Tuesday, June 22 & Wednesday, June 23 at 9 pm
Zagreb Youth Theatre, Teslina 7
SOCIETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO CESENA, ITALY
BR. #04 Bruxelles - Brussel, Tragedia Endogonidia

Societas Raffaello Sanzio, that is nowaday's one of the world's definitively leading theatre companies, was founded in 1981 in Cesena by a group of young uncompromising artists who, after education in the arts and sciences, entered into theatre, video and film, and more specifically plastic and written meditation. The beginning of their work can be defined as an iconoclastic theatre which distances itself from traditional scene setting and inclines towards a more inventive poetic of non-figurative energy, both powerful and refined at the same time, relating sacral, mostly Byzantine iconography, within natural spaces and elements.

The group aesthetic, supported by the rich diversity of the talents of their members, is related to a nostalgic appeal which simultaneously leads towards ritual violence and sacredness: a space of considerable dramaturgic splits in which a sense of depth becomes an intelligible participant presents something exceptionally disturbing and unique in the contemporary theatre scene.

Their last universal successes include the performances Giulio Cesare, Genesi from the Museum of Sleep, Voyage au bout de la nuit and Il Combattimento. All are guided by relations that direct to uncertain possibilities of presentation which are exposed as topos of contradiction and symbolization through the role of an inherent witness. This witness is the spectator; in each of their realizations s/he witnesses an inexplicable, inexorable spreading of symbolic and experimental power.

2004 marks the fourth visit of Societas Raffaello Sanzio to Eurokaz. After they introduced themselves to Zagreb’s audience in 1989 with the show Saint Sofia and I'm Aware Of Hatred You Nurture For Me and Gilgamesh in 1991, they presented Masoch in 1993. This year they are coming with the fourth Brussels episode of the cycle Tragedia Endogonidia.

The cycle Tragedia Endogonidia started in January 2002 in Cesena, Italy, the hometown of Societas Raffallo Sanzio and director Romeo Castellucci, that is in a way a Bayreuth of contemporary Italian theatre. This dramatic cycle that has been developed in eleven separate episodes linked to ten European cities, will end in October 2004 with its final eleventh episode in Cesena, the same place where it begun. The Brussels KunstenFESTIVALdesArts produced the fourth episode of the tragic, after Avignon and Berlin, and before Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London and Marseilles.

Tragedy is obscure, but the obscurity of humans doesn’t come from an academic contemplation of the tragic, but rather from an intrapersonal cognition /com/prehen/sion of the body that maintains absolute power over the individual. Tragedy doesn’t recall religious phantasms and there is not death in her nucleus but the scandal of birth. The birthplace of tragedy is at the spot where the experience of the world falls apart, from the level of contemplation to the problem of scientific axiology.

Tragedia Endogonidia is conceived as an open presentation, constantly changing its directions during three production years and showing different levels of development that delay its end. The fourth Brussels episode, that will be presented in Zagreb this year, introduces new figures in its schedule of displaced humanity. These characters are linked to the theme of duration by teasing the enigma of beginning, birth, initiating language and being swallowed by the abyss of time. In the white marble decoration of the hall lit with six neon lights, Castellucci builds the show on a double axis: human bodies in their evolution - alive and elevated against bodies divided by past and imposed frames of law and language.

Castellucci’s cycle deals with different tragic parameters in each episode - chorus, sacrificial lamb, protagonists, fire, time… With the return of figures, the themes are adapted to different angles, the axis are determined approximately; the show creates rows of specific allusions. But here there is no death of the hero, nothing that generates resolution or calm.

The cycle is presented as an inventive process without shades or ellipses. It’s a dramatic system with a strong component of development, and episodes represent degrees of change. Tragedy is created without chorus or his comments and insights; it refers to those simple living beings that with their gonads unceasingly follow a direction of fearless immortality.

http://www.raffaellosanzio.org/