals for episodes six and seven, simultaneously. I observed
and assisted rehearsals of P.#06 and R.#07 for three weeks in Cesena, and the rehearsals
in the theatres leading to the premiers, in both Paris and Rome. A year later (2004), I was
invited back to observe and assist on the final episode – the completion of the cycle – in
Cesena (the same place from where the cycle was launched). Without drawing
conclusions or decoding techniques, in this section of the thesis I will attempt to name
and discuss what I feel are consistent and founding principles of the process and
methodology, the system of representation of the theatre of Tragedia Endogonidia.
Starting (C.#01) with fragmented images and metaphors based on sequences and patterns
from chemical and biological elements of life on Earth, Tragedia Endogonidia then
connects with the city where the work is presented through the idea of the 'episode.' The
episode provides the link and the reason for the work's presentation – the city’s
connection to the episode as a signifier of a tragic narrative within a human community.
Episodes I - V in the cities: Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels and Bergen, had already
developed and evolved not only a vocabulary of objects, images, sounds and theatrical
states, but referenced a growing alphabet of concepts and philosophies. Many of the
actions, props and objects in the cycle are repeated and inverted in various episodes, to
take on the specific and aesthetic qualities of that episode or city. As the number of
episodes increases, so the palette increases and the language of Tragedia Endogonidia
expands and evolves. The episodes – both selfconsciously and unconsciously – show the
various stages of their own evolution. At the same time, the cities which represent the
episodes, are given specific meaning within the episode and therefore within the
vocabulary of Tragedia Endogonidia. So it is with most of the aspects of the work:
actions, props and other objects have different appearances and meanings on different
levels. Not only literal and figurative, or metaphoric, but without gravity, before time,
outside of visibility etc. They are like letters in an alphabet, they can be arranged
sensically or nonsensically – depending on the language – but they will always belong to
that alphabet. Whether specifically [the moment, the episode] or wholistically [the cycle],
the force which drives it is consistent and continually recreates itself, like water poured
into different coloured glasses, turned into ice, and then resurrected into a puddle. This is
65
one way of looking at one of the consistent lines of the overall process of the cycle, and
specifically how the cycle creates and re-creates it's own language and system of
representation.
To this end, there is also the fundamental way in which Tragedia Endogonidia questions
and re-defines the very space where the theatre takes place. In all of the episodes the
performance space is literally a 'room.’ A re-occurring golden box, a marble cube, a
white cube, a room that transforms into another room, and characters enter this room in a
way which breaks the conventions of space - from outside the theatre (A.#02), through
the window of the theatre (P.#06), through the floor of the theatre (R.#07). Add to this the
way the performers, when performing an action have to actually do it because the
materials and machines are not scenic props but real apparatus, lasting as long as that
action has to, making the audience, the actual community, question not only the particular
representation (as in Brecht's theatre), but the very 'act' of making and experiencing
theatre.
Societas Raffaello Sanzio manage to achieve a level of art making where the system is
such that it determines endless possibilities, all of which are consistent with the overall
vision, and all, are in harmony with each other through the network, the organization of
this alphabet, this new language. The fragments, ideas, images, symbols, actions…
which make up this work are not working together in a narrative form, but rather like
structural elements of a theatrical score, they achieve an ambiguity of meaning and an
often beautifully discursive presentation.
This language of Tragedia Endogonidia, like some other contemporary forms, exists in a
different formal context than more conventional and practiced theatrical languages or
forms - those that are erected by narrative, portrayal of character and behavioural
naturalism according to the laws of natural sciences or of physics (gravity or time/space
consistency). Tragedia Endogonidia is structured so that it can use fragments or
snapshots of these elements without the constraints of narrative or even of physics. The
66
past, present and the future can coexist without justification and a multiplicity of
representations can simultaneously inform and confuse the audience.
Through the process of creating a language composed of aesthetic fragments of pre-

