Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso - Romeo Castellucci

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

Romeo Castellucci

Societas Raffaello Sanzio

http://www.raffaellosanzio.org/

Spill Festival 2009

http://www.spillfestival.com/index.php?plid=4

at Barbican Theatre

Presented as three separate events – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, Romeo Castellucci has dismantled, exposed and transformed Dante’s epic text into a truly lived experience.
Using a profoundly visual style, Castellucci creates a deeply unsettling world forcing you into a hauntingly beautiful nightmare, engaging all your senses in an experience you are unlikely to forget. This is highly visceral theatre, full of provocative experiences not for the faint-hearted.

Inferno traditionally tells the epic tale of a struggle between heaven and hell, between God and the devil and between the living and the dead. Castellucci transports this story to the here and now, placing into question the future of humanity.

Depicting images of family life, Purgatorio is uncomfortably set in a fraught domestic space where the use of vivid imagination protects against a tormenting reality.
In an intimate installation, Paradiso creates the ultimate frame where small groups of viewers are sent on a journey to try and find paradise.

Credits:
Direction, set design, lighting and costumes by Romeo Castellucci
Original music by Scott Gibbons
Choreography by Cindy Van Acker and Romeo Castellucci

The work of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered by artists and audiences worldwide to be highly influential in contemporary performance. Having created a new non-narrative theatre, a visual language that directly challenges traditional forms, Castellucci’s visionary work is uncompromising and always surprising. Making impressive large-scale work that questions our entire human condition, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso has a company of over 60.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has previously been presented in London as part of LIFT; Tragedia Endogonidia at Laban (2004), Genesi at Sadler’s Wells (2001) and Giulio Cesare at Southbank Centre (1999), also at Battersea Arts Centre withBuchettino (2001).

Having been performed as part of the Festival D’Avignon 2008, this is the UK premiere of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (bite09 SPILL Festival of Performance) and one of the few opportunities to see the complete trilogy performed together.

Inferno

"Inferno" with each of these digits displayed back-to-front 

gatewaying out to us: it is us who are in this hell. each united 

letter is spluttering white light and soundscape of electrical 

shorting and buzzing is loud and abrasive.

throughout this piece the sound provides its centre moving 

through dangerous electrical sounds and loud noises of 

violence to choral sweetness.

one by one each of the "Inferno" units are removed leaving 

only the framing " " which remain for the duration at each 

side of the stage.

Romeo Castellucci comes on stage, announces who he is 

and is dressed in protective soft armour as eight large 

alsatian dogs are brought on and and chained across the 

front of the stage. loud barking offstage and by the dogs 

in front of us. one by one three dogs run on to the stage 

an attack Romeo, holding on to him. we have to take the 

image of aggression and animal attack while filtering out 

the happy tail wagging by the dogs.

a large black cube slowing arrives in the centre of the stage, 

a huge black sail billowing above it. the black drapes are 

pulled up to reveal a cubed crèche of toddlers happily encased 

and playing.

Andy Warhol walks slowly on with a polaroid, takes a picture of 

us, turns to look at the children, turns back to us and slowly 

falls in on himself.

The children are re-covered and removed, a shiny skull is left 

behind which Andy Warhol takes and places beneath a huge 

mirrored swinging wall, which lowers slowly on to break it like 

a nut.

A boy with a basketball, each bounce amplified to terrifying 

sounds, a sense of something else behind him

A great sea of people with their different coloured clothes 

slowly pout across the stage, fall down and wash as one 

mass backwards while differently aged individuals step 

forward to hold the ball replacing the boy at the front. the 

final older woman appears to greedily eat the ball 

accompanied by sickening sounds of gluttonous eating.

