He has that elegant appearance, that inner dialogue with civilisation and its earliest texts, and then that solemn vision of human nature which stirs melancholy in others.

But with Romeo Castellucci, that solemnity tends towards a living salutary emotion revealed in each of his productions. “I really like to cry” he admits in a corridor of the Palais Garnier a week before the premiere. “I cry at different works of art. I cry at Buster Keaton”. Castellucci smiles for a moment. He is tired. Work advances but the production is not yet complete and probably won’t be until the last moment, when the paintings that succeed one another on stage are arranged with precision as anticipated under his watchful eye and in the way he has long conceived them: “I’d say we’re halfway through part one, so no, we haven’t finished”, he tells me calmly.   

We have known for at least twenty years that Romeo Castellucci creates works as both a visual artist and a man of the theatre. His Die Zauberflöte, presented last October at La Monnaie in Brussels, or his ground-breaking Moses und Aron at the Opéra Bastille four years ago, thrust upon opera that aura of symbolism, that aesthetic suspension between painting, dance, performance and music, which is the essence of his style.

To find the gestures for the singers of Il Primo Omicidio, he worked from 17^th century canvases painted in Scarlatti’s era, combining them with his own inner images, ideas and fantasies. Scarlatti’s oratorio is divided into two parts: the troubled life of Adam and Eve following the Original Sin, the presentation of the offerings of each of the sons, God’s choice in favour of the bloody sacrifice of the shepherd Abel, Cain’s jealousy, then the murder, condemnation, and painful departure of Cain. Adam and Eve play a central role in this reinterpretation of the legend with its lively, fast-paced, poetic language by the baroque, composer and librettist Antonio Ottoboni. Castellucci himself discovered it with a genuine surprise when he started to work on Il Primo Omicidio: “Eve’s feelings at the beginning and at the end or Cain’s grief expressed in his farewell words to his parents, are extremely moving”. And it is rare in that period before the Da Ponte/Mozart duo, to find so fine a libretto. Especially in the context of the Counterreformation. Castellucci, to whom, as we know, theology is familiar, emphasizes the dimension of rhetorical catechism sought by Scarlatti in his oratorio “and I’m not afraid of that word. On the contrary, our role is to bring out the beauty of that rhetoric”.
And also to subvert it , since it goes without saying that in the confrontation between Abel and Cain, Castellucci positions himself firmly on the side of the murderer…   

The story of Cain’s act of murder takes up twenty-five verses of the fourth chapter in the Book of Genesis. The first man to die in the Bible and the first murderer are thus handled as quickly as possible. In 1707, Scarlatti composed an oratorio lasting almost three hours which maestro René Jacobs revived in 1998 with a recording in which he himself sang the voice of God. Because God does indeed appear, adorned in a simple costume with a powdered face, to choose his preferred offering, thus fomenting Cain’s wrath. Here, God is Benno Schachtner, a subtle countertenor. On stage, his double also appears, because this oratorio works on mirror images. This is Lucifer, played by the baritone Robert Gleadow, whose virtuosity conveys the sheer joy of song.

But let’s return to Castellucci’s first tableau, where simplicity dominates: four characters dressed as puritans appear on stage. This is a family that has already fallen from grace. Eve has experienced the pains of childbirth and the two sons, over whom hang the anxieties of their mother, have become a farmer and a shepherd respectively. “My sons, my wretched sons, wretched because they are mine, by my own guilt alone”, sings Eve in the superb opening aria performed by Birgitte Christensen who on this rehearsal day seems perfectly at ease.

