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The theater group Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered an indisputable benchmark in the contemporary Western theater scene. Their work is based on a search for the limits of representation. It also opens up on other essential themes such as the questioning of language, the recasting of tragedy in a world whose paradigms present a post-dramatic character and a reflection on topicality of the myth or reality in relation to art. This work aims to analyze the new forms of artistic expression that the Italian group has put in place since the 80s until today by discovering another way of conceiving the theatrical scene and, therefore, another temporal perception of our world.

Hoy resuena incómoda aquella performance de les Castellucci a la que asistí con muchas otras personas en 2019, porque este ahora de pandemia enlaza tiempos. Y "Ethica. Natura e origine della mente" reclama pensar –desde Spinoza, Romeo y Claudia Castellucci– situándonos en nuestro momento de cortes y cese del movimiento acostumbrado. En este trabajo de concatenar imágenes trataré de no ceder a la gravedad del tema filosófico ni a la incomprensión ante ciertos significantes, o la dificultad que traen las alegorías a las que Romeo Castellucci alude en entrevistas. Esta performance nos desafía, pareciera que hubiese anticipado la experiencia inusual de nuestros cuerpos, los que desde hace más de un año penden en el extenso territorio mundial, con una oscilación entre el escuchar el lenguaje, el aullido, mirar la luz eléctrica, sus parpadeos en la virtualidad de las pantallas y sentir la brutal animalidad de ciertas interacciones. Atrae articular la performance con la traducción de las figuras de la Luz y de la Cámara, triangulando con nuestras incertezas, entre la vida y la muerte. “Si el cuerpo humano ha sido afectado una vez por dos o más cuerpos al mismo tiempo, cuando la mente imagine después luego a uno de ellos, al instante recordará también los otros” (Spinoza, Ética, II, 2020: 133. Cursivas del texto).

When ‘scandal’ becomes provocation The postsecular and Romeo Castellucci’s theatre of iconoclasm Romeo Castellucci’s performance On the Concept of the Face Regarding the Son of God has led to a series of violent protests coordinated by Catholic groups in France (Paris 2011, Le Mans 2018) and Italy (Milan 2012) and has been judged as being blasphemous and ‘Christianophobic'. Castellucci in the media has defended his piece using biblical terms and advocating his artistic right to create ‘scandal’. This contribution intends to investigate the limits between provocation and ‘scandal’ with the help of a work of art that adoperates consciously an ‘iconoclash’ (Latour 2002) montage between avant-garde transgression and the symbolic code of Catholicism. While the freedom of artistic expression enjoys the protection of the state, this ‘natural’ right is put into question by the postsecular ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere (Habermas 2006). The analysis of the Catholic protests against Castellucci’s piece and the director’s aesthetic and ethical goals, both show how the configuration of postsecular art becomes part of the ‘denaturalization’ of secular and religious normativity in postsecular society (Parmaksız 2018).

The conversation about the director’s changing identity, as our century gallops towards or stumbles through challenges that few could have anticipated even a few years—let alone months—ago is becoming all the more complex. Today, directing practice has crossed many disciplines, methodologies and ecologies of theatre-making. My article sets out to explore some emergent dynamics that reflect the director’s role within the current performance landscape; a landscape in which directorial jurisdictions are no longer contained within the realm of pre-scripted dramatic plays and one which engages with unconventional performance environments framed by the proliferation of intermedial forms, intercultural collaborations and a variety of human and nonhuman (im)materialities. In so doing, I will set out to locate the shift from perceiving the director commonly as the production’s single uncontested authority to an agent of symbiotic meaning making.

While being affected, as the processural embodiment of emotions, is often seen with positive bias and as a literary or aesthetic quality, I will argue that affectivity is not restricted to emotive or aesthetical happenings, but that it opens ways to share ideologies through narratives. Due to affects that audiences experience, they can evolve into a state of being morally off-guard due to the profound emotive response to certain dramatic elements. Heroic elements in narratives seem to amplify such uncritical acceptance of both behaviour and ideologies. They allow audiences to embrace ideas they might otherwise reject because of their allegiance to heroized figures. The article elaborates on this specific ideological element of spectatorship and discusses it within the field of performing arts by making reference to the work of, among others, The Panic Movement, Jerzy Grotowski and Romeo Castellucci. I will analyse the strategies employed in performing arts to create affective experiences, such as mirror neurons, transparency, shock effects or alienating effects. The article combines insights from the research field of spectatorship and morality, as affect allows audiences to side with ideologies they would normally oppose. I argue that affect is not only a highway to the heart of audiences but can simultaneously be a silencer for the moral mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of nomadology, which can be used as the basis for an ontological and aesthetic alternative to our understanding of representational theatre. Referring to different meanings of nomadology, the essay argues for the notion of nomadic performativity, which can be applied to recent non-representational performative practices. For this purpose the essay makes an indirect comparison between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical ideas and their sporadic insights into art, such as Francis Bacon's paintings and Antonin Artaud's theatre. Deleuze discusses theatre in "One Less Manifesto", his only text directly dedicated to theatre and to Carmelo Bene's productions. Referring to the structural deformations in Bene's work, Deleuze argues for non-representational theatre, based not on representation and identity but on continuous variation and differentiation. In other words, if theatre as a form of representation creates a striated and hierarchized space that embodies and increases power, the non-representational theatre creates a nomadic smooth space of continuous variation, which transposes everything into a constant becoming. In this respect nomadic performativity covers these meanings: first, it is a distribution of intensities, which come to replace forms, bonds, organized hierarchies; second, it refers to fusional multiplicities rather than self-identical subjects; and third, it opens up the potential for change and "becoming-minor" instead of representing major figures of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as a means to sketch out what I would like to call a theatre of the 'abject/sublime'. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the sublime, which requires nothing less than the acknowledgment of the moral law by the subject, I will situate Castellucci's work within a reading of the 'sublime' that embraces the failure of the subject to achieve transcendence. By this I mean the subject fails to achieve the kind of ethical autonomy that Kant's radical sublime demands. Instead, I propose to interpret Castellucci's work in two 'heteronymous' ways: firstly, in light of Kristeva's dictum that the 'abject is edged with the sublime', and secondly, in terms of Levinas' claim that the face is nothing less than the 'infinite which blinks' (OB: 93). What results, I argue, is a theatre of 'failed transcendence', in which Castellucci's 'face' of God, returned to the abject condition of its own corporeality, marks the traumatic site of the ethical demand.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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