And so it drifts through a series of images, always slowed 

and certain and seemingly endless: 

a series of loving tableaux replaced later by a series of 

mimed throat slashings, the slow climb one by one on to 

the returned black cube, then the arms spread wide in 

some sort of universal supplication only to fall backwards, 

again and again, backgrounded by a projected list of 

Andy Warhol's works with their dates, a back projection 

of the names of deceased members of Societas that 

seemed sentimentally discordant with the rest of the piece, 

a grand piano is set alight and we watch it burn

a white horse the arrives as the sea of people are rewound 

slowly back from whence they came to then be poured 

over with vivid red blood.

and then the return of Andy Warhol to take another 

polaroid of us and then to disappear into the wreck of 

a smashed car.

somehow while it is all interesting enough the 

accumulative effect is of a scenographic hypermarket 

with the chance to view what's hot in this season's range 

- a bit too look at me look at me. but a treat for all 

that to get theatre this different from our more 

usual literary plays...

Purgatorio

Paradiso

after a long queue we are let in to the space to see a huge 

dazzlingly white cube structure, a small entrance in one 

corner into another smaller white light cubed space, 

around black hole entrance into darkness. inside this final 

space is first the sound of falling water and as eyes adjust 

we can see we are in a larger black space with a waterfall 

cascading down the back wall. there are other sounds too 

and looking up we see the naked upper torso of a man at 

the top of the waterfall apparently struggling - to free 

himself? to communicate? - evidently unhappy and caught 

in this perpetuity, and yet dangerously precarious suspended 

above this black waterfall: misery in his stuckedness but were 

he to get himself free the drop would destroy him. 

this is an apparently small piece but absolutely perfectly formed 

- the fusion of image and sound burn a permanent imprint so 

that - unusually for me - i can still easily re-summon up the 

remembered pictures days afterwards. this is a vision of life 

ever after that is oppressive in its small stuck foreverness, 

somehow all the more plausible for its absence of fire and 

brimstone or colour and movement. a superbly realised perhaps 

even heightened by our having to make a special trip to the 

barbican and queue for some time for this 5minute moment.

***Audio Forensics @ I M T + Electra

Audio Forensics
MA in Sound Arts graduate show
University of the Arts : London College of Communication
Venue: I M T,
Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road,London, E2 9NQ



Contact: 020 8980 5475 (for booking)

Comprising of ambitious works by nine artists who employ sound as the principle media of their practice, Audio Forensics demonstrates the breadth of engagement with sound in the arts, and how it can be re-evaluated in the context of an increasingly noisy world.
Sound art encompasses a wide range of forms and concerns and has its precedence across many creative fields, yet, as these artists demonstrate, the acknowledgment of sound’s significance in the arts is becoming of greater importance as technologies develop, and as the public become ever more aware of the interactions between sound, space and artistic practice.
Audio Forensics provides an extraordinarily comprehensive inquiry into how sound, and its manipulation, influences our experience and understanding of our environment.Audio Forensics is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of the first MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrates the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998.
The exhibition is co-curated by Electra and IMT

Artists & Exhibits:

Libero Colimberti ~ Frame 2008
Short film (7mins)
A sound film installed in the bathroom and projected backwards through various reflections on to tiles, walls and ceiling showing a digital clock countdown from 7.00.00mins and subtitles of what is being heard - sometimes in the form of a script, as in (passerby) you won't kill yourself jumping from that height. The sound sweeps us through a huge narrative of a fight between two lovers with him on the ledge threatening suicide - gripping and for a time compelling in the possibility that we are about to actually hear someone die. Being locked away listening to this in the bathroom is perfect - simultaneously safely away from the conflict going on 'outside' and redolent with imagined self-violence - pills, drowning, razor blades, broken glass to cut with, slippery surfaces to fall from …


Jan Hendrickse ~ Harmonic Motion: Composition for Prepared Bass Guitar and Fans 2008
Prepared bass guitars and fans
Quirky and gentle and fun - i loved having to go 'looking' for its sound hidden within the sweep of sound i had already triggered from Dear Dust


Simone Izzi ~ The Emperor's Mind 2008
Mixed media installation http://www.simoneizzi.com/home.php



Nitin Lachhani ~ Bhagvapad 2008 Polymer rapid prototype 232mm x 350mm x 10mm; Gautam 2008 100% Dense titanium rapid prototype and vero white, 200mm x 200mm x 100mm; Brhaspati 2008 Glass, polyurethane resin, iron filings, 500mm x 500mm x 10mm



Luc Messinezis ~ Wunderkammer: The Sound Cabinet of Curiosities 2008
Sound installation http://www.artselector.com/collective/directory/audio/Sonologik/



Maria Papadomanolaki ~ Trajectory 2008
Performance; video documentation
An intriguing and captivating piece that we loved and that i’ll have to come back to write about when i have time:
audience in gallery – different people wearing headphones and microphone walking to gallery describing what they see and following text instructions from the gallery.