On stage, the sons are played by two women, the mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen with her radiant smile, and Kristina Hammarström, who with her impeccable voice as Cain carries the oratorio on her delicate shoulders. To see those two inseparables silhouettes in the first part that evening—one blonde the other brunette—it was difficult not to draw a parallel with Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, and more particularly the film by Elia Kazan: the brothers, twins by appearance, one of whom will soon be driven out in the name of some dark, intransigent power appearing on stage behind a wall of PVC, behind which doors open and close on an altar of offerings. Then comes one of the most beautiful moments of the first part, when the inverted altarpiece descends to the stage and the bright inverted gold of Simone Martini’s L’Annonciation appears like a bolt out of the blue above Cain and hugs his neck. At that moment, Castellucci stops the rehearsal. This technical procedure, which requires extreme precision—since the altarpiece needs to come down on Kristina Hammarström without actually touching her—has not yet been fully perfected. Castellucci’s tableaux are planned right down to the last centimetre, particularly in part one. Right up to the offerings—which are not incarnate but pure technical symbols—the staging blends symbolism and abstraction into both the scenography and gestures, using what Castellucci likes to call “synecdoques” to represent events. In this production there is an openness toward permanent thought which is even more pronounced than in his production of Die Zauberflöte. Part two, a dreamlike escape which plunges us into the origins of the criminal act, gives voice to what in the first part was a suppressed cry.

Little by little, we begin to grasp what Castellucci wanted to achieve at the heart of the opera; to bring out the duality of Cain who is both the guilty party and a victim. A criminal and humbled. A blind man and a bearer of knowledge. He explains as much in the same corridor of the Palais Garnier: “There is a double aspect to each character. The brothers reinforce the ambiguity. Why did God choose Abel’s sacrifice? Probably because of the blood. God is bloodthirsty. There is no object, because an object is not unequivocal.”

Is ambiguity possible at the heart of an oratorio which he himself has described as a rhetorical catechism? “This production is not a matter of religion, you have to understand that” he repeats to me several times over, less worried about being attacked than being misunderstood—the scandal around his creations fires up only a handful of catholic fundamentalists. “I was particularly impressed by the way Scarlatti and Ottoboni treated the characters of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, with a gentleness that I find powerful. Listening to the music we have doubts about Cain’s guilt and to what degree he is guilty. A certain innocence resonates in him. He seems driven to act by a jealousy of love. We can imagine him as a child who has been ill-considered by his parents. And it is clear that he didn’t understand the consequences of his act, since no one before him had known death. He was the first man to discover death.”    

The linchpin of this production appears in part two: at the moment of the murder, the singers, Cain, Abel, God, and Lucifer are replaced by children. These boys, aged between eight and ten, are dressed in the same way as the singers and will continue to act out the singers' roles on stage, miming in play-back the songs of the performers who have been relocated to the orchestra pit. On this particular day of rehearsals, the singers of the Hauts-de-Seine Childrens' Chorus, while perfectly adept at the play-back, still have some trouble reproducing the production’s choreographed gestures. Silvia Costa, the director’s principal collaborator and long-time creative partner—whose incredible work as a director in her own right is also familiar to us—once again shows the children the poses and gestures that transform them into figures from a painting. Castellucci himself then comes to advise the young boy who plays Cain. The latter, shirtless, and delivered over to the judgement of God, seems forlorn on stage in the middle of the wild garden setting that graces part two. Castellucci has built his entire production around the presence of children: “the singers become children. The children represent this synecdoque of humanity. With the murder, there is a reduction, the adults are seen as children. Yet at the same time, through the narrative, we can imagine a story invented by the children.”

When we leave the rehearsal, I cannot help but think back to Castellucci’s interpretation of Cain and his empathic approach which transforms the first murderer in history into a jealous and deranged child in what is one of the core myths of our civilisation along with Oedipus. It is perhaps the first image of the artist as conceived by the director, wandering in the obscurity of an incessant question: “I’m much closer to Cain than all the characters. He’s a hero, like a Greek hero who takes the wrong path. He is the one who is enveloped by error. And error is the cradle of art, of thought. It is because we are in error, in the wrong place that we can imagine our condition. I don’t think art is the answer to error, but the question of error resonates twice as powerfully in it. There’s a sentence in the opera uttered by the character God. After Cain has been condemned for the murder, he says a terrible thing: “You are condemned to live”. A paradoxical phrase if ever there was one. There’s a separation between the experience of life and life itself. You could say that Cain is condemned to be detached from life, and I think that is an experience that we can feel each day. It is why he is simultaneously a modern and a tragic character.”