existing languages of history and cultural representations – Castellucci disowns his
authority as director. By displacing92 the cells which, in formation, make up the structures
and compositions of a history and a culture of representation,93 he loses control of the
possibilities and potentialities of meaning. With Tragedia Endogonidia, a situation exists
where Romeo Castellucci (as well as Chiara Guidi and Claudia Castellucci) are no more
correct about the meaning of the work than anyone else who has seen, heard and
interpreted it. There is not an absolute truth and the work is greater than the just the work
of the author, it is a discursive formation.94 The work is still a score which is determined,
has meaning and structure, but most importantly, not a definitive ‘program’ with a
definitive meaning and purpose. Tragedia Endogonidia is the antithesis of such a model.
It is the possibility of not knowing, and therefore setting out to discover the meaning of
your own work, which allows the existence of this theatre which is profoundly structured
yet without an absolute program or a fixed agenda. It is a system for allowing meaning to
have its freedom, to exist in multiplicity and to be greater than its own specificity, where
the artist must not know their own destination. Every ‘scene’ that is a result of this
process, went through various stages of macro and micro developments depending on the
addition of and relationship with new elements. Because the language of this theatre
draws its vocabulary from a variety of aesthetic, multi-artform and philosophical sources,
new objects [arrival of new props or machines in rehearsal] or relativity of conditions
[technical adaptation during final stages in the theatre] play an equal role in the formulas
92
In a similar manner to Agamben’s notion of the displacement of human beings in the concentration
camps, the de-humanisation of man from his community, language, and therefore, identity. As previously
discussed in the Genesi section of this thesis.
93
See also, Walter Benjamin’s essay The Author as Producer, Michel Foucault’s essay What is an Author?
and Roland Barthes’s essay The Death of the Author. Although the three essays have different concerns,
they all define an ambiguity of meaning, and a loss of ownership or control by the identity of the author.
94
As defined by Michel Foucault, a notion where a work spawns a form, a multiplicity of an evolving
discourse, often contradictory to its own origin, and never absolutely specific to space and time. The affect
and potentiality of the work is beyond the writer, where the work becomes a form.
67
within the network of the language. They are not compromises or limitations because
their part in a formula is equally valid.
One of the features of the methodology of Societas Raffaello Sanzio is the time and
process they have in the theatre, building up to the premiere. Their sets are not built by
scenic art departments, but are mostly real or individually created objects, there is no
system of stage management or a stage manager to ‘call’ the show. The bump-in does not
follow the conventional order of (lighting and sound) plotting, technical rehearsal, dress
rehearsal etc. Instead, the company bring many more props and objects than they will
ever use, demand a long time in the space (longer than what is often affordable even at
Arts Festivals or major theatre seasons), and proceed to work through from beginning to
end, every day. Every day is an updated version of the show as more elements [set pieces,
lights, costumes, props and soundtrack etc.] arrive and evolve with every new ‘run’, or
version of the show.
Romeo Castellucci himself operates both lights and sound, and the way in which the
company organize set-up, pack-up, the preparation of props and costumes, and the
organization [‘calling the show’] of the action on stage – without a stage manager – is
due to a particular work ethic by the whole company. Actors are responsible for most of
their own props and costumes, and, together with crew members, the re-setting of the
stage for the next performance. The extra props and objects – which the company bring
with them – are often re-incarnated objects from other episodes, continuing the evolution
of the language. This principle also extends to subtle or even hidden levels, where objects
are re-used for completely different ‘backstage’ purposes than the reason for their
creation or their original usage.
A funny example of this was an early water/lighting effect onto the floor of the stage in
the Paris episode. When I walked onto the stage and looked up at the lights, I saw the
aquarium from Genesi, suspended in the air, with six large lights tightly focused to shoot
through the bubbling water (the acquarium is rigged to boil water), throwing the resultant
shimmering phenomena onto the stage floor. The device did not end up being used in the
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show, it was one of the experiments in the early stages of the production week95 in the
theatre which was eventually discarded.
This instance not only demonstrates the process and evolution of the company’s stage
language through its reincarnations and re-combinations of objects, but also the principle
of using real or organic material [the hard way] to create unique phenomena rather than
stage effects. Similarly, the soundtrack by Scott Gibbons – in close collaboration with
Chiara Guidi – seems like extraordinarily powerful electronic sound-art. But, it also is
carefully and cleverly made up from organic material, processed in a structural and
philosophical way, for maximum density and body. The manipulation of volume,
equalization and rhythm in the theatre projects the score at the audience’s senses in a way
which not only underscores [or overscores!] the action, but appears as an autonomous
stage element in its own right.
Within the framework of the production week where many permutations of existing and
new objects and actions are tested, fragments and scenes are often combined or cut,
adapted or inverted. And although it is sometimes sad to see the work cut, the results are
never a compromise but always spatially more in tune with the geography, and
rhythmically more at one with the audience and in accord with the immediate conditions
of the space/time of the production.
A number of examples may serve to illustrate the company’s methods. Both the enigma
scene in Paris, and the interrogation and signature of Mussolini in Rome were intricately
rehearsed and re-addressed numerous times. Both contained detailed actions and
interactions with real objects. Romeo (and Chiara), both in the theatre and in the rehearsal
room, needed to see, hear and experience a particular sequence, before deciding to keep it
or not.
The scenes of Abraham, Isaac and the Angel’s transformation into silent movie polis,
with the extensive use of water and the two washing machines [‘enigma’ – P.#06], and
95
The ‘week’ from ‘bumping in’ the set and properties, including lighting, sound and all technical
rehearsals, previews, through to the premier.
69
the Vatican priests with Mussolini, basketballs and chocolate [R.#07] both possess
complex, ritualistic actions and sequences with objects which can be re-arranged in
numerous ways for different permutations of meaning and rhythm. These two scenes had
numerous incarnations before the premiere of the two shows and continued to evolve
even afterwards. The actions themselves are part of an alphabet, and as within languages,
there is the logic of silent [practically unnecessary] letters within words.
In many ways, many of the details of the ritualistic actions of these scenes are too
obscure and esoteric for the audience to fully comprehend, even if they were simplified
or somehow theatrically faked, yet every object functions as the object it is, and the
performances have to accommodate this. The washingmachines in the Paris episode
actually washed a load while a series of these intricate and esoteric scenes were
performed. This enigma scene, was timed to the cycle of the washingmachines, and the
actors were able to take out their (soaked, but washed) costumes from the
washingmachines when they were ready, put them on, and enter the next scene.
As the objects are real, the sequence of the scene is constantly re-arranged and re-
incarnated to achieve both maximum theatrical effect, and to work within the constraints
of the objects.
In this way, Romeo’s philosophy of working operates organically at unseen levels [as far
as the audience is concerned ie. actions which would look the same if theatrically faked],
and the fact that often most of the hard work goes into making esoteric, semiotically
complex scenes rather than the large scale big impact scenes. It extends from the way the
objects are created [real materials, not scenic art], through to how the striking visual
images achieve their power [painstaking and organic means to create natural phenomena
rather than stage effects], to the more intellectual realm of symbolism and semiotics in
something as complex as the Tragedia Endogonidia.
There is a consistency of style and methodology between Tragedia Endogonidia and

