The company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) was founded in 1981 in Cesena, Italy, through the collaboration of the artistically eclectic siblings Romeo and Claudia Castellucci and Chiara and Paolo Guidi. They gave shape to an unconventional artistic ensemble where, as the Italian director Federico Tiezzi puts it, two souls merged into one.Footnote 1 As Tiezzi recalls, there were, on the one hand, Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi – the ‘intellectual soul’ of the company – and on the other, Romeo Castellucci and Paolo Guidi – its ‘practical soul’. In his essay ‘L'anima mentale e l'anima passionale. La memoria di un incontro’ (The Mental Soul and the Passionate Soul: The Memory of a Meeting), written in 1986, Tiezzi recalls that when the four were no more than teenagers they founded their first company, initially called Gruppo Espressione, which later became Esplorazione Teatro.Footnote 2 O Oliviero Ponte di Pino identifies in the Italian theatre of the 1970s and the 1980s a movement characterized by what he calls ‘the culture of the group’.Footnote 3 The members of this movement, he claimed, did not necessarily have a background in theatre. But in spite of this they were able to define their unique theatrical agenda and language through a continuous and ardent reflection on theatre.
Several companies born out of this movement – such as CarrozzoneFootnote 4 (1972), led by Federico Tiezzi, Marion D'Amburgo and Sandro Lombardi; Gaia Scienza (1975), led by Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Marco Solari and Alessandra Vanzi; and Mario Martone's Falso Movimento (1977) – exemplify the characteristics of this new wave of Italian theatre. Influenced by dance and rock music, poetry and comics, television, advertisement and cinema, these companies presented the Italian audience with performances marked by a strong visual impact where linear narrative was, more often than not, totally absent. During the 1980s the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy gave birth to three very provocative companies: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (1981), Teatro della Valdoca (1983) and Albe (1983). The same region became the launch pad for the most experimental companies of the 1990s, groups deeply influenced by SRS: Teatrino Clandestino, Fanny & Alexander, Impasto, Motus and Masque.Footnote 5 Although this is not an exhaustive list of Italian theatres from this period, it is essential to outline the context in which SRS was nurturing and developing its own distinct philosophy. In their iconoclastic incursion into theatre, SRS stood out from their contemporaries. They widened the parameters of theatre, sanctioning the use not only of fragmented words, but also of artificial silence, violent sounds and haunting music, including in their performances not only actors but also children and animals, or just the presence of bodies marked by ageing, anorexia, obesity and illness. The uniqueness of SRS is in their ability to appropriate these icons for a new dramatic language through their personal visionary approach.
Underpinned by the company members' own theoretical texts, the theatre of SRS attempts to rebuild theatrical language through a passionate and aggressive dismantling of traditional performance. The thrust behind their work is the conception of a theatre that is capable of impacting all the senses, a theatre that is able to transform. As Chiara Guidi declares,
Thought is the very bedrock of our making theatre. Right from the start we have transcribed our theatrical meditations into theoretical texts . . . We start from the presumption that superficial and pleasing things should not be done . . . we must do something that hits, something that transforms.Footnote 6
Their work, up to the Tragedia Endogonidia project,Footnote 7 can be divided into three phases, which correspond to the following publications: Teatro Iconoclasta (Iconoclastic Theatre),Footnote 8Teatro della Super-Icona (Theatre of the Super-Icon)Footnote 9 and Epopea della Polvere (Epic of Dust).Footnote 10
In 1979 the four members of SRS attended the performance Punto di Rottura (Breaking Point) by the Italian theatre company Magazzini Criminali (Criminal Warehouse), a performance which, even if they did not love it, became the ‘event that once and for all convinced them to dedicate themselves to theatre’.Footnote 11 The name Società Raffaello Sanzio (Society/Company of Raphael) was apparently chosen in order to contrast with the name of the company Magazzini Criminali,Footnote 12 led by Federico Tiezzi, Sandro Lombardi and Marion D'Amburgo, for whom ‘the metropolitan horizon . . . becomes a warehouse from which to draw liberally objects, situations, frequencies, images’.Footnote 13 This contrast thus has to be read on a conceptual level: Romeo Ro0 Romeo Castellucci opposed the museum-like immobility of a world seen as a magazzino (warehouse) to the living flux of a theatre considered as a ‘society’. The word Società was eventually changed into its Latin version, Socìetas, at the end of the 1980s. Romeo Castellucci explains the conceptual consequences of this lexical shift as follows:
I realised that with the addition of an ‘s’ [at the end of the word Società] our being together could have a plausible name. Socìetas is a word that suggests a communitarian occurrence . . . A community of strangers, when it gathers around the gaze of the figure, is instantaneous, transient and structureless. A Socìetas that has to be considered not in an esoteric sense . . . but rather as a community of strangers of whom and between whom there is nothing to say. Apart from that, their bond is, for a moment, indissoluble and carnal, and it is, in the space of a second, sotereological and necessary.Footnote 14
The name Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio alludes to its members' education and personal interest in the visual arts,Footnote 15 suggesting affinities with the Renaissance Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio (known as Raphael). While Raphael is considered one of the masters of perspective, Romeo Castellucci categorically rejects any use of perspective in his theatre:
Our performances lack perspective because we are against perspective . . . [T]he physical perspective makes you lose the internal perspective; it breaks the wall that we are appealing for, the Byzantine wall, the wall that was there before the Renaissance: perspective breaks the iconostasis . . . Fixity is lost along with the significant layers of oriental Byzantine rigidity . . . Perspective is internal: one should not see it. There are several methods and techniques to gain perspective. [And whereas there can be several perspectives] bi-dimensionality is only one; it is always the same.Footnote 16
Since the employment of perspective implies a simulation of reality, SRS's iconoclastic stand against perspective is signalled from the outset in Romeo Castellucci's ironic choice of the name Raffaello Sanzio for his company. In reference to the frontal nature of their theatre, Claudia Castellucci states that, for her, ‘perspective is a subjection towards the “existing”, the real, and therefore it goes against the super-real, it goes against the solemnity. Perspective is not solemn, it is connected to description [cronaca], it is realist’.Footnote 17 By privileging the bi-dimensional plane over the tri-dimensional depth of perspective, SRS problematizes the conventions of theatrical representation.
The question of representation
Claudia Castellucci, as the ‘intellectual soul’ of the group, has written numerous articles, manifestos and texts since the 1980s, amongst which are seven theoretical reflections – the Oratorie (Oratories), which SRS presented to the audience in the form of readings and the significant theatrical meditation OAO (1983). In these writings she began to analyse some of the main concerns of the company, which would be addressed twenty years later in the Tragedia Endogonidia project, namely the problematic relation between art and life, between idea, text and performance, and the nature of theatrical representation, theatrical time and theatrical language.
Lorenzo Mango argues that SRS, paradoxically, regards theatre as an instrument of communication in which language is negated. It is in the actualization of their performances that SRS contradicts theatre as a form, since SRS's ‘theatre and art exist in the very act of being contradicted as forms, they exist in the moment in which language is pushed to the extreme limits of its possibilities, beyond which there is silence or the omnipotence of the word’.Footnote 18 In the absence of a coherent narrative we are faced with a confusion of imagery that performs what Lorenzo Mango calls ‘dissolution of representation.’Footnote 19 He recalls that the 1981 performance Mondo-Persia 1 a 1 (The World versus Persia, One All) presented to the audience an incoherent assortment of germinal ideas: ‘The animal world, the peculiarity of certain popular behaviour, intimate fraternal relationships and the conflictual relationships between friends within “the group”, the tension that exists at the very limit of language, even dialects.’Footnote 20 Mango's description of Mondo-Persia 1 a 1, although lacking in specific scenic and performative details, gives the idea of SRS's ‘dissolution of representation’. This ‘dissolution’, which is related to the problematic nature of theatrical language and the relationship between art and life, is specifically theorized in OAO. In this short but extremely dense text Claudia Castellucci speculates on the nature of the relationship between art and life, advancing the hypothesis that ‘impersonality' should be the artists’ way of questioning life.Footnote 21
