Michael Shanks - site 2006: TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The working cycle includes a first base in Cesena, with the auto-generation of a chain of images (tragedia endo-gonidia) from which a series of spores will depart in order to be collected by other "bases".

These spores in their turn will give rise to individual tragic units. These units (which will be identified with the name of the city hosting them: Roma 09, Madrid 12) will have an impact on the following "base".

This will not be a process of accumulation, but rather of living transformation.

A + B shall not equal AB
A + B shall equal C

The general structure is a sequence which includes a transmigration of forms inside itself.
It will be a process of evolution. There will not be many performances, there will not be one large performance. The final result will be an organism which is on the run.

The shape's reacting and changing speed becomes a necessary strategy in order to support the scope of this age.

-Romeo Castellucci, Tragedia Endogonidia, C.#01

There isn't a finished or closed performance any more, one piece that goes on tour, but the world, its cosmopolitan areas, they are now calling the theatre to adhere to a continuous exodus, starting from its dramatic structure, that cannot be closed, but only arranged in such a way that it can change its morphology. The aim of the Endogonidic Tragedy isn't the final result, but the passages that are the accomplished acts of a transformation and of a truth that is already ripe today.

-Claudia Castellucci, Tragedia Endogonidia, C.#01

The Tragedia Endogonidia is a sequence of eleven episodes that were performed in ten European cities between January 2002 and December 2004. Both the first and the last episode were staged in the Northern Italian city of Cesena, where the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is based. Thus the progression and transformation from place to place came full circle, returning to its origin a changed, but related incarnation. In addition to the eleven numbered parts of the epic, a series of unique one-time performances called 'crescita' act as extensions or tendrils branching off the central parts. The pieces of the Tragedia continue to be performed throughout the European continent and new crescita evolve as the echoes of new places of time and space.

The filmmakers Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti have been collaborating with SRS to produce a five-hour "video memory" of the Tragedia Endogonidia. This work is not a documentation of the entire performance as much as an interpretation or collage of memories. Performance privleges the passing moment, the ephemerality of an experience that happens in the present tense. In response to this ontology of performance, Carloni and Franceschetti's video becomes an object in itself, its own eventful transformation of the base material.

The re-performances of the individual completed parts are presented in locations other than the original site of their premiere, but each maintains its identity in correspondence to the particular place of its becoming. Joe Kelleher writes: "Throughout the Tragedia sequence, as each episode is brought to its designated city, there is a process at work that is akin to a scratching at the sores of European memory and identity. ... The sequence itself is conceived as a shape-changing and self-producing structure, after the fashion of an endogenous organism. Each episode, each image, is generated out of whatever is already immanent in the material to hand; the possibility of an experience re-expressing itself, concretising itself, as an altogether new conception, according to the pressures of a new climate, the inflexions of an unfamiliar idiom, and the measures of a local-as opposed to a standard-time." (Kelleher, 193-194)

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