previous work by Societas Raffaello Sanzio. His personal style and aesthetic is what is on
display, and this personal style – for analytically inexplicable reasons – is one of the main
70
reasons for the images possessing their power. It is, after all, Romeo’s artistry, not the
underlying ideas, which gives this theatre its strength. Castellucci avoids committing
himself to precise rules which govern his process, but there are some consistent personal
and philosophical lines of thought.
As the image, the moment, or the scene is being worked, one of the consistent ways in
which Romeo [and Chiara] search for meaning and rhythm is by off-setting the current
idea with something which will trivialize it [if the idea is profound], or make it feel
sacred [if the idea is profane]. In other words, they will seek to ‘level-out’ the
associations, the domains, the categorizations and generally the culture of singular and
specific ideas by applying them to their antithesis, for an object’s sacredness is put into
question when it’s opposite’s profaneness is made to be seen as sacred. This process is
always a type of perversion of the image, the object or the idea for applying a profound
context to a trivial object can also be a perversion. Most importantly though, the world
which is created through this perversion is a new territory where everything is flattened
out, there is no more hierarchy between the sacred and the profane; the human and the
animal; the present and the absent. It is precisely this ‘flattening out’ effect that guides
Romeo’s process on both literal and subliminal levels.
A clear example of this was the extraordinary scene of Jesus and the three cars which
dropped from the skies in the Paris episode. Firstly, the cars are not used for their sole
purpose [driving] but are rather – literally – dropped as we see [three] of them fall to the
ground. Not only is it an obvious sacred/profane juxtaposition of Jesus Christ and a
Peugeot on which he is crucified, but both Jesus’ and the cars’ entrance into the space
defined this new world as a horizontal plane, free from [possibly before or after] cultural
and historical hierarchy. In Romeo’s own words: this ‘flattened out, horizontal’ plane is
not just a stagnant flat line, but this collective of objects and forms, free from their
associations and respective cultures, causes the line to pulse and breathe ‘like a wave’
which continues to constantly recreate and reform itself. “Not like a writer…” Romeo
added, but… and gestured for a puppeteer.
71
I have attempted to x-ray the company’s working process to arrive at some consistencies
of thought and methodology. Process is vital to an understanding of their work since the
writing, the creation, is happening during rehearsal, through the process and not before it.
I have not, and could not, conclude a definitive technique or formula by which Romeo
and Societas Raffaello Sanzio work with Tragedia Endogonidia. For me, the key to
reaching an understanding of their system is that it is multi-platform [different meanings
and symbolisms on different levels], and multi-artform [juxtaposition of visual, textual,
sonic etc.], placing equal importance on a visual, aesthetic and musical alphabet, rather
than a traditional dramatic model based on a hierarchy of artforms serving the narrative.
Within this palette of inspired multi platform/artform fragments, a multiplicity of
meanings emerge. The juxtapositional switching of sacred and profane objects in
Tragedia Endogonidia recontextualizes the scenes in which they appear, in a kind of
surreal montage.
There is also a governing system of representation based on the principles of the