Is this another reason to make us cry? The tall silhouette that is Romeo Castellucci heads back to the rehearsal which on this particular evening will continue until 11:30pm. He hesitates before answering: “Obviously, I would like my audience to cry, but not because of me. I am an open door through which something else passes—the music of course—an emotive wave which strikes the viewer.”    

After his production of Moses und Aron in 2015, Romeo Castellucci is returning to the Paris Opera. Now, the director evokes “the wound” that Il Primo Omicidio caused him and the searing images that propelled him to come to grips with Scarlatti’s oratorio.   

R.C.: First of all, I have to peel away all my armour by immersing myself in the work. I need to listen to it profoundly, in a way that has nothing in common with listening in a cultivated or cultural way. The work has to penetrate me and, in a certain way, wound me. If there’s a wound, then there’s an opening and something can happen. To imagine a new form, one has to have the infantile conviction of being the composer of the music. Obviously, this is self-indulgent, and in any situation, not exactly reasonable, but sometimes reasonable choices are the worst. We must lose ourselves in a task far greater than ourselves and overcome the fear. There is an obvious connection between fear and failure, but we need that.

R.C.: Yes, I had an intense one, but it didn’t pan out. I had to abandon it.

R.C.: I wanted to involve some genuine fratricides. It was important for me to have them physically on stage in the second act. So, there would have been a sort of double narration. We were able to meet two people who committed fratricide, one was in France and the other in Italy, but strangely—or perhaps not—they both did something stupid in prison just before getting permission to appear from the judge. That falls within the realms of profound psychology…

R.C.: We are always victims of the music. We’re not protected from it. It’s not a book or a discourse: the music is a poison which perturbs us in a morbid way. I believe it was Hegel who wrote: “Music is the night of the philosopher”. Music is a weapon against the listener, but that’s what makes it so rich. In a certain way, Greek tragedy also plays against the audience: it pushes them into a corner, into an impossible choice from which they cannot escape.

R.C.: Time is the most important material in theatre, it’s our clay. The characteristics of time, the fact that one can stretch it, compress it or change its nature depends entirely on the staging. Time for a director is like colour to a painter or marble to a sculptor. At the Opera, that dimension is given. It is the principal architecture. Then there is the emotive tonality of the music and the libretto. You can find an angle of interpretation for the libretto, but you can’t change the music or the time. So you have to go back to the source, as with inverse engineering, to dissect the music to understand the philosophical principle of what binds it, to go deep into the fibre of the composition to be able to take the place of the musician.

R.C.: The themes treated are never anecdotal. They are universally simple, profound and radical. There is always a fight between life and death. Baroque is the artistic expression closest to death. It was born from the experience of the great plague; it is like a flower of evil, a flower of darkness.

R.C. : Through blasphemy. One has to be very careful with that word, because it’s like dynamite. An oratorio is not an object of faith, it has nothing to do with faith. We are not saved or educated by this form. On the contrary, it’s about discovering the other side, the side of darkness. And in this case the perspective is reversed: God is no longer the judge, it is about judging God. It is the viewpoint of the son towards the adult, of the creature towards God. It is in this way that the work is blasphemous: the object is the same but the point of view is reversed.
    

R.C.: Primarily in the baroque and neoclassical repertoire of Italy and France. It was a way for me to accept the pathos but also to embrace the rhetoric of art history. It’s a choice not to choose. I need to have the conviction that I’ve not invented anything; to have the illusion that I’m not there. I need to be absent, I don’t like artistic languages where I can read the artist’s intentions. That’s no longer art, that’s communication, that’s ego. And art is not the place for the ego. It’s more a question of fading into the background: that is the great lesson of art history.    

Romeo Castellucci’s art pulses with a visual charge and a highly imaginative power that cuts to the awareness of your unconscious. The age-old technique of theatre is a means to introduce a different time and a different space for spectators, at the heart of the contemporary negligence of a viewing. For Castellucci, theatre is “the possibility to think, to think of seeing, to see to seeing, and to acknowledge therefore, the deep significance of being a spectator nowadays”, as he stated at the recent Lectio Magistralis, when awarded his Laurea honoris causa, from the University of Bologna. In his world, the curtain comes up as soon as the spectator comes through the door and is confronted with “dilemmas designed specifically for him”. The spectator is given the red carpet treatment: and is granted nothing. He is relentlessly presented with images that challenge, that want to be seen, that need to be seen. Their power of attraction is ambivalent, they incite nausea and involvement, shame and abandonment. Art is being used to strike to the deepest reaches of the nervous system, to embrace the highs and the lows of the human existence, to rip the real from the principle of reality, while never sinking to compromises between the violent extremism of beauty and with the non-reconciled face of the obscene.

       Looking from today with a panoramic vision at the artistic wake of Castellucci – director and scene, lights, sound and costume designer – you can’t fail to recognise the reach of his creations that have altered the horizon of theatre to come, radically warping the point of view. These creations have been modelled over time with the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, the theatre company he founded in Cesena, his hometown, with his sister Claudia and Chiara Guidi at the beginning of the 1980s. That was the starting point, from which an absolute and vertical study of the forms of representation began, searching for a “pre-tragic” theatre. He entertains iconoclasm to invoke a return to the use of the body and he shows an open hostility towards prospect as “subjection of the existing”. He claims the rights to end the on-stage language subject to the “mimetic regime”, where the logocentrical structure is dominant as in western theatre. The debuts were ground-shaking for the theatrical community, such as Kaputt Necropolis (1984) and Santa Sofia. Teatro Khmer (1985) as well as the epics of mythography from the mesopotamian cycle of La Discesa di Inanna (1989), Gilgamesh (1990), and Ahura Mazda (1991).     

The diffusion of all kinds of illustration practices for text meets the catastrophe of language, that middle ground between logos and soma, that during the 90s led to the creation of the Epopea della Polvere cycle. It deals with a total and thorough exploration into the great classics of western theatre, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, which takes the arts beyond theatre, beyond the representation in the very heart of the representation. It is a sinking to the underground language that reveals a theatre of the body, Artaudian, backwards and continually in evolution thanks to its artistic strength, it reveals the other. The body and its kenosis – its starkness - are at the centre of attention and nothing is as it was before. The scene is struck by the apparition of Hamlet. La veemente esteriorità della morte di un mollusco (1992), in which the Prince of Denmark is cocooned in an aphasic autism that keeps him suspended between “being and not being”. In Orestea (una commedia organica?) (1995), the text by Aeschylus undergoes a derailment similar to that in Alice by Carroll and Umpty-Dumpty [install1] translated by Artaud, during the hospitalisation of Rodez. Giulio Cesare (1997) focuses on the empire of the rhetoric, the morphology of the monument and the obsessions for the statue, framing the drama of the voice and its organs. The cycle is concluded with the confrontation between the biblical myth of the creation of man. In Genesis. From the museum of sleep (1999) creation is linked to his most extreme opposite: Auschwitz. Genesis here is “the act of absolute sovereignty with which the Divinity has allowed himself to no longer be absolute for a long time”, to quote Hans Jonas.

Castellucci’s theatre is constantly bound to the Grecian world with its telling of the foundation of communities and with the great ancient tragedy. Indeed, tragedy for Castellucci “is the reference point for every work”. But how can you reckon with an insurmountable form? “According to Greek tragedy – he says - it is an extremely refined aesthetic form. Oresteia by Aeschylus cannot be refined further. It is the extreme and perfect synthesis which cannot be surpassed. There is therefore no point in trying to exceed it. You must instead disappear into the tragedy and be absorbed by it. It is for this reason that I believe Greek theatre should neither be watched with nostalgia, nor with an academic approach: it would mean laying a tombstone on ancient theatre. It should be considered as a fixed point in space, a kind of North Star”.     

This tension recalls the scenic forces of the colossal cycle of Tragedia Endogonidia (2002-2004) which is composed of 11 Episodes in 10 European cities. This system of plays based on the idea of self-reproduction works in a kind of juridical vacuum regarding the “tragic”, being the only way it could return in our era: here the hero is immortal, unable to die, and the choir is positioned outside the door, waiting, since there are no longer words to say to or for all. However the technology of the tragic in hindsight is to be found in the compositional fibre of each work. It is visible in Purgatorio, in the 2nd act, loosely inspired by the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, presented at the Festival of Avignon in 2008, when he was named “associated artist”. In fact the play revolves around a forbidden place: the act of violence. As in a tragedy, we are not witness to the rape of the son by the father, but here the telling is also omitted: we are left alone, only to hear the groans and screams. The risus pascalis generated from Sul concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio (2010) is also drawn from tragedy. Somewhere between the intensive glare of Christ in the giant work Salvator Mundi by Antonello da Messina, and the spectator there is a hyperbolic soiling of an elderly incontinent father who is lovingly cared for by his son. This morphology of the dispersion (excrements), built with the syntax of polished comic gags, touches an anguish that cannot be dissolved (non liquet) except in the body’s abjection and its symptoms, elevated to become a sublime query on Man and his transience.

However, Castellucci’s founding interest in the ancient Greeks is regarding the western aspect: thus not just the sun-kissed and harmonious Greece, but also the night-time, chthonic Greece, crossed by irreconcilable contradictions, such as that of Mysteries of Eleusis and Samothrace, and the Demetra culture rediscovered by Bachofen. It is here that the meeting with Friedrich Hölderlin comes into play, to whom more than one work has been dedicated. If Hölderlin, with his incomparable translation of Oedipus by Sophocles wishes to take the language of tragedy back to the sacro pathos of its origins, Castellucci when directing Ödipus der Tyrann (2015) –at the Schaubuhne in Berlin since March – dismantles the mental lameness of Oedipus in amorphous bodies that reveal "the enigmatic depth of being something”, adipose masses with only ejecting orifices that excrete the tragic logos in bowel sounds.

One aspect that Castellucci is always able to achieve in his directing is a radical action in etymological terms. He digs deep to the roots of tradition to cut away his own bond with forms of representation and sever the already well-known domesticated repetition. In the wake of Hans Blumenberg, theatrical acting seems to often eradiate from a mythological scene, set out of time. The mythical potential is rediscovered in the material elaboration of something otherwise unspeakable that lives in bodies, in the sensitive world of drama. The peak is portrayed in personified animal power, a biological force which is unmoveable for any dramaturgy. Horses, dogs, baboons, albino donkeys, macaque monkeys and goats have been used on the stage from the first performances as gifts closed in perfect forms. It is for this reason that the actor that Castellucci seeks is he who is able to maintain the objective precision “of a dog who ends up in the square”. And it is here, in the heart of such objectivity that the “as if” of theatre, its fictional dimension, can be pushed to its extreme limits. It is all about “faking fiction. Faking being a fake, – he says – using double meanings whilst conscious of the external element, raising up a structure to then come to terms with it and symbolically decide to destroy it. Pretending requires total presence, like doing. […] His calculated approximation and lack of determination create a tangible space for the spectator, a kind of open door that leads to another room”. In The Four Seasons Restaurant (2013), the type of language used by the young women in Hamish outfits in the gym of a women’s college is the proclaimed “staging” of a voluntary act that forms the “simulation in theatre”. La morte di Empedocle by Hölderlin – a literary text revisited – contains a somersault in fiction that frames another language in poetry, telling of the aesthetic suicide of the philosopher in a crater on Etna. A grinding friction is also created in the performance of Metope del Partenone (2015). Here there is a hyper-realistic device whereby there is a sequence of successive acts to various incidents. Real paramedics and professional nurses carry out first aid with real medical instruments, while the actors with drama in their veins, “playing the part” of the victims, feign injuries or death, while a series of enigmatic riddles suspend, in a counter-rhythm, the concreteness of this contemporary frieze of pain.

Castellucci’s work – whether installations, theatrical plays or directing operas – never cease to stimulate deep, physical images conjured up by the intimate alliance that links the visual and audio. Chromes and lights, sound pulses and acoustic images help to create a form and make it vibrate as if alive and tangible. The scene becomes a sensorial layout, artistic, profoundly pictorial, not at all seduced by the simulation of the enigma or by the taste of aesthetic formalisation. It is not about offering tricks that cannot be represented, nor forcing disloyalty, even only in part, to its mystery, but instead to create openings in the order of perception. Eye, ear and touch are the first target audience. In the second part of M.#10 MARSEILLE the whole stage becomes a kinetic-visual event with no interpretation. The same scene comes alive and becomes the drama through the integrated use of Edward Gordon Craig’s screens, geometric objects and light pulsations. Le sacre du Printemps (2014) is construed as a molecular dance of 30 tonnes of animal bone powder, made on an industrial scale for fertilisation in agriculture. A “powder of folklore”, nebulised and exploded in gaseous masses makes up the idea of the dance with a rhythmical score closely related to the static ostinati and dynamic accents of the music of Stravinsky. For Romeo Castellucci sound is, in fact, the shortest route to reaching sensation. Sound is and produces activity, it builds vision as it is tightly-linked to matter. It reacts before any critical barrier. In his shows, the presence of body sounds is a weapon: from the Gregorian chants to the physiological curves produced by the electronic processing of organic material (bone, rocks, fire) of Scott Gibbons. It is primarily in this direction that the fissure initiated by the directors of Opera is grafted. The gateway to the attraction for Wagner’s universe is real acoustic enjoyment. In Parsifal (2011) the insidious dimension of the “infinite melody” in the leitmotiv plot becomes the area where the philological excavation and philosophical penetration into the sacred scenic action begins. In Orfeo ed Euridice (2014) Gluck’s music and the power of the myth allow for the adoption of the most extreme existential condition: a coma. In Neither (2014) by Morton Feldman the use of the Catabasis psyche, the detection of the dictated music by Morton Feldman, the tour de force of mangled voices in which the short prose by Samuel Beckett is entangled, all lead to the coming together of the narrative seduced by noir, in a story with no object that could run into pure psychic imagery.

The technology of the eye is called into play in his tactile scenes to unleash the power of vision, intended as seen objects – the opening of a space for imaginary creation –, but especially as the act of actually seeing. Thus the different elements that mark the image – the strength of the icon, the seriality of the pop image, the use of precise advertising technology, the dizzy trap of film, the comedy in the form of antiphrastic gags, the search for the bi-dimensional aspect of hyperrealism, the monumentalisation of the “rhetoric machine”, the layout of gestural scores for revenant paintings and sculptures taken synchronously from the history of Western art, the sweetened iconography of the saints - are never worth as much as they are. Nor are they redeemable in the hermeneutic network of quotations or meant as a postmodern resurgence. These are rather devices to insinuate suspicion in terms of the trade of viewing, to prepare for the blooming of something unexpected, something backstage, maybe a manque, that climaxes in an essential and universal shaking up that can be perceived when you feel exposed, under scrutiny to the bone of your existence, plunged into naked life, almost as if, we, the spectators are, in excess, and for this reason centre stage. This is exactly what happens when the voluntary mishap of being a spectator is flipped upside-down in its incidence (or tangent) of vision, giving body to something that looks at you again, and frames you, and makes you the frame. Because watching means being seen by the image. From the stage as it is.

Ultimately, in front of the works by this theatrical philosopher it is all about waiting for the image. Relentless pictures filled with universal intensity. Romeo Castellucci's works possess the strength of an art form that is capable of touching, and knowing how to touch without touching too much, the motion, of a cortical emotion that opposes sentimentalism, images which you can only decide to look away from, delay or perhaps surrender to. 

Alessandro Scarlatti's Il Primo Omicidio is a little-known gem from the Baroque repertoire that the Paris Opera invites you to discover from January 22 to February 23 at the Palais Garnier. René Jacobs - who conducts this oratorio - is one of today's greatest conductors. As one of the musicians responsible for rediscovering this masterpiece, he conducted a definitive recording in 1998 with Berlin's Akademie für alte Musik. We asked him to choose four moments to help you prepare for this musical experience.

