Romeo Castellucci Director

Romeo Castellucci was born in Cesena (Italy) and studied painting and scenography at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts. In 1981, he created the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio with his sister Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi. productions he created for that company, be it as a writer a director, a costume designer, a set designer or a lighting designer have been staged at prestigious festivals and theatres all over the world. His work is characterized by dramaturgical lines that distance themselves from the primacy of the literary text in favour of a more complex and visually rich territory. His productions include Sul concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio (2011), The Four Seasons Restaurant (2012), Hyperion, Briefe eines Terroristen after Friedrich Hölderlin (2013), Ödipus der Tyrann (2015), and Democracy in America (2017) to cite but a few of his most recent creations. Drawing on his personal experiences, he has written several theoretical texts on his conception of theatre and directing. An “associate artist at the Avignon Festival in 2008, Romeo Castellucci has received numerous honours and distinctions including the Prix Europe for Theatre in 1998 and a Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale in celebration of his entire body of work. He was also made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2002.
He made his opera debut at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2011 with Parsifal, followed by Orphée et Eurydice (Gluck / Berlioz) in 2014. He then staged Neither (Morton Feldman) and The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) at the Ruhrtriennale, Moses und Aron (Schönberg) at the Paris Opera (and later at the Teatro Real in Madrid), Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Honegger) at the Lyon Opera, Tannhäuser at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Das Floss der Medusa (Henze) at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, Salomé (Strauss) at the 2018 Salzburg Festival and, most recently, Die Zauberflöte at La Monnaie in Brussels. This season, he presented the installation-performance La Vita nuova at the KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels.