Croatian House of Culture in Sušak, Gallery Kortil - 4.5. at 20:00 h
Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Cesena, Italy
ON THE CONCEPT OF THE FACE OF THE SON OF GOD
Concept i direction: Romeo Castellucci
Art assistent: Giacomo Strada
Sound: Marco Canali, Matteo Braglia
Light: Fabio Berselli, Luciano Trebbi
Prodution: Societas Raffaello Sanzio
Co production: Athens Festival, Barbican London and SPILL Festival of Performance, BITEF, Chekhov International Theatre Festival / Moscow, deSingel international arts campus / Antwerp, Festival d’Avignon, GREC 2011 Festival de Barcelona, Holland Festival / Amsterdam, International Theatre Festival DIALOG Wroclav / Poland, Le-Maillon, Peak Performances @ Montclair State-USA, Romaeuropa Festival, spielzeit europa I Berliner Festspiele, TAP Théâtre Auditorium de Poitiers- Scčne Nationale, The National Theatre / Oslo Norway, Theater der Welt 2010, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Théâtre de Strasbourg / Scčne Européenne, Theatre festival SPIELART München, Théâtre National de Bretagne / Rennes 2011.
Cast: Gianni Piazzi, Sergio Scarlatella te Dario Boldrini, Vito Matera i Silvano Voltolina
The theatre group led by the charismatic Romeo Castellucci leaves no one lukewarm, and his performances are either adored or vehemently contested. The performance that we are going to see in Rijeka was first performed in 2011, and it has after that provoked a scandal, smaller or bigger, wherever it was performed around the world.
If we are made in the image of God, is there anything sacred in man if what we disappear into is but the disintegration of the flesh? The performance On the concept of the face, regarding the son of God by Societas Raffaello Sanzio, a famous theatre group that had first performed outside of Italy in 1989 at Eurokaz Festival, explores this liminal areas between the sacral and the profane, the physical and the transcendental, the human and the godlike.
The performance On the concept of the face, regarding the son of God, imagined and staged by Romeo Castellucci, like all of his projects, with their equivocations, arouses anxiety and controversies. At first degree, the performance juxtaposes the projected face of the Son of God from a relatively unknown painting "Salvator Mundi" by the Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina, and a hyper-realistic scene going on in front of the canvas. On a vertical line going from the lowest physical to the sublime and the transcendental, Romeo Castellucci develops a metaphor which opens the wound of the deepest existential questions. The performance has a certain hidden tone and the ruse of a trap that catches the spectator who expects the theatre to be spiritually articulated as a strategy. The face from the canvas stares straight at us, so that we as the audience are observed and almost controlled. The gaze is simultaneously indulgent and ironic, but also cruelly disinterested in worldly sufferings, in the disintegration of an old-man's body shown at the stage doing everyday, justified and connected actions. Yet, we can count on commiseration in this gaze, raising the metaphysical meaning of the embarrassing trivialities of the first setup.