Romeo Castellucci’s performances are an exercise in culture shock in which the alchemy between extreme violence and paradoxical gentleness often leaves an indelible mark on the audience’s psyche: “A spectator needs to be shaken to the core⁽¹⁾.”

It was only natural that his work on the origins of tragedy and the forces acting upon the human psyche, together with his talent for expressing the great legends of Western thought in a language in tune with modern thinking would lead Romeo Castellucci to opera: a genre in which his productions have already made their presence felt.

We propose to relive the career of a master of imagery in ten productions.

Adam is writhing in pain, Eve has had a breast removed and children are playing with cuddly toys in a lacteal world. In a flash, human viscera rain down upon the unsullied ground like a divine deluge: it is the Garden of Eden according to Castellucci: Auschwitz. Genesis as seen through the eyes of Cain. God created man, but created him a murderer. By assassinating his brother Abel, Cain is the first to live the tragic experience of humanity: that of a life stretched between a beginning and an end where every act carries its own negative charge and the force of nonexistence threatens all ambition of being. Paris audiences discover the impassioned poetry of this Italian dramatist.

For his first operatic adventure, Castellucci opted to transpose the duel between the valiant Tancredi and Clorinda—his lover disguised as a soldier—and reposition it between the flimsy screens of a hospital room. In this place of birth and death, Tancredi and Clorinda only recognize each other at the very end. Beyond the reality, a natural need unites all that appear distinct to us: like the crusaders who once battled for Jerusalem and whose fight to the death is reduced here to a free-for-all between spermatozoa struggling for their survival on a TV screen. This dizzyingly clinical exploration gradually strips the combatant of his armour and the theatre of its veil.

Another rain which, this time, sets things shaking: three cars fall from the flies and slam violently onto the stage with a metallic crash. Three sharp bangs, as if to open the play or mark the force of destiny. Jesus climbs atop one before being taken away by a man in a red top hat. Some French flags unfurl from the walls and flap in the breeze. The Revolution? The Liberation? P.6#Paris is the sixth of eleven episodes of the Tragedia endogonidia – an evolving form in permanent reproduction—which took Castellucci all over Europe: to Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London, Marseille. Each time, the same question: How do you reinvent and depict a tragedy here and now? And each time, the attempt to extricate oneself from the deadening white noise of contemporary society. 

A man dressed in black advances alone across the immense bare stage of the Cour d’honneur. “My name is Romeo Castellucci” he says. Seven dogs enter, pounce and devour him. Impassive, he accepts the pain in silence. He is an image, a pure image: Dante. The poet before the citadel. Thus begins Inferno, the first part of an adaptation of The Divine Comedy for the Avignon Festival. The work will give him the opportunity to continue his quest for verticality over the entire height of the Palais des Papes. An unprecedented sight: in the darkness, under the blustering Mistral and amid the cries of the swifts overhead, a bare-handed silhouette begins to climb the imposing wall of the Cour d’honneur. All the way up to heaven, all the way up to the stars until the stars themselves finally fall in a new squall: a shower of TV screens smashing on the ground.

Although Castellucci had already tried his hand at opera with his version of Combattimento in 2000, he had yet to direct one. The Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie offered him one of the most sacred works in the repertoire: Parsifal. Moving beyond Medieval and Christian imagery, he challenges the insistent figuratism to offer an oneiric and metaphysical vision which culminates in the Grail scene: at the very moment the latter is supposed to appear, the music becomes sublime and huge white curtains illuminated by a blinding light eclipse the stage. The sacred as unrepresentable? With this radical gesture, and whilst still remaining faithful to Wagner, he explores the essence of “Kunstreligion” in a new light.