According to Claudia Castellucci there are, in fact, two fundamental ways of interpreting the world. On the one hand we have the ‘personal’ approach, which is based solely on cognition and is forever marked by the personality of another individual. On the other hand we have the ‘impersonal’ approach, which, no longer relying on particular data, aims at the ‘universal’. This last form of interpretation, she argues, ‘by surrounding itself with generality, impersonality and anonymity, constitutes itself as the world’.Footnote 22 Later in the text she explains that a work of art must be in itself a coherent, complete world rather than a fragment of the world. For Claudia Castellucci the coherent world of a work of art is ‘composed of certainties that hit the target, with an absolute and unquestionable . . . clarity’, and should never depend on its supposedly manifest originality.Footnote 23 Since ‘the world of ideas and forms is finite’, there can be no absolute originality in art, and therefore, she continues,
We should no longer depend on the world of ideas and forms in order to create [art], because we will always end up recontextualizing a part of the world which is already made. This is a depressed form of originality, if we admit that originality makes individuals happy . . .Footnote 24
Although the illusion of originality is satisfying in itself, the attempt to achieve originality is not only impossible but also futile: ‘considering that it is impossible to be effectively original, artists more and more tend to find their originality in subtleties’, without realizing that ‘immediately after the very subtle there is the insignificant’.Footnote 25 In this critique of contemporary theatre lies the premise of Claudia Castellucci's belief in the impersonal perspective: it is ‘only when you turn your personal world into a general and absolute world [that] you depersonalize yourself and therefore escape the predictable logic of comparison’.Footnote 26
Impersonality thus accords access to the universal, for ‘the universal is not indescribable for those who generalize their own world in a coherent fashion’.Footnote 27 In the conclusive part of OAO she argues that once a man achieves impersonality his ego is consequently transformed. This transformation enables him to perceive the existence of the void and subsequently to be comfortable within the void.
Impersonality and inaction . . . thrive in virtue of the emancipation from any engagement with the world; a man who has reached that plateau undergoes a transformation of his own ego. The world is seen as if it were empty; nonetheless it has not been destroyed, but it operates in the midst of the void.Footnote 28
It is through the void and because of the void that SRS is able to touch the ‘real’, given Claudia Castellucci's provocative claim that ‘when we do not have any representation at all, it is then that we have real representation’.Footnote 29 Real representation, then, is only accessible through the impersonal, which opens up to the universal, as opposed to the equivocal nature of personal knowledge, which is always filtered through the particularity of language. Claudia Castellucci affirms that ‘it is about time that art was emancipated from language. It is there [in the absence of language] where nothing is equivocal; where one can understand everything and therefore act with complete certainty’,Footnote 30 implying for her the negation of any linguistic link between life and art. This problematization of the language of performance anticipates the scarification of language that occurs throughout Tragedia Endogonidia. In the final section of OAO, focusing her attention on the visual rather than on the verbal, Claudia Castellucci highlights the self-similarity of each performance's elements in relation to the performance as a whole:
Every single element that appears within a work of art already implies its whole, the whole that manifests itself in the form of its smallest details. The result of our work is to put aside the world and to openly show our own way of seeing the world.Footnote 31
The work of art is the idea; it becomes the dramatization of the concept of the work of art itself. Lorenzo Mango identifies in the first performances of SRS one of the problematic points of their practice: ‘the centre of their theatre is not spectacle but drama’.Footnote 32 According to Mango, SRS shifts the focus of attention from the formal construction of language to a terrain that is more solidly theatrical.
