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ROMEO CASTELLUCCI
Looking for a gymnasium. A large room borrowed to to rehearse. A found place, without heating, accessed through the stench of locker rooms; a "wrong" place for theater. But no. A gymnasium, now, as an exact place, as the fulfillment of Hölderlin's heresy and unactual beauty. Hölderlin's poetry will be uttered in a gymnasium in clandestine form, outside the orthodox wiring of institutional theater. It is exercise, discipline, work on the present.
Witnessing the abstract sequence of an exercise, the elliptical of a silent gesture slicing through the air, or listening to the articulation of a verse as an affirmation, will mean contemplating an empty space, prepared precisely through the things seen and heard; achieving a space without content as a place of revelation. To renounce discourse; to seek absolute, inhuman elegance in form; to seek the glacial precision of a guarded aesthetic.
In the figurative light of the spectator's gaze everything will be judgment, possibility, being, in the Poet's own words. In Ancient Greece - to which Hölderlin turned throughout his life - the Gymnasium was the place of preparation of young men for athletic competitions. Young men, only after Gymnasium, ushered in adult life by being able to face war. In Hölderlin's prose we continually refer to youth, but not in anagraphic terms. So who is this adolescent, what does he want and what does he represent? The youth is theinactual, the one who does not live in his time, the one who by contrarium, is the contemporary and for whom everything is always new. He who will be entrusted with the task of speaking to this epoch from the deferred time of a representation. He will be the Empedocles, the heretic who leaves the city to climb the mountain and throw himself into the fire of being.
In the gymnasium, tentatively welcomed on high jump or artistic gymnastics cushions, one will be able to watch to a textual score-almost nothing more-tightly bound to Hölderlin'sThe Death of Empedocles. The group of characters in the tragedy will be played from a company of young women. Are they students at a school ?-or perhaps members of some women's community? Are they rehearsing a performance to behind closed doors? Only one thing seems certain: as they enter through the wrong door, the spectators surprise an action of theater that has all the air of being a rehearsal among adolescent girls deprived of means, but which of these contains all the stubborn determination to to consecrate poetry to theater.
Romeo Castellucci
_Gymnastics exercises _
_on _The Death of Empedocles _by Friedrich Hölderlin _
from Perform in a gymnasium.
by Romeo Castellucci
with Silvia Costa, Laura Dondoli, Irene Petris, Alice Torriani
and featuring **Vittoria Chiacchella, Federica Crispini, Evelin Facchini, Caterina Fiocchetti, Viviana Mancini, Maria Irene Minelli, Daphne Morelli, Elisa Turco Liveri, Cecilia Ventriglia, Giulia Zeetti **
Socìetas production
translation **Cesare Lievi **
Director, creator of sets, lights and costumes, Romeo Castellucci is known worldwide for giving life to to a theater founded on the totality of the arts and aimed to an integral perception of 'opera. He has also written numerous theoretical essays on directing. His theater proposes a dramaturgy that overturns the primacy of literature, making his theater a complex art form; a theater made of extraordinarily rich images expressed in a language as comprehensible as music, sculpture, painting or architecture. Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, the theater company created in 1981, is now internationally recognized as one of the most important for its radical aesthetic stance and the human depth of its creations.Since 2006, after the eleven performances of the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle, a monumental recapitulation of tragedy in contemporary Europe, Romeo Castellucci has also been working on individual projects, particularly in the operatic world. His stagings are regularly invited and produced by the most prestigious international theaters, festivals andopera theaters, in over fifty countries spanning all continents. Among his most recent creations: On the Concept of Face in the Son of God (2011), _Parsifal _by Richard Wagner (2011), The Four Seasons Restaurant (2012), _Hyperion _based on Friedrich Hölderlin (2013), Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph W. Gluck (2014), Neither by Morton Feldman (2014), _Le Sacre du Printemps _by Igor Stravinsky (2014), Ödipus der Tyrann by Friedrich Hölderlin (2015), and at the Opéra Bastille Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg (2015) Democracy in America (2017). He has received numerous awards and honors. In 1996, he was presented with the Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities, and in 2002 he received the honor of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Culture of the French Republic. In 2005, he was entrusted with the Direction of the Theater section of the Venice Biennale. In 2008, he was named "associate artist" from part of the artistic direction of the Festival d´Avignon for its 62nd edition. In 2010, Le Monde chose his trilogy Inferno. Purgatory. Paradiso, the only opera theater included among the most significant cultural events of the decade 2000 - 2010. In 2013, the Venice Biennale awarded him the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In 2014, the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna awarded him an honorary degree in Disciplines of Music and Theater. Opernwelt, the leading German periodical in the field of opera, awarded to Romeo Castellucci the 2014 Best Director Award. The Festival d´Automne à Paris, by presenting in each of the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 seasons three of his works as part of the "Portrait Biennale," has definitively consecrated him as one of the greatest artists of our time.
Originally from Treviso, she studied Visual and Performing Arts at the IUAV University of Venice. In 2006 she began to working with the Societas Raffaello Sanzio theater company founded from Romeo Castellucci and until 2020 Costa worked as an actress and artistic collaborator on most of the Cesena-based director's theatrical and operatic creations. At the same time she carries out her own artistic projects, developing since 2007 a kind of visual and poetic theater, nourished from a deep reflection around the role of images, their meaning and power on the spectator. From time to time author, director, performer and set designer, Silvia Costa is a protean artist who uses these different aesthetic fields to deepen her theatrical research. Her creations are regularly performed at major Italian and international festivals. From 2019 Costa starts to creating her own directions also for the world ofopera, in particular at the Stuttgart Staatsoper, Opera in Lille, Opera National de Lorraine, Philharmonie in Paris. Since 2020, he has been part of the ensemble artistique of the Comédie de Valence.