Ecco la traduzione in inglese del testo che mi hai fornito:
Romeo Castellucci: What a Scandal, Theater at the Triennale in Milan
Repubblica, Bandettini
Above, Romeo Castellucci at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. On the left, his Orestea from 1995 (©_soukizy.com)
Until 2024, the director will be the museum’s “Grand Invité.” Here he talks about what he will do: “We start with my show Bros: 50 ‘policemen’ on stage to explore the mystery of violence.” January 25, 2021
Surprisingly, he didn’t take up residence in a theater, but in a museum. Romeo Castellucci will be at the Triennale in Milan, and it’s an extraordinarily promising development—especially since the president, Stefano Boeri, immediately invited him as “Grand Invité” starting January 2021, and continuing until 2024, so this is not just a one-off. It’s the first time in forty years of activity that a cultural institution in Italy has offered a role to the most prominent Italian director in Europe. An artist whose creations in musical theater and prose are always revelatory. This year, pandemic permitting, his Don Giovanni is expected in August at the Salzburg Festival, conducted by Teodor Currentzis, and now, of course, his projects in Milan. Here, “the most continuous engagement has been precisely with the Teatro della Triennale and its director Umberto Angelini,” says Castellucci, 60, from Cesena, tall and slim, with a warm smile, founder in 1981, together with his sister Claudia and Chiara Guidi, of Societas, the company with which he realized his persistent works: Orestea, Julius Caesar, Genesis, La Tragedia Endogonidia… which Giulio Boato’s film Theatron on Raiplay narrates intelligently.
Castellucci, what is the role of “Grand Invité”?
“To be invented. The Triennale is a place with a Renaissance character, which is rare in Italy, because it embraces different languages. I want to work on this specificity, which is also mine. With ideas, above all, dialogues with artists, to reaffirm a European cultural strength that has somewhat faded. Then with site-specific projects, co-productions, potential participation in the 23rd Exhibition in 2022, and with the Italian premieres of my works.”
Starting with the new show, the highly anticipated Bros.
“After its debut at the Kunsten Festival in Brussels and in Paris, it will be at the Triennale in November. It’s a work with a large number of participants—up to fifty non-professional actors, all men, and unaware of what will happen. So it changes with every performance. In police uniforms, they act according to instructions given in real-time through a sophisticated system of acoustic commands, delivered both individually and to the group, thus creating unexpected synchronies with effects that are unsettling but also comical.”
Is it a reflection on the concept of authority?
“Two years ago, I spent some time in Paris while it was militarized due to the Yellow Vest protests. The police presence appeared to me as a dark force, a primitive anthropological power, with totemic rules and a strong stratagem like the uniform. It’s undeniable that when I see a policeman, I think of violence, which can prevent but also inflict it. Yet the policeman is also Buster Keaton, and in this case produces the gag, the chaos. Bros is not a show about the police, but about us—a reflection on the thin space between order and free will, power and obedience, and the mystery of violence that cannot be ignored.”
Why are you always so interested in the theme of evil and violence?
“Because Western theater was born from anthropological pessimism, which has always marked Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and even Goldoni and comedy. The presence of evil among us is its subject. And even beauty, which is probably one of the possible salvations, comes from the clash with or discovery of this negligence of being. This is the lesson of the Greeks. The problem is not death, Sophocles said, but that we are born.”
And how do we deal with it?
“Art can free us for a moment—not because it changes the world, but because it makes vivid and conscious what we are. Art gives meaning to life. I cannot forget when, at 16, I saw Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and it was a shock. It contained the violence I needed, but with the rigor and discipline of form, it produced extremely powerful effects.”
Side effects?
“At the time, I was just an ordinary kid. I didn’t know what I wanted. I studied agriculture because I imagined I could live with animals—a possibility I didn’t completely discard. My sister Claudia studied art, and I began looking at her books. I fell in love with classical art, the Greeks, the Renaissance, Mannerism. My backbone isn’t theater, but that history of art. With Claudia and other friends, we spent days talking about theory, thinking that to influence reality, we had to undermine its pillars and that language was the central battlefield. Hence the iconoclasm of our early works, Santa Sofia, Kaputt Necropolis… For me, language, as both prison and the only tool we have to communicate, has always been the line of crisis that fuels my work. Today, with the communication world as the real power of control, it has become the problem.”
Who were your teachers?
“Grotowski, Carmelo Bene, who for a time came to rehearse in Cesena and we watched secretly; the Magazzini, with Punto di rottura, which was a shock. And then Bob Wilson, body art at the Performance Week organized by Renato Barilli and Francesca Alinovi… Bologna in the 1970s and 1980s was alive, vibrant. I, who had moved to the Academy of Art, was fully exposed to this electric atmosphere. Things happened, spaces were available—not like now, only rules and prohibitions.”
How do you see young people today?
“I’m curious to see what they do, with what strategies, because today demands a powerful originality to avoid disappearing. It’s a more difficult era than mine.”
Have you ever thought of starting a school?
“And to teach what? A method to do things well? But I want to make mistakes, surprise, not be recognizable. I want to touch, to scandalize. ‘Scandal’ is a beautiful word—it’s not about provocation, but about deep questioning. It forces a confrontation with oneself. So it is pleasure, emotion. And in theater, there is nothing more beautiful than crying.”
From Venerdì, January 22, 2021
Original Interview
https://www.repubblica.it/venerdi/2021/01/25/news/romeo_castellucci_intervista_societas_triennale_di_milano_bros-283055932/
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