philosophy of the work and which determines the composition and the methodology,
making up the discursive content of the work. In Tragedia Endogonidia it is the
investigation of the contemporary meaning of tragedy.
Tragedy, as we know, derives its name from the goat, and Castellucci has based the
language of this work – both literally and philosophically – on the choices a goat makes
as it walks on a grid with a determined set of parameters. The seemingly random choices
a goat makes in ignorance, creates vowels and consonants for this language as it moves
across diagrams – creating vowels and consonants – that represent an alphabet of its
animal destiny, the coding of it’s DNA, but it also determines a specific trajectory for the
work, its very chemistry and biology. The goat’s writing covers the floor with letters,
dehumanised language, the organization of the letters corresponds to the symbols of its
bodily functions (cell respiration, growth of horns, decomposition…). This stages the
atomic form of our language, where letters have no significance, where the alphabet is
corporeally linked to the body of an animal through the voice. The goat is the poet in this
72
tragedy, when it actually appears on the stage it represents and also becomes the author,
its body is the source of origin for the text, from where the score of the work, its
particular language, originates. The decoding of the goat’s spoken language and its
ultimate expression in performance, is in the form of tragic, foreign song, a new – non-
sensical, non-human – Chorus.
Whereas most traditional plays and 'performance scores' depend on structural

