Crescita XII Avignon

While they were students at the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna in Italy, Claudia and Romeo Castellucci and Chiara Guidi set up the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio in Cesena in 1981 as a place for artistic work mixing theatre, video, sculpture, writing and painting. Heavily influenced by their encounter with actor-director Carmelo Bene, they produce iconoclastic theatre composed of tableaux, of images, of physical performance by actors for whom the text has a secondary role, and whose want to address, most of all, the audience's feelings rather than their intellect. They centred their first artistic productions around major myths from Mesopotamia, the birthplace of writing, such as Gilgamesh and Innanna. From 1992, they made their way back to the European classics, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and The Orestes, their handling of these stories always challenging the audience, in order that they become one of the driving forces of the performance. Genesi, from the Museum of Sleep sees Romeo Castellucci confront our history's biblical origins and the Book of Books. Crime becomes the original act and evil the origin of art. This is a radical production where "nuclear" and radiant images, produce theatre unlike any other, and which is spreading across the whole of Europe in the eleven episodes of "La Tragedia Endogonidia" which began in 2001. The Societas Raffaello Sanzio's previous presentations at the Avignon Festival are Giulio Cesare in 1996, Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, a concerto adapted from the work of Céline in 1999, Genesi in 2000, one episode of the "Tragedia Engononidia" cycle, A.#02 Avignon and an exhibition of Romeo Castellucci's work in 2002.
In the colossal work,"Tragédia Endogonidia" Romeo Castellucci has chosen to single out moments or objects or sounds or gestures to show them as developments stemming from the original work, like outgrowths that, for one brief instant, would have an independent life. As if one looked through a magnifying glass to make the features bigger and draw particular attention to them, to focus on what could appear to be fleeting in the performance itself. Highly dependent on the place where they will be shown, these performances, called "Crescite", throw a particular light on this unprecedented threatrical experience.

by : Romeo Castellucci
Original music : Scott Gibbons
Composition dramatique : Chiara Guidi
Trajectoires et écritures : Claudia Castellucci