Romeo Castellucci, a “Rite” to the bone – Liberation

Castellucci convenes hallucinations. Small red lights robots hanging on hangers, first. Rain hair, then ash jets, ground (mortuary gestures) or dust ejaculations. Atmospheres ocher, green, pink, gray. The Rite of Spring Stravinsky plays on tape, digital sound, not very comfortable. The original fire fireworks stamps disappears into the muted violence of amplification.

The part of the Italian film director was created Ruhrtriennale last summer. It includes forty computer-controlled machines that rotate on themselves, slide on rails, like mini-mixers and pulsate rhythmically white powder. He is known about the ballet scandal (for his musical novelty, not in theme) in 1913: old sages sitting around a girl sacrifice to appease the god of Spring. She dances to death in the middle of the meeting. The partition is divided into two main sections: the “Kiss the Earth” and the “great sacrifice”. Castellucci has somehow figured that kiss in the middle of the show: once spilled dust, earth literally swells (mouth, vulva, crater), while the robots down by breaking the corolla which organized and are glued to this protuberance vergetée , stick to it for a moment before rising.

The Coronation Castellucci according to Ruhrtriennale in August 2014 (in German)

Obviously, the video gives a very pale idea of ​​theater puppets castelluccien: “This is to break, to atomize the dancers’ says the director, in order to regain “idea of ​​our time” , the industrialization of everything, from a technological relationship to nature. But this report machinic with his coldness and his apparent insensitivity, is not nothing. It produces, as would say Kleist, an infinite grace

For 34 minutes flat, ballet evokes both destruction and construction (sputtering and deposition of the dust according to programmed arabesques), a fascinating carnage dry which is to last as long as the capacity of the concrete mixers but actually seems to have no end: in fact, the room did closes and spectators not leave the room without the curtain has actually fallen. First tentatively, one by one, then by entire rows, tearing a post-apocalyptic setting free from the period.

Attention spoiler

After the last jets propelled against the plastic window separating the scene of the audience, the curtain falls (he then falls for an infinite coda, so) and surtitles are projected to the sound of “sacred dance”. Where we learn that the material used for this ballet is the bone ash. The text details the production process, from carcasses of guaranteed good slaughterhouses for human consumption. It took 75 cows for the show, says one. The effect of disgust or discomfort, ambiance “eat your dead,” is almost guaranteed. We wanted the consecration, sacrifice, we are. But this ash is used as fertilizer. So death is fertile.

This is the usual theme of stillbirth among Castellucci, but that was born dead, a certain idea of ​​productive discarded. Shit and blood in Sul concetto nel figlio di volto di Dio , ghost abortion in Go Down, Moses , … It is that, as stated in the release in 2012, “Everything must go, language, artist, body and even the end frame. [...] After that, you can . enter another hole, the cave that is poetry “ Ironically, the hole disappeared, never arrives at Castellucci: there is always an embarrassing waste, erasure is not cleared, but instead exhibited. It is certainly productive, but the past.

At the end of Sacre , actors in atomic combinations come sweep the bone ash, pick up pieces of carcasses. Such non-compliance must obviously be felt as a motor rather than a failure.

Romeo Castellucci explained, in his The Rite of Spring (with subtitles English)