Vytis Puronas ~ Dear Dust 2008
Interactive video projection and sound http://www.superfield.org/
sound of breathing that for me was all about the sound of the sea and kinaesthetically worked its image of floating 'dust' and wind-blown hair watching it with the fan blowing the guitar sounds


Mark Shorey ~ 8.5 2008
Mixed media installation; video documentation
the image for the poster is from 8.5 and see his video documentaion on his website @ http://www.peace.talktalk.net/PEACE.html



Mark Peter Wright ~ A Quiet Reverie 2008
Headphone installation (18mins) http://www.a-quiet-reverie.blogspot.com/

http://www.myspace.com/handsofsand

The star of the show for us – an exceptional experience for all the fullness and its space it gives in the listening.
A table with four clear plastic 'coffins' each containing dried materials from the four ruined sites and perched up on soil from them - leaves feathers stone shell flowers berries cones - all dry and dead but still resonating with remembered-imagined life

The 18 min 'psycho phonography' moves and moves us through a fragile deeply felt sonic narrative that for me was an oscillation of flickering images, fleeing associations and pooled moments of intense presence. The sounds move through ‘stone’ ~ a sort echoed resonant cascade of resonating troubled air - or the noise of ‘dust’ banging (to steal language from another exhibit) - through ‘water’ ~ coming in soft rain which we can know and name but without losing any magic from this literal recognition and making its narrative of 'textured time' (to steal language again) ~ listening in to water moving and feeling both the heightened immediacy of each water soundfall and simultaneously the inexhaustible stretched out continuum of time beyond life, lives, living. Then 'wing' and the choral backchat of birdsong going abrasive and scarring and making me think of living systems of immortal species as the uncaring witnesses to human insubstantiality and transience. Then through 'blood' ~ a swelling of sound rushing throbbing bringing up a sonorously chiming alarm coming through a crackle of rainfall that I first took to be fire ~ and lastly 'mouth' ~ we hear an echo of monks chanting or perhaps just the endlessly repeated prayers echoing back to us from the stone and then a slow ebbing abandonment into pulsating absence.
And I hand over the headphones emotionally charged and emotionally changed.

extracted from Mark’s book of ‘A Quiet Reverie’
A quiet reverie investigates the ruined abbeys of North East England, and creates a sonic experience from the architecture, space, and surrounding natural environment.

The work extends the practice of phonography into a dynamic and acoustically creative portrayal of time and journey through space and site. I will use the term ‘psycho phonography’ to label my practice and define it as a perceptual appreciation of field recording rather than an ecological or documental one.

By relocating, transferring and manipulation recordings from the ruined abbeys, the work connects each location in a metaphorical and sonic chain. It explores sounds inherent ability to spill between time and sense and into other perceived realms and modes of perception and listening.

A Quiet Reverie is a psycho phonographic sound piece, a mode of of aural imaginary awakening.

extracted from Mark’s research poster
Research Conclusions:
* A subjective absence in the sound is necessary to encourage a deeper sonorous listener
* Do ruins contain traces of sonic past? As poetic & compositional tool yes. In places of ruin or abandonment a perpetual & psychological space exists for the listener to complete, the journey to complete this absence is the soundscape narrative
Essential Listening:
B J Nilsen, The short night
Chris Watson, Stepping into the dark
Hilgegarde Westerkamp, Transformations
Richard Skelton, Landings Steven Peters, Hereings

+ External Symposium:
Date: 30 NOVEMBER
Time: 15:00-18:00 RSVP
Symposium in which Steven Connor *, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck,
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/
and sound artist David Toop**, Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London and Senior Research Fellow at the Sound Arts & Design Department of the London College of Communication http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=112997086 address issues of sonic practice raised by Audio Forensics.
* see Steven's lecture @ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/earroom/earroom.pdf
** replaced Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern






Steven Connor: Ear Room
Seated. Listening. In session. Seance.
Hearing seems different to sight and touch and taste and smell
Hear from where the sounds are rather than where we are – sound occupies & evacuates
Sound Space. We can hear textures qualities inside things
Ventriloquism - how fragile & volatile our sense of sound space is - when it really counts we are very poor at hearing well
Unlike vision not immediately intelligible – hearing asks questions – which we then often seek to answer by the eye
Cartesian Grid - pinpoint - the ideal of point of view. There can only be a corresponding point of audition in most optimistic sense. Lines or fields of sight. Ears far less able to pinpoint - sound and we are multiple positioned through them
‘I am All Ears’ – we hear through distribution not convergence. You cannot sleep on both ears at once. There is no listening post: listening is listing & leaning
And sounds don't stay still – the eye commands space – the ear occupies – the ear makes room
Ear Room title of this lecture
We use Germanic words for animals & Latin words for cooked equivalents
Germanic for body parts - Latin for ‘cooked body’ like ‘mortality’
Germanic for raw corporeal ‘thing’ and ‘feeling’ – Latin for ‘object’ & ‘sensation’
In the dual coding: Latin ‘space’ is for sound; Latin ‘room’ is for sight: What becomes of ‘auditory space’ when one translates it into ‘ear-room’?
Space ready for occupation, able to be modified, presents a vacancy, defined from the outside in. Room inhabited, defined from the inside out, can be easily co-joined 'leg-room'
No relation direct between sound & hearing: the ear comes & goes with what it's hearing. Sight however automatically makes what sees an ‘object’
John Hull writing about going blind in ‘Touching the Rock’ “When you are blind, a hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you. There is no anticipation or preparation. There is no hiding round the corner. There is no lying low. I am grasped. I am greeted. I am passive in the presence of that which accosts me. I cannot escape it … For the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go. They come out of nothing, they disappear”
For the eye there is always a scene, whether seen or unseen. For the ear there is either something audible or there is nothing – there is no place in which to repose.
We can hear textures tonalities tensions time - sound energies intensities
Tonic - muscle & musicality
Space is free; a room costs.
In gallery ear-space must accommodate within eye-space. Ear-Room is only what & when it is made, which is why it can so easily escape the gallery. Ear-Room insists on a blind here & now

David Toop
Sound is always in a state of becoming & disappearing - so perhaps my unpreparedness for this is good
Readings from my notebook beginning 6th august
Trip to Marfa Sessions, Texas made famous by Donald Judd
Space used to inter German soldiers in WWII - Chinati Foundation - space for work to be made in http://www.chinati.org/visit/missionhistory.php
Christina Kublish (?)- nothing to see - abandoned building to listen to sound in - 'memory room' closed factories abandoned farms - old barn with abandoned tools
Memory room with no clues - just sounds of digital production - up to listener to make own meaning

Silent but Poem by Sugasi (?) b. 1889 anti war imprisoned for being

Cormach McCarthy: The Road
“The blackness I awoke with on those nights ...

Dickens – “many people unhappy to spend night in church - because of the roaming wind …”

A musical instrument is a small room - sound can linger - dispersing into air

the Confessional - grille like amplifier to image-less ear – talking into ear of god

Kafka: “Everyone carries a room inside them ... rattling of mirrors”

In America the sound of the trains is so romantic, mythic but it wakes me in the night – both absorbing & irritant

a rich woman shows me her hearing implant – “it’s no good for listening to classical music but fine for experimental …”

Donald Judd - huge library with few music books except eg Glass. And bagpipes he learned to play. (And music collection)

Q&A
S - two poles sound is moving between - sound art is changing - we can capture & see sounds more easily now
D - previously sound recorded though text, oral tradition, painting, sculpture … very few writers on paintings refer to sound because outside their discipline? because the sound is no longer there? A difficulty of sound art having to squat in others’ rooms, houses. Best sound art when it completely accepts the contexts they move in with. How do you reveal the work to audience?

