Societas Raffaello Sanzio: Polemics for a pre-tragic theatre

Seeking, Romeo Castellucci suggests, ‘to undermine all that is becoming dialectically and historically on stage’ (Castellucci, R. in Castellucci and Castellucci, 1992: 182) through the animal’s presence, Alla bellezza tanto antica provides for a radical development of the gesture of the Herald in I Miserabili. Where the Herald’s immobility and silence acquire significance as ‘a gesture of renunciation’, and so in his refusal to act out his rhetorical function, the animal’s presence evades these linguistic references, for, as Castellucci notes, ‘the animal is pure voice; it has no language: it has a tongue’ (Castellucci, R. in Castellucci and Castellucci, 1992: 182). In contrast to I Miserabili’s iconoclastic gesture, then, these animals, ‘who do nothing except for being there’ (Castellucci, R. in Castellucci and Castellucci, 1992: 183), suggest a pre-linguistic occupation of the stage; a presence which is ‘anti-theatrical’ in its resistance to and evasion of the drama’s rhetorical means. It is this capacity of the animal to remain out of place, in its inevitable lack of technique, that draws Castellucci to it. Writing of ‘The Animal Being On Stage’ (Castellucci, 2000), he remarks that:

On stage, the animal is comfortable (being not perfectible) in the confidence of its own body; at the same time it feels uncomfortable in its surroundings. The device of technique cannot be used by the animal, as it already possesses the greatest device: to be alienated on stage, immobile, in an alert state. (Castellucci, 2000: 26)

Such a ‘being on stage’, in its very otherness to the actor’s performance of rhetorical technique, serves to amplify and exacerbate the ‘double-ness’ in representation that Raffaello Sanzio’s work exposes. Yet the significance of the animal is clearly greater than this to Castellucci. In Alla bellezza tanto antica, not only do the company employ the presence of animals, but do so while taking recourse to fable for its anti-historical character (Castellucci, R. in Castellucci and Castellucci, 1992: 182). In both these respects, these departures allude to a concept of ‘pre-tragic’ theatre that further develops the company’s iconoclastic practice and provides the basis for their subsequent dialogue with classical texts. Emphasizing that ‘the theatre that I think is pre-tragedy’ (Castellucci, 1990: 5), Castellucci has written elsewhere that ‘in the moment that the animal disappeared from the scene, tragedy was born. The polemical gesture we make regarding Attic tragedy consists in bringing the animal back on stage’ (Castellucci, 2000: 24).

This ‘pre-tragic’ theatre alludes to a state that precedes the ‘double-ness’ of theatrical rhetoric and, implicitly, a ‘tongue’ which is other to the ‘silence’ of the Herald, which is a silence integral to speech. Reflecting Claudia Castellucci’s remark that key to Raffaello Sanzio’s work is the notion that ‘beyond the fiction of reality true reality is reached’ (Castellucci, C. in Palladini, 1989), this ‘polemical gesture’ approaches the image analogously to Carmelo Bene’s approach to the voice, in a ‘destruction of representation’ (Colomba: 1982: 106) and where theatre’s rhetoric, with regard to the animal, is ‘caught in the act of modifying and disappearing’ (Bene in Giacchè, 1997: 156–7). In this context, if ‘tragedy’ is ‘born’ in the self-reflexive, ‘double’ nature of rhetoric, the animal’s ‘being on stage’ suggests

a presence, often a phantom, which permeates matter and takes me away with it. Matter is the ultimate reality. It is understood as holding the least possible communication. This is what is of interest to me: to communicate as little as possible. (Castellucci, 2000: 23)

(Giannachi and Kaye 2002: 150-1)