Excerpts from an interview with Romeo Castellucci, Italian theater director and head of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Interview conducted with Christopher Allen after a performance of L. #09 London episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Aired on WKCR 89.9 fm as part of Commons Radio 9

Q: I want to start with a question about what we just experienced – this postshow discussion. Why do you think you are asked to do this?

RC: Maybe because the performance doesn’t present itself like an object. It’s not an object. Maybe there are some questions …maybe it is a question more than an answer. . maybe coming from this feeling of feeling lost. But it’s not the audience that is feeling lost. It’s me – I am feeling lost. Maybe because a performance reveals itself after one, two days. After one week. You don’t know immediately what to say. It’s a long wave. It’s not coming immediately.

Q: Can you talk about the source materials you use and how you work with them?

RC: So I work a lot with images. And each image – every image is like a river. So every image has a starting point and an ending point. But we don’t know where the ending point is. So every image has a story and a strength, a force, inside. And you need to enter in this flow and be taken by this flow that is in the image. And the force that is in an image. And the images, they are coming from everywhere. Of course painting – the history of painting. Sculpture. Architecture. But also the images of the people you see on the street. Or the images you have in the newspaper, magazines. And every image has to be taken into consideration. Is important.

Q: Why is your work concerned with the past? What elements of the past are you trying to bring into the present?

RC: For me, the past is always present in my work. But the past for me is amnesia. Is not remembering. And amnesia is the core of memory. And you can feel the past, because there is always an absence. There is always something that is missing. So the past is like a ruin. With a ruin you have always to build against something that is not there anymore. This rebuilding is the force of amnesia. The past is always hidden somewhere – it doesn’t show. And you can feel it because of the absence. So the project on the tragedy is based really on the absence of the tragedy. Because we don’t know what tragedy is anymore. So it’s work on the ruin of tragedy. What is left of tragedy – like a fragment.

Q: Why can’t we experience tragedy now?

RC: There are two reasons. The first one is that the experience of the ancient tragedy doesn’t belong to us anymore because we are cut out from that experience. Because we are not from Athens, we don’t know what tragedy is anymore. And we don’t have actually a full tragedy. We have the trilogy [Oedipus]. The only one is a trilogy. But we don’t have the fourth part. It’s missing. So we don’t know what really tragedy is. The second reason is that there’s not a common language anymore. There’s not anymore the logos, the word – it doesn’t exist. And it’s not possible anymore to have a chorus. The chorus is a metaphor of the society where people live. And there’s not a chorus anymore. And maybe this is characteristic of the tragedy of the future.

Q: In the work that we just saw, as you say, there are pieces missing – obviously missing. And you make it difficult for us to see much of what is going on onstage. At the same time, you tell the audience not to look. What’s the relationship between the audience not being able to see and the audience not looking?

RC: This is part of the tragedy. In the [ancient] tragedy you couldn’t see certain things. Certain things weren’t shown. They were obscene. That literally means out of the scene – outside the scene. Like all the bloody facts – all the events that had blood within – they weren’t shown. They were behind the scene and they were just told. Not to look is related to the obscene. Something that you don’t have to look [at]. But yet, you don’t have to look at something that is very important. Is the driving force of tragedy. The event that is making tragedy important is the event you don’t have to look at. So the dark that you don’t have to see, to look at, becomes the opposite. It becomes a flashlight. And with a flashlight, you cannot see because there is too much light.

Q: That leads me to a question about the tools you’re using. We see a lot of technical solutions and a lot of things moving that shouldn’t move and animated machines. And also, the staging is very literal. In the sense of curtains coming up in the back and covering parts of the stage. What are the limits of what you can do with these tools?

RC: Well the limit, the boundary – you have to go over it. So the boundary in this case is the theater itself. And you have to go over it. The theater is a sum of instruments. And the technical part in the theater has to become an uber-technical part. Something that is a step forward. After the theater. Over the theater. When the technical side of the performance becomes an uber-technical side, it becomes invisible. You cannot see it. The technical side is usually operated by ghosts. By spirits. By a specific spirit. And the ghosts are invisible.

Q: I have a question about your experience as an artist taking your work now to different cities around the world. Because there is an international theater economy and festival scene. Do you make your work for a global audience now? Or do you make your work for a local audience, or do you make it for another audience altogether? I guess the question is, who is your audience?

RC: There’s not a difference in the audience. And actually I am the audience. And I surprise myself. I find myself surprised by things that are happening. And maybe I’m like an audience who is seeing the work first. So I’m like a preview audience. But actually the reaction of the audience all around the world is very similar. There’s not a connection with a social state or social situation. And maybe it’s because these kinds of performances touch within the audience. So it’s not referring to a social status or social area. It’s really touching the person – the audience – inside. Maybe because intimacy is a new political matter.

Q: Just one more question - speaking of intimacy. I know that you work very closely with your wife and your sister and your children. And I think there’s something very wonderful about that. And I wonder what it means – and this may be a very personal question – but I what it means to work so personally, in an artistic way, with people you exist with in the rest of you life. Are there boundaries between the two?

RC: I don’t want to sound bad, but the fact that Chiara is my wife and Claaudia is my sister doesn’t mean anything. Of course there is a meaning – there should be a meaning. But I cannot understand how important it is to have my wife and my sister and my children working with me. It’s a way to work that is very separated. The writing is very intimate. And intimacy is something that you can’t divide, but you can feel together, share with the others.

In my work, words are not so important. We don’t need to talk. You talk with something else, but not with words. So I do the writing. Chiara, often with Scott, works with sound and voices. And Claudia, in some performances, is taking care of the movement. So it’s not so important that it’s a family. Maybe it became a family because there is a common language somewhere else.