Since in their theatre there is neither traditional nor linear representation, but a dramatic translation of ideas and thoughts into tangible forms, Romeo Castellucci avoids the inevitable distinction between language and object, which ‘is the primary nature of the concept of representation’.Footnote 33 In traditional theatre, in fact, language usually defines the objects presented and represented onstage; in SRS, however, the object is nothing more than itself. It is the spectator's gaze that identifies it. There is no need for any defining language:
What we touch with our gaze is exactly what is in the performances of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, which is also the symbolic key [of their performances]. This symbolic key is not attempting to define anything . . . If we subtract drama from the representative logic which develops through the narrative existence of the character, we obtain [a theatre] that no longer belongs to the diegesis of history, but is wholly and solely part of the universe of ideas that phenomenalize onstage.Footnote 34
The presence of drama and dramatization in SRS's theatre produces what Lorenzo Mango calls a ‘theatre of thought’, a ‘theatre of ideas’, a theatre that is realized ‘as a concrete manifestation of ideas and projects, which gains body (and therefore existence) only in the simulation of the scenic act’.Footnote 35
In her 1983 text Questioni Raffaellesche (Raphaellean Matters), Claudia Castellucci explains that it is through their ‘theatre of ideas’ that the equivocal nature of traditional theatre is avoided:
I feel that we have gained the dimension of CLARITY, because if everyone embodies his own world, nobody says anything equivocal any more . . . We put together situations and particular objects, because not the objects per se but their combination produces [in the audience] a determinant psychic disposition.Footnote 36
These hyperbolic claims, expressed through paradoxical metaphors, illustrate the iconoclastic nature of SRS. Not only do they flatten perspective, they also attempt to annihilate linear narrative whereby time, ever present, is compressed into ‘multicontemporaneity’ (policontemporaneità), a continuous presence ‘of the whole time into the same time . . . it is not that the only thing that exists is the present . . ., what exists is the whole time, all in the same time’.Footnote 37 For Romeo Castellucci, SRS's theatre achieves clarity through the dramatization of ideas that exist in an everlasting present where past and future coincide. Thus, in their performances, concepts take shape in the ‘here and now’ that, removed from any personal experience, becomes universal. Words, instead of conveying a meaning, conjure the physical appearance of ideas; they make the invisible visible through the process of substitution:
With the words that we use we do not describe anything, because we always accomplish an act through the very enunciation of the words themselves. We create through the double movement of imagination (in fact, we do not rebuild any real event of the past) and of identification (not as it was for Stanislavski, but in a substitutive sense) . . . What happens through imagination and identification is such a swirling SUBSTITUTION, which – in the end – returns us to ourselves . . . While we take the place of our parents, we remain at the same time still ourselves.Footnote 38
This process of substitution, as explained by Romeo Castellucci, in which the agent of the action – the actor – is simultaneously himself and the character played, finds a parallel in religious ritual. Achille Mango, in comparing SRS's theatre with religious rituals, highlights that the actors of SRS are, as the celebrant of any rite is, at the same time agents and recipients of the ritual's actions:
The actor, who is the explicit translator of theatre, does not inhabit the stage in order to converse with the audience. His privileged point of reference is himself or at least the other actors; his acts remain completely enclosed on the stage whereas the other entity – the audience – does not take part in any kind of encounter. Saying that, what has been affirmed is that the presence of the actor, as spokesman of theatre, is doubly significant, because not only is he the agent of the action, but also he is the recipient of the action.Footnote 39
As in any ritual, the dramatic whole in SRS's performances is made by distinct, unconnected units. The achievement of this fragmentary and yet complete whole is exemplified in Lorenzo Mango's poetic description of the performance Popolo Zuppo (Soaked People – 1982):
The materials of the set are like islands floating in the void. They overlap and show themselves in partial succession, following the progression of the particular fragments of the action. The actions, instead, still respond to the necessity to disarticulate the fabric of any possible tale . . . Overall, scenic elements do not relate to one another; the cohesion is accomplished through . . . the lyrical staging of friendship . . . and the reality of a fake world rendered [onstage] with foam rubber, which epitomizes an infantile universe.Footnote 40
We see how, in SRS's performances, the artistic whole is rendered by a succession of different images that correlate to one another through ideas, rather than through a linear narrative. Popolo Zuppo was the germination of the concept of separation that would take precedence in subsequent works.