inevitability based on one or another type of narrative, Romeo Castellucci draws from
various and numerous artforms in order to paste together a language which is multi-
platform and multi-artform. The inspiration this language draws from key modernist and
philosophical thought, is particularly to do with history, mythology and the semiotics of
representation. This aspect of the work has invited a rich interpretive response from
various insightful writers and thinkers.96 This wealth of intellectual reaction to this work
goes a long way towards unraveling the cultural fragments used by the language of the
work, as well as interpreting their role in the work. The process of rehearsal – while
serving the system of representation – evolves through emotional and sensory
incarnations and re-incarnations which develoip the notion of potentiality, in that the
body of the action is the same body which describes the ultimate purpose of this theatre.
In the end, it is this emotional and sensory power [rather than cerebral]98 of theatre which
inspires Romeo Castellucci, and it is the live conducting of these elements for maximum
'physical' – body – effect on the audience, which makes his theatre so engaging and
stimulating. Romeo strongly acknowledges that this aspect of his process is his priority,
and next to this, meaning and philosophy are relatively unimportant.
The driving force, the quality which sets this theatre apart from other audio-visual forms
is this conducting of rhythm and time. The dynamic sculpting of time. It is Romeo’s
prioritizing of the non-intellectual, gut, animal experience of the audience, why he
operates lighting and sound himself, which gives this theatre its power. As far as Romeo
96
Such as Nicholas Ridout, Celine Astrie and Joe Kelleher.
98
A term Romeo uses to describe an intellectual, concept/narrative approach.
73
is concerned – fundamentally - the community which creates, and by watching, makes
theatre, is a community of animals. We are all physical, sensory creatures, and this
prioritizing of rhythm and time, speaks directly to our innermost animal, often bypassing
the intellect. The score which Romeo creates prior to rehearsals already contains the core
structures of the work, but the main work of rehearsals is to work and re-work the
presentation in order to achieve the power with which to inspire audiences to connect and
unravel the multiplicity of meanings. This physical approach is the way in which the
artist becomes the spectator, and it supersedes style and aesthetic, for ‘being’ the
spectator intellectually, “would be being rhetorical.”99 This physical, sensory, animal
approach is the way that Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio make the
images burn, the actions deafening, the distortion and perversion of meaning terrorizing.
Interestingly, it is his conscious prioritizing of this 'physical' effect on the audience which
explains why his rehearsal process allows for extraordinary juxtapositions, but these
burning images and breathless atmospheres are inspired, then rigidly rehearsed, then re-
arranged in a multitude of different ways, until a maximum potency has been reached.
Therefore the 'real' work of rehearsal is not developing the theatrical ideas, images or for
meaning and interpretation, but rather working and tuning the representation of these
ideas to have the maximum sensory, emotional and physical effect on the audience. Once
this is achieved, the structure and language of the work – which includes the various
possible juxtapositions which, within a more rational system would not make sense –
allows the audience, individually and subjectively to interpret it and relate to it.
Of course these images and inventions are personal to Romeo Castellucci and Chiara
Guidi, the extraordinary thing is that the structure and language of theatre they have
developed can affect every individual who experiences these images and inventions
differently and subjectively, without the possibility of an incorrect interpretation. This
particular aspect of Tragedia Endogonidia also addresses one of the fundamental reasons
for it's conception - the problem of the impossibility of tragedy at the present point in
history and theatre, while the content is focused on creating a new language because the
99
From Romeo Castellucci’s program notes from Giulo Cesare.
74
old one does not speak to a collective anymore [“…There is no more LOGOS”100]. Is
there any possibility for a collective in the sense that theatrical form can mean the same
thing to everybody at the same time? Perversion, again, serves to unify – if only for a
moment. Certain events function as flashes, shocking or exploding the image or event,
both sensationally and intellectually. And it is at this moment, that the audience is
unified, they are a community.
100
Romeo Castellucci, from the program note of IDIOMA I – one of the original premises of Tragedia
Endogonidia.
75
Destinations – a conclusion
It can be argued, that Romeo Castellucci’s theatre – both in content and methodology – is
primarily about notions of origins, destinations and representation. Both within a known
culture and history – as in Genesi: from the museum of sleep – and through a new
language, a ‘level-playing-field,’ in Tragedia Endogonidia. These notions are consigned
to infinite transmission, unable to declare themselves apart from themselves – are seen in
the work as the condition of language and therefore of history.
The examination of tragedy in Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia follows Agamben’s

