Like spores in the wind, a strange and mysterious show has been floating across Europe these past 18 months, setting off almost tangible emotional ripples in every city where it has touched down.
From its deafening creation as if out of sound itself in Cesena, Italy in January 2002, to progressively more elaborate versions in Avignon, Berlin, Brussels and Bergen, this “Tragedia Endogonidia” — an “organism on the run” according to its creator Romeo Castellucci — now spreads its extraordinary energy to Paris in its sixth unforgettable episode, a spectacular opening to the Festival d’Automne.
The “pre-tragic” theater of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio, founded in 1981 by Castellucci, his sister Claudia and his wife Chiara Guidi, has amazed, astounded and at times infuriated audiences through its efforts to articulate the power and terror of theater’s earliest forms via an essentially “carnal” language that seeks less to communicate with the audience, in the manner of the Chorus, than to create a way of seeing. In its use of animals, amateur actors, the deformed or ill, and Castellucci’s own six young children, the company seeks to eliminate any technique meant to arrive at a stage presence, so as to better access a quality of simply “being present” which Castellucci likens to a return (more terrifying than comforting) to the womb.
The continuum of experience that the human race shares with its animal cousins is also explored in this theater that dares above all to explore our origins, and animal slaughter is consequently a regularly invoked metaphor for human suffering. But if blood and viscera are an element of productions like “Guilio Cesare” (1997) and “Genesi, From the Museum of Sleep” (1999), Castellucci uses them, not to provoke, but to open the way to a communal, largely unconscious reflection on the human condition.
“Tragedia Endogonidia” is the newest, most accessible step on that path and reveals Castellucci’s mastery at creating lasting, dreamlike images of tremendous power that mystify and trouble the spectator while leaving their mark far beyond comprehension. In the show’s second episode, “A.#02,” at the Festival d’Avignon in 2002, audiences entered a milky white world where trance-like gestures, a booming soundtrack and the rapid-fire projection of signs and symbols assaulted viewers’ senses and cowed their efforts to understand why.
The title holds one, albeit enigmatic key: “Tragedia Endogonidia” presents either an infinitely replicating story of suffering or the menace of death present from the first burgeons of life. Audiences wary of entering Castellucci’s primeval world may opt for a film tracing the project’s development, which will be screened on two days (October 19 and 26, 5pm). But if seeing is believing, “P.#06 Paris” is a not to be missed stop on the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s latest voyage of discovery.
“P.#06 Paris: Tragedia Endogonidia -— VIe Episode,” Oct 18-31, Tue-Sat 8:30pm, Sun 3pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe/Atheliers Berthier, 8 bd Berthier, 17e, M&Mac251; Porte de Clichy, 20E-26E, tel: 01 44 85 40 40
