Translated material
Blood on the border strip
"Territory" opened with a performance by Romeo Castellucci
The “Territory” festival, which declared one of its main goals to be the presentation of art existing in adjacent territories, began its program with the play Tragedia Endogonidia BR.#04 Brussel couldn't have imagined anything better. The author of this production, Italian Romeo Castellucci, who has the status of a radical and one of Europe's favorite festival directors, has an artistic education and creates his performances right on the border between theater and visual arts. It is no coincidence that Castellucci was the curator of the theater program of the last Venice Biennale.The play with such a complex name - Tragedia Endogonidia ("Tragedy born from itself") - is an eleven-part project, each chapter of which was made for one of the European cities. And it was started and completed in Cesena, where Castellucci and his theater “Society of Raphael” come from. The fourth part of the epic, made for Brussels, was brought to the “Territory” - a performance similar to a series of spectacular tableaus with no visible plot connection.
Castellucci - a visionary and intellectual (author of several books on theater theory, university lecturer and winner of numerous theater awards) - talks about his performances only in the most abstract categories, refuses to explain the meaning of their gloomy visions and assures that each viewer must find the him the key. It is difficult to say what it was like to perceive such art in a hall densely packed with students from creative universities from Russian cities who had come to the festival; it is unlikely that they had had such an experience before. But perhaps they too found some key to his cruel theater.
The paintings of the Brussels chapter of "Tragedy" lead from birth to death. The performance begins with a cleaning lady mopping the floor in a room that looks like a hospital: the floor and walls are lined with white tiles, and there are rows of fluorescent lamps under the ceiling. The woman only washes, nothing more, spraying from a spray bottle and carefully scrubbing off every spotted spot. After which the curtain closes. Scene two: in the middle of this cleaned room, a baby is sitting on a rug with a pacifier. At the back of the stage, a cardboard figure with a mechanically opening mouth pronounces letters. The baby gurgles and, groaning, tries to turn around towards interesting sounds. The curtain closes. An old man with a long gray beard enters. For some reason, he’s wearing a women’s floral swimsuit and slippers with rose pom-poms. In his performances, Castellucci often uses actors whose bodies cause shock with their physiology—the sick or the crippled. There is nothing unnatural about this old man, but it’s hard to look at the naked old body, the weak knees, the elastic bands of the bra cutting into the flabby stomach, the wandering, watery eyes. Taking things from a chair littered with rags, the old man begins to dress: first in multi-layered long white clothes with Hebrew letters and covers his head, like a Jew at prayer, with a shawl similar to a tales. Then, right on top of these clothes, he puts on a Russian police uniform - a blue shirt, tie, jacket with a Ministry of Internal Affairs badge on the sleeve. This can also be understood as a change in social roles, or as the complexity of a person who, under a guise visible to everyone, has a second layer and a third.
The central scenes of this performance look very topical to us, but Castellucci always emphasizes that his productions cannot be considered a commentary on current events, wars and other terrible phenomena of our time. Because tragedy is a property of life itself, regardless of where it takes place. In the central scenes of the fourth episode of “The Tragedy of Its Own,” three men in Russian police uniforms appear on stage. One of them pours a puddle of red thick juice from a bottle onto the clean floor. The second one strips down to his white swimming trunks, the other two policemen throw him into this puddle of “blood” and begin to beat him with batons to the roar of the multiply amplified sounds of the stick on his body. A naked man covered in sticky bloody clots is beating and writhing from blows, a red stain is spreading across the washed floor.
Apparently, Castellucci does not have any special hatred for the Russian police, and in every country where the Raphael Society plays this play, the theater buys costumes for local police officers. But it is impossible to escape from the relevance of this plot. The police put the bloodied man's body on a chair and place a microphone in front of it, but it only shudders, making indistinct gurgling sounds. Then they put him in a black garbage bag, throw a microphone next to him on the floor, and from the bag we clearly hear the words of the prayer to the Mother of God: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women...”
There was also the death of an old policeman who literally disappeared, dissolved in his hospital bed. And slow dark pictures, like a dream: the appearance of a small Black man - a child in a black suit, top hat and mask with a huge horn sticking out from the side. Two black women cutting their hair like tow. A piece of raw meat thrown next to a body huddled in a bag. This meat is then carried away on a rope by the Black Child.
What these pictures mean is anyone’s guess; some people find them very annoying and seem pretentious, while others perceive them just as intuitively, which is how most of these images were apparently born. In an old interview, Castellucci said: “It’s more of a game of nerves. Intelligence is too slow." In any case, it is impressive, repulsive and very beautiful. Designer beautiful, glossy beautiful. A very relevant combination for contemporary art.