‘Big Separation’ and iconoclasm
The notion of separation – separation between ideas and their actual representation as well as separation between life and art – finds its theoretical shape in two texts, Teatro Avulso (Detached Theatre)Footnote 41 and Teatro dei Murati (Theatre of the Walled People),Footnote 42 both written by Claudia Castellucci in 1987. In the first text, she provocatively announces that she ‘yearns for a sword that splits things and people between themselves and within themselves’.Footnote 43 Her remarks are a fierce criticism of contemporary theatre's attitude, which acknowledges predecessors and necessitates a reaction against them: ‘the theatre that I consider necessary . . . does not measure itself against what has come before, nor does it realise the future expectations of the present’.Footnote 44 She adds, ‘I have inside me a feeling of intransigency, of a wish for a lack of comprehension and for a lack of solidarity between artists. And I also wish that words could cleave’.Footnote 45 She openly attacks the ambiguity that, according to her, characterizes the miserable status quo of art: ‘I feel that the answers should be clear: yes or no; these answers should be without pointless wavering. Without the qualms typical of misers, which are caused by the fear of losing something’.Footnote 46 This is the manifesto for their theatre, a theatre that must be different from anything else:
A detached theatre, a distant place, a radically dissimilar place. A place where one can breathe the air of blissful ignorance, preconceived iconoclasm, and a knowledge that is the knowledge of abandoned children. In such a place we are certain we will not encounter common places . . . This is the time for refusing knowledge. This is the time for the Big Refusal, for Self-Exclusion, for not being involved . . . This is a call for the philosophy of the Big Separation, of the Big Dissimilarity.Footnote 47
Claudia Castellucci explains that this separation should happen not only between SRS and the theatre of their own time but also between actors and spectators, indicating that the epitome of the true secluded place is the stage:
Our theatrical work does not allow for any dialectic confrontation. There can be no question of any kind of dialogue between us and the audience, because the only Active Place is the stage. The stage, thus, is a secluded place.Footnote 48
SRS is thus a community of artists who hold disdain for the values of a world to which, they feel, they do not belong. When Claudia Castellucci states that ‘spending hundreds of millions on a performance is an abomination, it is vulgar and violent’,Footnote 49 the philosophy of the Big Separation shows a political drive against the consumerist attitude towards theatre and of theatre itself.
The Big Separation is made manifest in the performance I Miserabili (The Miserable – 1987), where the concept of seclusion, theorized in Teatro Avulso, becomes material: the stage of this performance is enclosed by a ‘wall made by colossal stones’Footnote 50 as a ‘metaphor for the human condition’.Footnote 51 The convergence between the audience's and the actors' gaze is unfeasible, since SRS no longer allows for any kind of dialectic or dialogic encounter. Il Teatro dei Murati consolidates the philosophy of the Big Separation into a firm refusal to admit into theatre any tear or gap through which a trickle of communication could pass. In this manifesto, at times pretentious, they state that their theatre is a place completely confined and detached from the outside world:
The walled people are surrounded by a wall and covered by a roof. The one who inhabits the area inside the wall is making a theatre that is totally detached from the free world, of which he does not want to know anything. There is a clear separation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, so clear a separation, in fact, that it is erroneous to combine these two words, which are too dialectic one towards the other. No dialectic is feasible between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between the Theatre of the Walled People and the free world, because the wall is not dividing the ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, but it is dividing ‘an inside’ from ‘another inside’ between which there is no intercommunication or comparison.Footnote 52
As Romeo Castellucci further explains, the nature of the wall encloses their theatre: it is a wall that protects them ‘from the kingdom of the word in which everything is so dialectical that those [in the kingdom] who protest fortify the object of their protest [the word]’.Footnote 53
Through the analysis of Teatro Avulso and Teatro dei Murati their iconoclasm announces its true character. It is an iconoclasm against all the icons that, hitherto, have been the basis of making traditional theatre, an iconoclasm against the word and the condescending relationship between actors and audience, against the cohesive composition of a performance onstage, and against language as a whole. A scarification of language spreads throughout all their productions as an endemic means of investigation.
The negation of representation through representation and the negation of theatre through theatre constitute the creative nucleus of SRS: ‘above all, Iconoclastic Theatre’,Footnote 54 they state in the text Tohû Wâ Bohû.Footnote 55L'Immagine che non si può vedere due volte (Tohû Wâ Bohû: The Image that Cannot Be Seen Twice – 1986):
The image that cannot be seen twice is an empty chair that is in the places where Soc. Raffaello Sanzio goes. This chair represents a path through which one has to go in order to get beyond it. The place where the empty chair is welcomes those who will present the Religione delle Colonne [Religion of Columns], the new religion that started in the twentieth century and was transmitted from the iconographers Paolo, Romeo, Claudia Manikon and Chiara Ipertheòs.Footnote 56
The image of the empty chair materializes the void, whose importance in the creative process had already been underlined two years earlier in OAO. For SRS, one needs to get beyond the ‘empty chair’; one needs to go through the disintegration and abnegation of representation in order to find a new form. It is only by acknowledging the existence of the void and by being comfortable in it that SRS can present its original theatrical vision: a prophetic vision expressed through parables. Their ‘theatre of parables’, as announced in Tohû Wâ Bohû, is exemplified in the performance Santa Sofia, Teatro Khmer (1986), where several parables are performed: ‘the parable of sick Pol Pot; the parable of the child as a symbol of western tradition; the parable of Leo III the Isaurian, the iconoclast, destroyer of icons; the parable of the upturned icon’.Footnote 57 Parables are also present in I Miserabili, the text of which is actually divided into different parables: the parable of the prison, the parable of the tribunal, the parable of the sickle, the parable of the petrified words, among others.Footnote 58 The theatrical device of the Religione delle Colonne transforms SRS into prophets of a new dramatic religion based on the absence of the incarcerating Word. This device highlights the ironic nature of SRS's iconoclasm, which opposes icons with icons, and which resides in the midst of the void (the ‘empty chair’ of the absent Word). Romeo Castellucci decodes the cryptic character of their iconoclasm as follows:
It is a technique that, without any doubt, has more to do with religion than with theatre. It is a holy fact. It has to do with finding your own technique in order to destroy it. There is a glorification, and at the same time, a humiliation . . . In this way the zenith of communication is reached. We started from the study of iconoclasm and icons.Footnote 59
SRS humiliates, almost destroys, theatre in order to glorify it, using theatre as the arena where they shape their innovative parables.
