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Italian director Romeo Castellucci founded the theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio with his sister, Claudia Castellucci, and wife, Chiara Guidi, in 1981. In the twenty five years since, the group has staged some of the most radical and controversial performances of the turn of this century.
Having come to the theatre after completing study at the University of Bologna and the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city, the company's foundations are firmly rooted in the visual arts. Their work has developed into a profound engagement with the ontology of the stage and the problematics of representation, a theatre of images and iconoclasm. Beginning in the 1990s the company produced works based on the classics of Western theatre, including productions of Hamlet, Julius Cesear, and the Oresteia. Other recent significant productions center upon the foundational texts of Occidental literature and culture - the epic of Gilgamesh (1990) and the biblical Genesis (1999). Over the past three years, the Societas has engaged in a rumination on tragedy called the Tragedia Endogonidia (see TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA), an eleven-part construction with numerous outgrowths that form a constantly mutating structure of performance.
At the same time, the company has engaged in a series of performances for children, based on archetypal tales such as Hansel and Gretel and Aesop's Fables. Under the leadership of Chiara Guidi, the Societas continued their research in this vein with the institution of a children's theatre experimental school in 1995 and 1997. The work produced here is chronicled in a publication by Chiara Guidi and Claudia Castellucci (see chronology of children's theatre).
The Societas Raffaello Sanzio bases its work in a profound sense of collaboration between its founding members and a consistent group of visual and sound artists. Romeo Castellucci directs the mise-en-scene, Chiara Guidi directs the acting and vocal work, and Claudia Castellucci constructs the dramaturgial structure of the pieces and the movement. In addition to theatre production, the Societas has presented performance concerts, installation pieces, works for video, and exhibitions visual art. Their engagement with the boundaries between the human, the animal, and the machine benefit from new technologies of representation, particularly in the field of sound design.
The company's provocative and controversial work has faced political censorship in their country of origin. In 1994 the Italian Ministry of Art and Culture sought to ban their productions and revoke their public support. In response, the company organized an International Convention on Theatre Censorship in their city of origin, Cesena, Italy. They were subsequently awarded the Ubu prize for resistance.
In 2000 Romeo Castellucci was singled out for the 7th Prix Europe-Nouvelles Réalités Théâtrales by the Union of Theatres of Europe and the European Theatre Convention and in 2002 he was selected as the associated artist of the Avignon Festival. This year he was named the festival director for the theatre arts division of the 2005 Venice Biennale.
This page will develop over the next few months into a gathering place for material concerning the company and its productions, most centrally the recent eleven-part Tragedia Endogonidia (2002-present), in anticipation of a visit by Romeo Castellucci to Stanford University in October of 2005. Please feel free to contact Daniel Sack (dsack@stanford.edu) for more information about the visit and surrounding events.
The company's website
http://www.raffaellosanzio.org
October 5th, 2005 The Film Cycle of the Tragedia Endogonidia (US premiere) a production of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio video memory by Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti (contains some disturbing imagery and is not suitable for children) The Stanford Humanities Center Stanford University, CA 5:30pm-11:30pm
October 10th, 2005 An illustrated lecture by Romeo Castellucci Pigott Theater, Memorial Hall Stanford Univerisy, CA 7pm-9pmThese events are sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the San Francisco Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Stanford University Division of Literatures, Languages & Cultures, the Stanford Classics Department, and the Stanford Department of Drama.
An archive of general critical and dramaturgical texts by the company
Chronology of Performance Work
See a list of previous productions
Chiara Guidi and Romeo Castellucci have co-directed a series of site-specific children's theatre performances since 1992.
See chronology of children's theatre
COLLABORATORS
Gibbons has worked with SRS for a number of years on projects ranging from theatrical sound design to performance concerts. His methods are unorthodox, at times manipulating the human voice, found noise, or the results of chance procedures through digital processing. In the 1999 production of Genesi: from the museum of sleep, for example, Gibbons translated the visual information from old photographs that the company had collected into sonic information. In the "Tragedia Endogonidia," some of the soundscape was based on the movement patterns of a live goat (see Letter about the Goat). Gibbons employs registers of sound on the cusp of human recognition, creating harmonic overtones and sub-sonic reverberations that approach material manifestations, disturbances of the air made substance.
http://www.red-noise.com
Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti: video/installation artists at work on the [film cycle] of the Tragedia Endogonidia.
Since 1999 they have worked with SRS on projects including Genesi: from the Museum of Sleep, Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Le pèlerin de la matière. Carloni and Franceschetti produce discrete elements of a work's mise en scene (projected film, dynamic lighting) as well as the filmed documentation of more recent projects. These latter collaborations, or video memories, are intended not as records of a closed system, an object of research, as much as a subjective recollection, the trace of the event. Their website contains video clips and images of their independent work as well as their (in Italian and English):
http://www.carloni-franceschetti.it
An image from Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Additional video material can be viewed under the "portfolio" section of http://www.domesticalabel.it
plastikart: an artists' group (istvan zimmermann, giovanna amoroso, and giuseppe amoroso) that has worked on the realization of several of the SRS designs. Their website contains some images of these productions as well as other collaborations.
http://www.plastikart.net/scenografia/index.php
Above a single piece created by plastikart used in the first part of Tragedia Endogonidia, A.#01. Filled with artificial blood and suspended from the ceiling in the middle of a large gold room, the form is inverted during the course of the performance, at once blurring the line between the internal and the external, the female and the male, into a single substance or skin.
CRITICISM AND THEORY
http://www.e-state.org.uk
An essay by Ehren Fordyce, a professor in the Drama department at Stanford University, approaches "whiteness" in work by SRS and other contemporary theatre groups.
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Genesi from the Museum of Sleep 1999:Agata, Sebastiano, Demetrio, Cosma Castellucci, Photo by Romeo Castellucci
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Tragedia Endogonidia B.#03 Berlin, 2003: Photo by Luca Del Pia
