La Divina Commedia
If The Divine Comedy is a text that has accompanied Romeo Castellucci since his adolescence, he does not show a literal “adaptation” of it. His work is inspired by this text, as he writes in his working notes: “Read, reread, dilate, hammer at and study in depth The Divine Comedy so that it can be forgotten. Absorb it through the epidermis. Let it dry on me like a wet shirt”. But he especially aims at “becoming” Dante: “In this sense, being Dante. Taking on his behaviour as the start of a journey to the unknown.” The Divine Comedy is a sacred poem by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), comprised of three parts, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise), each composed of 33 canti plus an introductory canto. In all, there are 100 canti, nearly 150,000 verses, written between 1307 and 1319 when, at the end of his life, Dante finished his work, both relieved and melancholic. The Divine Comedy was composed at the same time as the installation of the papacy in Avignon and therefore as the construction of the first Popes' Palace. The Divine Comedy is more than a literary monument for Western culture: it is a reference. Even for those who have never read it, this text makes sense and seems like a mythic country in which you visit the underworld dreading its punishments, in which you go through paradise hoping for its joys. Many writers and artists have been fascinated by this text, its images, visions, hallucinations, the breadth of its registers (amorous, mystical, erudite, allegorical, political, poetical...) and many have wanted to translate it to better assimilate its treasures (Dumas, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Nerval, Lautréamont, to mention just a few). Romeo Castellucci attempts to “hurl down The Divine Comedy on the earth of a stage”. He offers the spectator, in three stages and at three venues of the Festival, a crossing, the experience of a Divine Comedy.
Romeo Castellucci has installed his paradise on the grounds of the église des Célestins, between the old walls. The spectator who freely roams through this space enters his own intimacy, a process shaped by silent contemplation, by light that, from blinding, becomes dim, by a host of reflections, by omnipresent sounds. It is a paradoxical world, without any incarnation: in Inferno, man is excluded from the elect, here he is excluded from the world, condemned to wander in an incorporeal, faceless universe without matter, a place of pure light and limitless sounds, totally devoted to the sole glory of God the creator. “I think that it is the most terrible canto,” Castellucci points out regarding Dante's Paradise, “a form of reversed exclusion and not a welcome!” Everything is focused on the canto of divine glory, to such a degree that the spectators' bodies seem to dissolve in the light, the sounds and the reflections as though they were losing their substance in a clarity so intense that it absorbs everything, that it was now impossible for anyone to distinguish the place's perspectives, the proportions of things, the consistency of the objects. Any psychology and any subjectivity seem to be challenged. It is there, in this path taken through the église des Célestins that each spectator is proposed a question: what is his political, social place, faced with the malfunctioning of existence?
Distribution
Mise en scène, scénographie, lumières et costumes Romeo Castellucci
Musique originale Scott Gibbons
Collaboration à la scénographie Giacomo Strada
Sculptures en scène Istvan Zimmermann, Giovanna Amoroso
Réalisation des costumes Gabriella Battistini
Avec Dario Boldrini, Diego Donna, Michelangelo Miccolis, Norma Santi, Irene Turri
Production Gilda Biasini, Benedetta Briglia, Cosetta Nicolini
Production
Production de la Trilogie Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Festival d'Avignon, Le Maillon-Théâtre de Strasbourg, Théâtre Auditorium de Poitiers - Scène nationale, Opéra de Dijon, barbicanbite09 (Londres)
Dans le cadre du Spill Festival 2009, de Singel (Anvers), Kunstenfestivaldesarts /La Monnaie (Bruxelles), Festival d'Athènes, UCLA Live (Los Angeles), Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione (Modène), La Bâtie-Festival de Genève, Nam June Paik Art Center /Gyeonggi-do (Corée), Vilnius Capitale européenne de la Culture 09, “Sirenos”–Festival international de théâtre de Vilnius, Cankarjev dom (Ljubljana), F/T 09 –Tokyo International Arts Festival avec le soutien: du ministère italien du Patrimoine et des Activités culturelles, de la Région Émilie-Romagne et de la Ville de Cesena avec l'aide du programme Culture (2007-2013) de l'Union européenne
Remerciements à Comune di Senigallia-Assessorato alla Cultura / AMAT