In the manifesto related to the performance Santa Sofia, Teatro Khmer, SRS elaborate further their theatrical iconoclasm and the connection with their religion, the Religione delle Colonne:
This is the theatre that refuses any representation. (When we do not have any representation at all, it is then that we have real representation . . .). This is the theatre of the new religion: so, come here, you, who wish to be the follower of the columns of the Unreal . . . This is the iconoclastic theatre: we want to destroy every image in order to adhere to the only fundamental reality: the anti-cosmic Unreal, the totality of all that is not yet conceived.Footnote 60
Romeo Castellucci explains that he actualizes iconoclasm through two different techniques: ‘theatrical paralysis’ and ‘the text that has lost itself’, where the latter is the apex of iconoclasm because ‘the text erases itself, curses itself’.Footnote 61 In the performance Santa Sofia, Teatro Khmer the main figures are Pol Pot, ‘the greatest iconoclast of the contemporary era’; Leo III the Isaurian, the emperor of Byzantium and ‘advocate of iconoclasm’; and finally two monks of the Religione delle Colonne.Footnote 62 In this performance, ‘theatrical paralysis’ is obtained by restricting Pol Pot's communicative ability solely to the voice and its intonation. Pol Pot the iconic iconoclast is, in SRS's performance, paralysed on a bed for the entire time with a drip in his arm, to exemplify their quintessential and paradoxical iconoclastic attack against the icon itself. In I Miserabili the character of the Herald suffers simultaneously from physical and verbal paralysis. For the whole performance he stands stock-still in the centre of the proscenium, in the midst of a series of scenes, the parables, which take place around him. SRS's iconoclasm realizes in this chain of disjointed parables the destruction of narrative cohesion and thus of the theatrical text. The ‘verbal paralysis’ of the Herald allows him only the monotonous calls of exclusion, which chime the moments of his stasis: ‘Now is dawn. I have nothing to do with this dawn’, ‘Now is morning. I have nothing to do with this morning’, ‘Now is noon. I have nothing to do with this noon’.Footnote 63 The text that ‘erases itself’ through a fragmentation of disconnected scenes and incongruous language reaches its apex in the character of the Masticatore delle Parole (Masticator of Words) who, instead of uttering his lines, must eliminate them, announcing that ‘From now on I will swallow my words. I am he who talks backwards’.Footnote 64
In the first decade of their career, SRS's specific interest was experimentation with theatrical techniques and devices. Their critical investigations established a detached theatre that, based on ideas rather than on dramatic texts, attempted to materialize concepts and test new means of communication beyond traditional language. La Generalissima (The Very General), a brand-new language invented in 1984 by Claudia Castellucci, ‘prophetess and translator’,Footnote 65 as Tiezzi calls her, constituted one of these means.