A(udience) - Idea frm Greek 'to see' - system of thought grown in sight not sound
S - But oral cultures are violent formulaic conservative very resistant to variation from norms - obedience comes from need to hear - change requires ability to put things down. Have just read a new dissertation on use of sound in torture
D – Should be wary of idealising silence – silence can easily make people uncomfortable - many examples of silence that is oppressive - censoring - power

A - In our culture do we (over)separate sound, sight & tactile sensing? - sound calls for use of memory
D - work with auditory artist - you work to her requirements.
A – reading Mark Cuzens - thought was born by Greeks when we could write and free brains for new thinking
S - animals are all memory - I look forward to not needing any memory.
A - Writing music has led to incredible architecture of sound - exact notation leads to conservativism vs. lack of notation leads to conservativism. Fixedness allows you to go somewhere else
S - writing preserves fantasy of permanence
A - Stanley Fish - always subjective - the work is made at moment of reading
(Me thought - sound must always be moving whereas sights can be more seemingly still - or we move - or what we're looking at moves)
D - does recording fix something that's not meant to be fixed? What sound does best is texture time rather than pure time - how would we know this without sound? In a film, sound is the plasma that holds things together. Beckett thought the silent film had demised too soon. We exist in space time
D – this idea is too much for me to grasp in one thought – need to separate each idea to get sense of space time.


see a blog review of this exhibition at http://www.fadwebsite.com/2008/11/26/audio-forensics-ambitious-works-by-nine-artists-who-employ-sound-to-open-at-imt/#more-2582



http://picasaweb.google.com/marktrezona/AudioForensics#

*** 'drawing breath recycled' - jean fraser, sue ridge, rosa ainley, annie whitehead

Drawing Breath Recycled
... maps and journeys .......
an exhibition about breathing with:
Jean Fraser

Rosa Ainley

Sue Ridge

http://www.sueridge.com/HOME.html
Herne Bay Junior School
Annie Whitehead

http://www.earthmusic.com/annie.htm

and
Betteshanger Brass Band

@ Horsebridge Galleries, Whitstabe
http://www.horsebridge-centre.org.uk/index.php?q=node/911
Curated by Jean Fraser
www.drawingbreath.org

An arts and health project about breath and breathing, the Drawing Breath project is based around a cycle ride during the summer of 2007 searching for oxygen on the Kent and East Sussex coast, and the conversations and conditions encountered on the way - a landscape adventure about survival and what remains possible as we grow older.

Featuring a life-size driftwood bicyle sculpture, a new brass band composition and new photographic work and maps of the journey, plus a sound piece about breath and vocalisation. A wall of air will be constructed by the audience during the exhibition.

Special thanks to the individuals and groups who contributed to the journey, including Canterbury & District Breathe Easy support group and the Eastern & Coastal Kent Respiratory team.

Artists and participants include: Rosa Ainley – multi-media practitioner Betteshanger Brass Band Jean Fraser – photographic artist Herne Bay Junior School pupils Sue Ridge – multi-media artist Annie Whitehead – jazz trombonist and composer Artists and participants include: Rosa Ainley – multi-media practitioner Betteshanger Brass Band Jean Fraser – photographic artist Herne Bay Junior School pupils Sue Ridge – multi-media artist Annie Whitehead – jazz trombonist and composer.

the experience of this show is all about listening and noticing - the overall effect is somehow still and resonantly present: jean fraser's potraits are all moments of people captured with an easy joyful glowing presence; sue ridge's maps make you stop and enjoy minute journey details and repetition, and her x-rays of jean’s lungs overlaid with the journey map outline and together with rosa ainley's sound piece – that has you empathetically holding your breath and aaahing into the air around you – suggests a simultaneous fragility alongside substantial strength and resilience; jean and her daughter’s video to play with annie whitehead’s music makes the movement of air mesmerising, and the driftwood bicycle made with year 5 at herne bay junior school is just magic.
there is nothing competitive or hard in this show. it does not boast endurance or mileage or impressive technology. neither does it pretend to find anything that isn’t already there waiting to be found and enjoyed and savoured, so that of brandishing it instead invites you to stop and look and look some more and listen and remember and smile and wonder a few ‘what if’s...’ and breathe a little slower, a little deeper.

life enhancing.