writings on sovereign power and potentialities. Between the origin and the destination, is
the tragedy, the inevitable journey. In this sense,101 tragedy is history, and has been
instigated or originated by the first Act, the decision of potentiality.102 Walter Benjamin’s
term for this philosophy is “messianic,” implying an end, a salvation from the tragic
history [journey] of destruction as seen by Benjamin’s “angel of history.”103 For
Castellucci, – unlike the end, as signified by Auschwitz, in Genesi – in Tragedia
Endogonidia, the end is a re-birth, it is the zero start-finish point of the cycle. It is at the
point of potentiality. It is this re-definition of the end as a re-birth, a re-start, that defines
the conclusion of Tragedia Endogonidia. It is the reason for ending the cycle with C.#11
rather than the originally intended tenth and final episode in Marseilles, it is precisely in
the nature of what this re-birth can be – an endogeny that is an infinity, an immortality by
nature of its endless re-cycling of itself.
Re-birth, like all figures and concepts within Tragedia Endogonidia, was in evidence at
the very beginning of the cycle, at C.#01, and equally at the end, at C.#11. Tragedia
Endogonidia, in its investigation of origins and destinations – just as, in a different way,
the earlier work of Romeo Castellucci had done – is seeking to discover how to start
again, how humanity and the Earth can re-discover creation.
101
A concept taken from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, published as part of
Illuminations.
102
A key Agamben reference in the context of Tragedia Endogonidia and this thesis, defining the decision
of potentiality to act, or, not to act.
103
Walter Benjamin, Thesis IX, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, p. 259.
76
Tragedia Endogonidia does this through the figure of potentiality. Just as Agamben
images the new creature emerging, and at the same time, not emerging – at a point of
indifference between potentiality and impotentiality, what is at stake here is a “second
creation…. A de-creation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned
to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was,
becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not.”104
What is shown is always just out of the frame beyond composition. The figure, the
referent of the work, keeps failing to cohere completely – the image is returned to itself,
unredeemed, as if recovering its potentiality not to be. A glimpse, a feeling, of all the
human generations as though they had not been born, an image of abandoned life.
In Agamben’s philosophical fantasy, de-creation will come into play at a point beyond
traces and records and schemata, supposedly at the limit of representation, precisely at
the point where the “interruption of writing”105 suspends flight, and returns to
contingency. This – in Romeo Castellucci’s theatre – is the origin and the destination,
together at the limit point of representation.
104
Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby, or On Contingency in Potentialities, p. 270-1.
105
Ibid.
77
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W, After Auschwitz; published as part of Negative Dialectics,

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973)
Adorno, Theodor W, Anti-Semitism and fascist propaganda published in The Stars

Down To Earth and other Essays on the irrational in culture, (London: Routledge,
1994)
Adorno, Theodor W, Anti-Semitism and fascist propaganda published in The Stars

Down To Earth and other Essays on the irrational in culture, (London: Routledge,
1994)
78
Agamben, Giorgio, Bartleby or on Contingency, in Potentialities: Collected essays in
Philosophy, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Agamben, Giorgio, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999)
Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, (New York: Zone Books, 1999)
Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal, (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004)
Agamben, Giorgio, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald
L. Martinez, (Minnessota: University of Minnessota Press, 1993)
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem – A report on the Banality of Evil, (New

York: Penguin Books, 1977)
Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and its Double, (New York: Grove Press, 1958)
Astrie, Celine, C.#01, P.#06: “Year Zero”, R.#07: “Perseus ruse”, and other essays
published in IDIOMA, CLIMA, CRONO I – VIII, Eight editions of program essays by
selected writers for the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle.
Balme, Christopher, Cambridge Journals Online, Vol. 29, Issue 1-3, (Theatre
Research International published by Cambridge university Press, 2004).
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972)
79
Barthes, Roland, Empire of the Signs, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
Barthes, Roland, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, (London: Cape, 1982).
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, (Michigan: University of Michigan

press, 1994).
Benjamin, Walter, The Storyteller; The work of Art in the age of mechanical
reproduction; Theses on the Philosophy of History; What is Epic Theatre ?
Published as a collection entitled: Illuminations, (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1970).
Benjamin, Walter, One Way Street, Conversations with Brecht, The Author as
Producer, Theologico-Political Fragment, On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man, Published as a collection entitled: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York
and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Benjamin, Walter, Origin of German Baroque Drama, trans. John Osborne,