The dissolution of language: La Generalissima and Animality
La Generalissima,Footnote 66 created ‘after the study of pidgin languages and Creole languages, and by utilizing the linguistic systems of Giordano Bruno and Raimondo Lullo’,Footnote 67 was intended to become the language of SRS's theatre, a new language where meaning was conveyed exclusively through intonation. Claudia Castellucci explains the structure of this language as follows:
For me there are only four words: agone [agon], apotema [apothem], meteora [meteor], block. From these potent words another sixteen words are derived: these are the words of the second level that dilute and thereby contaminate the purity of the words of the first level. The words of the second level start to describe what should have been already understood [by using only the words of the first level]. From these sixteen words (unfortunately) another eighty words (third level) are derived that deviate even further from the original four key words. From the eighty words [of the third level] another four hundred follow: these are the words of the fourth level, the weakest, the most equivocal, and these are the words of beginners.Footnote 68
Romeo Castellucci illustrates the influence of what he calls ‘Egyptian Technique’ on their theatre, claiming that in ancient Egypt people were able to tell if somebody was telling the truth or not from the mere intonation of the voice.Footnote 69 In transferring this concept to the theatre, SRS highlights that ‘what is important is not what one says but how it is said’ and that ‘the form is the substance’;Footnote 70 the actor's mode of pronunciation, rather than the meaning of the words, constitutes the channel of communication. In the manifesto I Miserabili, Claudia Castellucci indicates that the ‘Egyptian Technique’ is one of the elements that characterizes the high technical calibre of SRS. This technique is accomplished by an actor through the mastering of the ‘intra-phonic’ (sounds that are not uttered) and ‘extra-phonic’ (sounds that are uttered) vocal spectrum.Footnote 71 In the performance I Miserabili, the ‘intra-phonic’ technique is embodied by the character of the Masticatore delle Parole (Masticator of Words), who swallows the words instead of speaking them, thus ‘suppressing the words from entering the world represented [onstage]’.Footnote 72 In La Generalissima, Claudia Castellucci integrates the ‘intra-phonic’ and ‘extra-phonic’ elements into one. This language was used for the first and only time in the performance Kaputt Nekropolis (1984), presented at the Venice Biennial in 1984. Tiezzi recalls,
Pictorial moments, psychedelic lights that saturate the rusty room of the Dockyard of Giudecca [in Venice], while the music of Inti-Illimani blasts out and big robots enter the stage to rebuke the audience. In the meantime Paolo and Romeo speak to each other in a brand-new language called Generalissima.Footnote 73
SRS's iconoclastic approach to theatre presents itself as nothing less than an intellectual attack on language as a whole, disclosing the rejection of a logical correspondence between words, along with their meaning and referent. It is an urge to invent a new form of communication though a perfect language that is marked by a paradoxical yet functional absence of meaning. The artifice of La Generalissima and the Religione delle Colonne were abandoned shortly after their inception, never to reappear. Nonetheless, this probing of communication and representation propelled SRS toward its first principles. Romeo Castellucci's theatrical syntax reverted to animals as a visceral gesture towards the primal.
With the performance Alla bellezza tanto antica (For Such Ancient Beauty – 1987), the presence of two pythons onstage marked the starting point of this root investigation, which would become central to SRS's performances. On the stage of La Discesa di Inanna (Inanna's Descent – 1989) there were a sheep, some goats and six baboons. Romeo Castellucci, in an exaggerated chain of metaphors, comments that for him ‘the animal is the bearer of the soul’; it is ‘the icon of the actor’ and furthermore it is ‘his shadow, his obstacle, his dream, his desire, his language, his body, his pāthos, ethōs, rüthmos.’Footnote 74 The presence of the goat, which would reappear in Tragedia Endogonidia, finds its origins in La Discesa di Inanna. Castellucci, in fact, notes that ‘starting from this moment goats will inhabit the scenic space. The goat, which gave the name to tragedy (trāgōs), here retakes what it owns. Theatre becomes again a natural matter . . . The animal makes the stage empty.’Footnote 75
Their first theories, and in particular the one on forging a new language for theatre, would be advanced during Tragedia Endogonidia. The scientific–mathematical model of language that they ironically employed in the ‘episode’ A.#02 Avignon, according to which Romeo and Claudia Castellucci made a goat ‘speak out’ the text of their tragedy, is an attempt to make tangible the etymological meaning of the Greek word tragodìa (which, being composed of the two words tragos, ‘goat’, and ode, ‘song’, literally means ‘goat's song’). Here a goat, an animal, unable to speak, becomes the author of the contemporary tragic text that finds its roots in the biological realm, prior to language:
