The Regenerative Ruination of Romeo Castellucci

Abstract

This article proposes an expanded understanding of Romeo Castellucci's radical performance work as a genuine theatre of ruins. While various scholars have already addressed the iconoclastic desire of Castellucci and his company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio to break with existing traditions in the history of art and theatre, less noted is the manner in which they exploit ruination not only as a gesture of destruction but also as an act of creation. In this essay, we uncover this often overlooked aspect in Castellucci's oeuvre by demonstrating how his reliance on ruins as a structural element of creation goes against the prevalent view that ruination equals the disintegrating loss of a material world. We first undertake a critical reading of the dominant discourse on the theatre of SRS, highlighting those ideas that may be suggestive of a more ambivalent model of ruination but which need to be further elaborated in order to understand how Castellucci's work discloses a particularly constructive side to the notion of the ruin. To this end, the notebooks of Castellucci provide crucial yet largely unexplored resources that, by charting the preparations and conceptions of his pieces, exemplify what role the ruin plays in Castellucci's aesthetics. Analysing a representative sample of Castellucci's notes, we elucidate how these documents visualize what Castellucci calls the “via negativa” of his creative process. As a sculptor who chisels statues out of stone, he works according to a procedure of elimination, filtering out those scraps and fragments that eventually make up the ruinous landscapes of his productions. In Castellucci's hands, we argue, the ruin becomes profoundly ambiguous, as it hovers between the hostilities of destruction and the potentialities of resurrection. But it is precisely this complexity that may explain the powerful appeal of Castellucci's ruinous theatre to contemporary audiences.

Notes

1. Claudia Castellucci is the sibling of Romeo Castellucci and generally regarded as the ‘intellectual’ drive behind the work of SRS. The essay that Novati quotes from is a text written by Claudia Castellucci in 1983, enigmatically titled ‘OAO’.

2. Next to Badiou, there are of course several other philosophers who have dealt with the concept of the void, ranging from Aristotle to Spinoza, Leibniz, Althusser and Derrida, among others. The rich philosophical discourse on the void would therefore provide an interesting lens to analyse the work of Castellucci in a more elaborate manner than we are able to offer here.

3. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant deals with this distinction most extensively in the second division called ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ (1998 [1781]: 384–623).

4. The Tragedia Endogonidia comprised eleven parts, each created in a different European city: C.#01, Cesena / A.#02, Avignon / B.#03, Berlin / BR.#04, Brussels / BN.#05, Bergen / P.#06, Paris / R.#07, Rome / S.#08, Strasbourg / L.#09, London / M.#10, Marseille / C.#11, Cesena.

5. The analysis of Romeo Castellucci's notebooks offered in the following section would not have been possible without his generous permission to consult and take photographs of these personal documents. We expressly thank him and Silvia Costa for granting us access to these invaluable resources.

6. The images of Romeo Castellucci's notes included here were digitized by Project ARCH: Archival Research and Cultural Heritage: The Theatre Archive of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, University of Athens – Aristeia II. The ARCH research project has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF).

7. The most famous text in which Diderot expresses his appraisal of the ruin is his ‘Salon of 1767’, in which he claims that ‘a palace must be in ruins to evoke any interest’ since only then it invites to ‘contemplate the ravages of time’ (Diderot cited in Brewer 2008: 186). Diderot's interest in ruins was prompted by the paintings of Hubert Robert, who came to be known as ‘Robert of Ruins’.