An immense image of Antonello da Messina’s Salvator Mundi (1465): the face of Christ. Before a reproduction of the painting, the stylish apartment of an elderly incontinent man. His son cleans and changes him a number of times before finally giving up. In the silence, he crouches under the disintegrating face of Christ. Castellucci saw in this tragically banal situation—that of a son accompanying his father in his twilight years—one of the nightmares of our era. In doing so, he revealed an eminently sensitive question: are we still capable of loving? Amid the controversy that arose when the work was first performed in Paris, some were quick to see blasphemy rather than a heartrending vision of one of the most intimately private taboos of our society.

A hundred years after the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées witnessed the first performance of The Rite of Spring, the aesthetic manifesto of Stravinsky and Nijinsky which the stage director views as an “electrocution”, Castellucci revisits the very notion of choreography. Out of the darkness, little red dots appear. The performers have been activated: They are machines. They pour streams of dust into a large watertight cube in rhythm to the wild music. We learn from text projected overhead that the substance is powdered animal bone that has been industrially manufactured for use as a fertiliser. The performance is a powerful aesthetic and political statement: a contemporary interpretation of the sacred: a sacrifice that our society, which refuses to look at death, conceals. This vision, which closes with the sanitized images of men in overalls gathering up the dust, is a direct evocation of Genesis: “For dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

It takes a while to realize that the events happening on the screen covering the proscenium are not fictitious. We cross a park. At the end of a gravel pathway we see a large white building: a hospital. Inside one of the rooms, a women lies motionless. Her name is Els and she suffers from Locked-in syndrome. Els, who is filmed live, is Castellucci’s Eurydice. From her hospital bed she listens to the live feed of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice being played in the theatre. But Els is not just an image, she is also a woman, and it is precisely that which transforms her into one of the strongest images of Eurydice ever made. Rarely has a director known how to communicate the challenges of Orpheus’s quest so powerfully—to rescue the person he loves and bring her back among the living–and his response: poetry alone can revive the dead. Through the appearance of a sublimated reality in the theatre, Castellucci makes the legend palpable: He takes it to the highest degree of emotion without ever forsaking the storyline which lends grandeur to his interpretation.

Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is a cycle of Lieder by Schubert. A “theatrical recital” which begins as a recital. But something is amiss. It lacks the warmth of a recital. The singer is cold and tense. She glances furtively, her hands tremble. The audience is uncomfortable yet Schubert’s sublime music lets the ever more palpable tension appear to be a sign of artistic engagement. During the eighth Lied however, everything goes awry. The singer cracks: She falls, she shrieks, and starts to cry. And then everything goes downhill until the inevitable explosion: the pain becomes rage expressed in insults to the audience. A shocking Dionysian vision: the singer herself being swallowed up by the melody is one of the most original propositions on the recital format and the extreme intimacy of song.

Before directing Schönberg’s Moses und Aron for the Paris Opera, Castellucci had already created a production based on Moses. Like the Egyptian people, like the African-American slaves immortalized by Faulkner—who drew inspiration from the Negro spiritual Go Down, Moses to write his novel—like all men of all eras, we are slaves. But slaves of what? To find out, Castellucci proposes a probing exploration into the sub-consciousness of our times and the feverish excesses of our civilisation. The performance is a series of fragments—undecipherable riddles—snatched from a mind under anaesthesia: a dream about the life of Moses, the fantasy of a new Moses coming to liberate the world of today.

“Go down, Moses!” For God only talks to Moses in the silence and solitude of the Sinai Mountains where everything stands out against a white background—a theme that will again be taken up at the Opéra Bastille.

The production is also the opportunity for Castellucci to continue his introspective exploration of art—assimilated with religion by the superimposition of the Golden Calf and the painted cows of the Lascaux Cave—which here runs up against an impasse as problematic as it is stimulating for him as a poet of sound and vision: the interdiction of the image as embodied by Moses.

Emmanuel Quinchez is a former student of Sciences-Po and the École Normale Supérieure with a degree in contemporary philosophy, he founded Miroirs Etendus, an organization dedicated to the creation of modern-day operas. In addition to his work as a producer, he collaborates regularly with various opera houses (the Paris Opera, the Opéra-Comique, and the Lille Opera).