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 . . . This will be the poetry of our tragedy. And the people will know that we have a poet who has written for us, and this poet is very old but alive. A poet whose poetry coincides with his rest.Footnote 76
Romeo Castellucci, in a scientific manner, explains the system they adopted in order to obtain the language-text of the goat: it is ‘an analogical system of recombination of phonemes’ taken ‘from the protein sequences precisely contained in the body of “that” goat’.Footnote 77 Romeo Castellucci illustrates the details of this new linguistic system as follows:
The sequences of the chosen amines are those respectively responsible for: 1) cell breathing, 2) horns' growth, 3) putrefaction. The sequences of the symbol-letters of each amino acid of the chosen proteins have been reproduced on three white carpets; the Poet [the goat] was free to graze on the diagram of the chosen letters. Its route sets a graph on the board. The graph draws a constellation of letters that, in turn, formulate a basic writing.Footnote 78
Their research into language, brought about through an iconoclastic approach, had reached a theoretical peak; the language, this time, appears to be completely detached from any kind of human legacy. The language of their theatre is not human any more, it is not perfect any more, it has become ‘animal’,Footnote 79 thus displaying a ‘suspension of the meaning’ where ‘the alphabet is corporeally linked to the body of an animal (not arbitrarily or metaphorically), the body of a goat’.Footnote 80 The scarification and designification of language thus occurs by reducing the language to its phonic origins – the letters of the alphabet – and not just the four words of La Generalissima. The language has become mechanical, cold and emotionless. Starting with the first episode of Tragedia Endogonidia, we see how language is reduced to its phonic origins, to the letters of the alphabet, which are often conveyed by mechanical devices. During the scene of the oracle in C.#01 Cesena, for instance, language has been stripped of its emotion to such an extent that statements are delivered by information boards. The disembodied sentences, caramba assassini (carabinieri are murderers), and nella piazza in cui sono nato oggi è morto un ragazzo (in the square where I was born, a young man died today), appear on a mechanical lettering device, similar to the old-fashioned information boards found in train stations. The information displayed by this clacking cascade of letters, disturbingly evocative to an Italian audience, refers to the murder of Carlo Giuliani, the young man killed by a carabiniere on Friday 20 July 2001, during the G8 Summit in Genoa. Another example is given by Matthew Causey's detailed description of the mechanized speaker of the episode BR.#04Bruxelles:
Upstage right is a flat, wooden, white, free-standing head and shoulders, approximately two feet high. The eyes and nose of the figure are black squares and the mouth a black rectangle. The eyes open and shut while it slowly speaks the alphabet, a few letters at a time. The opening of the eyes and the voice are radio-controlled from the sound booth by the director.Footnote 81
Claudia Castellucci's seminal theorization of the necessity for a negation of traditional language in the theatre, and her belief that every detail of a performance implies and reflects its performative whole, find their literal reflection in Tragedia Endogonidia. Writing about this project, she develops her theory of visual self-similarity, connecting it with the gaze of the spectator. Pointing out that each episode is primarily a visual happening, based on images and deprived of verbal coherence, she argues that each episode produces a new spectator, whose ‘episodic gaze can comprehend the whole project by seeing only one Episode’. She concludes that ‘it is the spectator's gaze that founds and shapes each Episode’.Footnote 82 Romeo Castellucci echoes his sister's theories when he claims that in Tragedia Endogonidia he was able to achieve, through the erasure of language, a universal freedom within a universal structure. ‘The universal is the simplest place possible to free oneself from narrative structure, from the burden of narrative, and thus also from the burden of the written word, from its visibility’, adding that ‘the word should go back to being invisible’.Footnote 83 What he calls ‘universal’ here is what his sister, in the 1980s, called ‘impersonal’.
Thus we can see that SRS have, throughout their early work, explored the main themes that would be developed in Tragedia Endogonidia. On the stage of the episodes anonymous figures populate a dream-like realm, a realm alien and secluded, while scrims and curtains limit the spectators' view, physically separating actors and audience. This contemporary expression of SRS's philosophy of the Big Separation, by detaching the audience from the performance, prevents any suspension of disbelief. SRS do not aim at the spectators' rational reasoning but at their unconscious. The lexicon of Tragedia Endogonidia, in fact, deeply affects the audience with its unsettling imagery; this is SRS's invisible word, the result of their iconoclastic attack on language.