(London: New Left Books, 1973).
Blanchot, Maurice, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]).
Castellucci, Romeo, theatre program from, Genesi - from the museum of sleep (1999).
Castellucci, Romeo, theatre program from, Giulio Cesare, (Adelaide Festival: 2000).
Castellucci, Romeo, theatre program from, Tragedia Endogonidia: C.#01, (Cesena,

2002)
80
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, (London and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
Einstein, Albert, Relativity: The Special and General Theories, (New York: Crown,
1961).
Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith,

(London: Tavistock, 1972).
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, (New York: Random House, 1973).
Foucault, Michel, What is an Author, published in the collection Michel Foucault –

Aesthetics – essential works 1954-1984 volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion, (London:
Penguin Books, 1998).
Freud, Sigmund, The interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4 & 5 of The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under the editorship of
J. Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1900).
Hebert, Lorraine, Program essay for the Montreal premier of Genesi: from the
museum of sleep.
Kelleher, Joe, Lessons in a Lost Language: Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia

Endogonidia, http://www.bris.ac.uk/goatislandschool/pdf/kelleher
Kelleher, Joe, Like Friends. The Events in Paris, The Italian comedy, and other essays
published in IDIOMA, CLIMA, CRONO I – VIII, Eight editions of program essays by
selected writers for the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle.
LeCain, Maximilian, Carmelo Bene: A short obituary,

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/bene.html
81
Lehmann, Hans Thies, Postdramatisches Theater, (Frankfurt: Frankfurt am Main,
1999).
Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, published in If This Is This A Man, (Great
Britain: Abacus, 1987)
Lyotard, Jean Francois, The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington and B.

Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester Univerity Press, 1984).
McQuire, Scott, Visions of Modernity, (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1998)
Rose, Gillian, Judaism and Modernity, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993)
Scheer, Edward, (ed.), Antonin Artaud – a critical reader, (London: Routledge,

2004).
Scholem, Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, (New York: Schocken Books,
1946).
Sontag, Susan, Fascinating Fascism, published as part of Under the Sign of Saturn,
(Toronto: McGraw-Hill RFyerson Ltd., 1975)
States, Bert. O, The Phenomenological Attitude, in Critical Theory and Performance,

ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
1992).
Vanhaesebrouck, Karel, Towards a Theatrical Narratology?, (Online Magazine of the

Visual Narrative – Issue 9, Performance, 2004).
82
APPENDIX
In the preface to this thesis, I explained that the initial inspiration came from research for
my proposed trilogy work. Even though the thesis now concentrates on the methodology
of Romeo Castellucci’s theatre rather than the trilogy work, over the last four years the
trilogy itself has had two stages of development. The first stage was the production and
premiere of the second part of the trilogy titled: Close Your Little Eyes, at the Sydney
Opera House, for the Sydney Festival in 2003. The second stage was the development
and public presentation of the third part of the trilogy titled: The Hidden Face, at Romeo
Castellucci’s theatre in Cesena, Italy, in 2005. Close Your Little Eyes is a music-theatre
work for a sixteen part children’s choir, a string quartet and a female soloist. The work
featured the Sydney Children’s Choir, FourPlay string quartet and Melissa Madden Gray,
at its Sydney Festival Premiere.
Close Your Little Eyes relates to this thesis on Castellucci’s theatre in two fundamental
ways. Firstly, the trilogy (of which Close Your Little Eyes is the second part of) shares a
similar subject-matter as Castellucci’s work: Genesi: from the museum of sleep, as well
as notions of origins and destinations in Castellucci’s overall theatrical philosophy.
Secondly, Close Your Little Eyes engages – through the nature of its subject-matter – the
problem of representation, directly. The theatrical form with which it engages this
problem, is similar to, and inspired by, Castellucci’s form for addressing and presenting
fundamentally similar problems, specifically in the 2nd part of Genesi: from the museum
of sleep, titled: Auschwitz.
The subject-matter that Close Your Little Eyes shares with Genesi: from the museum of
sleep, is a particular philosophical notion of Auschwitz as a signifier of the end or
culmination of history and culture, and an event which is impossible to represent,
therefore exposing a fundamental problem with our language of representation. Whereas
Genesi: from the museum of sleep addresses the event itself (and therefore addresses the
problem of representation through its non-representation of the event), Close Your Little
Eyes presents the problem of representation directly, by addressing only the
representation of the event, and not the event itself.
83
The theatrical form Close Your Little Eyes employs which is similar to, and inspired by,
Castellucci’s form, is in the presentation of objects as signifiers in a compositional
framework, rather than being contextualised in a narrative, and in the use of children
representing a humanity which is before conditioning, outside of historical and cultural
inevitability.
84

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Origins and Destinations:

Representation in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci.

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

Surname or Family name: Lyandvert

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

…………………………………………………… ……………………………………..……… ……………………………………

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award:

THIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF THE THESIS

The exposition of flesh: Artaud and Auschwitz 18

The Grey Zone 22

The problem of tragedy 32

The First Five Episodes of the Cycle 36

The anonymous mother and the question of origin 46

This is the trajectory of this thesis.

The Theatre Company – Societas Raffaello Sanzio5

Within the compositional language, the system of representation of Castellucci’s theatre,

While Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty could be seen as a fundamental influence on

In writing this thesis, I am attempting to balance my privileged experience as an observer

“…phenomenology itself – tends to rely strongly on some variation of figural

“Phenomenological criticism, however, posits a stopping place, as it were, at the

Bert O. States defines the foundational problem of phenomenology as the “frontality of

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

In referencing Genesis the production presents a version of creation as the beginning, as

The Grey Zone

For this reality to be possible, an extreme state of psychological displacement had to be

Genesi: from the museum of sleep photos: Agence Enguerand

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia provokes us into encounters with remnants such as

The problem of tragedy

The contemporary impossibility to repeat tragedy, as a concept, is the central question

In Tragedia Endogonidia, tragedy is a vital question to the possibility of acting. The

A tragic representation is not a form of expression; it takes a different path to narration,

The three dimensional space of figuration and the temporal-logical succession of

poster/program from Tragedia Endogonidia Episode C.#01.

The First Five Episodes of the Cycle

Episodes I – V of Tragedia Endogonidia introduced, re-introduced, began a cycle of

History is the human story of life on earth/

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

P.#06 (18-31 October 2003)

Two fundamental and ongoing investigations of representation in Tragedia Endogonidia,

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

R.#07 (21-30 November 2003)

The chimpanzee cannot be controlled. There is a white sheet, plastic microphones

Tragedia Endogonidia photos: Marco Iorio

C.#11 (16-22 December, 2004)

Giorgio Agamben begins his chapter On Potentiality (from Potentialities) with a

The blank canvas, action at the point of zero intensity.

The theatrical and representational core of Tragedia Endogonidia concerns the

Through the process of creating a language composed of aesthetic fragments of pre-

There is a consistency of style and methodology between Tragedia Endogonidia and

There is also a governing system of representation based on the principles of the

Whereas most traditional plays and 'performance scores' depend on structural

Tragedia Endogonidia photo: Marco Iorio

The examination of tragedy in Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia follows Agamben’s

Adorno, Theodor W, After Auschwitz; published as part of Negative Dialectics,

Adorno, Theodor W, Anti-Semitism and fascist propaganda published in The Stars