Tragedy as a form of drama developed during the early 5th Century BC in Athens, where it died in the space of one hundred years. Despite the limited space and time in which tragedy flourished, it has influenced hitherto the conception of the life of Western society and has remained completely alien to any other culture. Tragedy is unique in its genre because of its ruthless depiction of the human condition which consists in the complete lack of justice, reason and control over life events due to divine energies that affect men with mania who accordingly lose their will and conscience, perpetrating irreparable actions against themselves and the people they love. Moreover, in tragedy, there is almost always no redemption and no compensation for the suffering of the past.

The actual origins of the tragedy are not known with certainty, allowing numberless thinkers to speculate about this void which is probably destined to remain a mystery. It is not our intention to delve into this topic in detail, however, we shall briefly consider some of its relevant aspects for this analysis. From the etymological point of view, the Greek word for tragedy is τραγῳδία which is composed of τράγος (goat) and ᾠδή (ode), suggesting that its literal meaning is “Goat Ode.” Indeed, tragedies were part of a festival dedicated to Dionysius and the goat is the figure directly related to the god, and René Girard argues that only when the goat vanished from the stage of the original celebrations because of a sacrificial crisis and was substituted with the chorus and the hero, was tragedy born. Nietzsche argues that there are two original contrasting principles which constitute the indispensable basis for the tragic and these are the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian is expressed in the god Apollo, in plastic arts, in the principium individuationis, in dreams; whereas the Dionysian resides in the god Dionysius, in music, in the forgetfulness of the self and in pleasure. This initial intrinsic contrast underwent a radical transformation that marked the end of the tragedy, precisely when the Socratic aesthetic principle took over from Dionysius, and both Bene and Nietzsche agree on the fact that the introduction of Socratic dialectics and optimism led tragedy to its own suicide, the only form of art which died in this fashion. Bene through The Birth of Tragedy claims that Socrates’s thought influenced Euripides who consequently considered the work of art in direct correspondence with the audience. Thus, the text became a means for the audience to understand rationally the events of the play, whereas the rest of the elements on the stage, which transcended representation and where the tragic could happen, were belittled and afterwards forgotten, i.g. the chothurni through which actors increased their height, the masks as a means to amplify the volume of the actors’ voice (what Bene calls phonè), the dances and the music.

The representation of the rational text instituted by the Socratic principle thus is not where the tragic resides, even though the academia, modern and contemporary theatre have imposed their power over it by regarding the text as its main element. Bene defines this improper imposition as follows: “The theatre is the exhausted and senseless representation, a funeral ceremony officiated by a dishonest priest.” Nietzsche and Bene were not the only ones who have denounced this fact, but, among many other examples, we may consider also Artaud’s theory about the theatre of cruelty outlined in The Theatre and its Double, and Jacques Derrida’s essay “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” whose concluding paragraph reads: “To think the closure of representation is to think the tragic: not as the representation of fate, but as the fate of representation. Its gratuitous and baseless necessity.”

This brief introduction about the nature of tragedy has been essential to start our analysis since the thinkers we have quoted are fundamental for the SRS. The SRS has based its entire production on the concept of tragic, even if Romeo Castellucci, one of its founders and the director of all its productions, admitted that the essential principles that made tragedy possible such as redemption, pathos and ethos have become only cold abstract concepts. Contrarily to Attic tragedy, in the contemporary time, there is not a common mother tongue and there is not one single people like in the polis, therefore, the choice to go back to the classics is not a way to create a continuity, rather, the purpose is to show what is the nature of the contemporary human condition, overcoming the tradition. Hence, the use of the classical texts such as the Oresteia, Hamlet, Julius Caesar or The Divine Comedy were explored neither in a representational way nor as a continuation from the past to the present, rather, we shall argue, as an attempt to erase once for all the Socratic principle through the elimination of the logos and dialectics which, according to both Artaud and Castellucci, are the rests of a theological presence on the stage. Concerning this aspect, Valentina Valentini argues that the SRS empties semantically classic texts, tending towards the zero degree where the complete deconstruction of the text is accomplished through an anti-narrative strategy. The spiritual sense is in fact conveyed through matter. In this regard, Castellucci states: “This is what interests me: to communicate as less as possible. The lower degree of communication consists of the surface of the matter.” Even the chorus, the element whose original function was to explain and provide opinions to the audience, is removed. What is left, therefore, is the use of sound, lights, scenography, machines and the performers, who are presented as bare life. Indeed, Castellucci, as also noticed by Matthew Causey in his essay Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture, embraces Agamben’s theory of Homo Sacer which consists in the fact that men have been inscribed in the field of zoe (bare life) and live in an endless state of emergency under the hegemony of the biopolitical power.

We believe that one particular scene epitomises the theoretical background of the SRS that is in the second episode of Tragedia Endogonidia which was presented in Avignon in 2002. Tragedy was here taken back to the pre-tragic, namely when the goat was still part of the tragedy, electing the goat as a poet. The following text by Romeo Castellucci contained in Epopea della Polvere explains the rationale behind this operation. 

The theatre is crossed by the problem of the presence of God, because the theatre, for the West, was born when God died. […] To see an animal on the stage means to tend towards the theological and critical root of theatre. A pre-tragic theatre means, firstly, to be infantile […] namely to be outside the language.

Castellucci, Epopea della polvere

Since an animal does not belong to the logos, how did the SRS manage to make the goat write and speak? The solution to this enterprise consisted in leaving the goat in a space whose floor was covered with letters each of which corresponded to amino acids responsible for the synthesis of proteins essential for the life of a goat. The movement of the goat throughout the space generated a path of letters which was treated like a poem (figure 1). Still, there was the problem of how the sequence of letters should have been transposed to be sung by the human voice. Each letter was considered as a subject, i.e. verb and predicate of itself at the same time, and as a vector that indicated the pitch, timbre, tone and volume of the voice. Let us take as an example how the letter L was converted into sound: “Vertical vector: from top to bottom, a slowing and weighted fall. Horizontal vector: from right to left, imperceptible vocal emission capable of withholding energy.” We would like to stress out how treating each letter beyond its conventional signification is a way to suspend the hegemony of the biopolitical power which, according to Deleuze, prevents us from seeing a given letter as a mere mark, like when we come into contact with an unknown alphabet, but we are forced to read it as a sign that denotes particular sounds. Moreover, the sound was treated through a process called granular synthesis which consists in breaking down the single molecules of sounds which last between 5 and 10 milliseconds and to each of them a different spectrum was applied. The original source degrades and becomes unrecognisable, giving the sensation to be in the maternal womb.

Figure 1

Endowing the goat with the logos means to overturn the Western philosophical tradition according to which the difference between animals and human beings resides exactly in the potentiality of the latter to speak. Furthermore, Annalisa Sacchi, in her essay “The long cry before a half open grave” contained in the ninth quire of Idioma Clima Crono published by the SRS for each episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia, notices how the suspension of language allows speaking without the use of words. Hence, speaking is not definitely removed from the theatre, but it implies a passage from an arbitrary form of language to a non-arbitrary form of language which consists in the use of the ars combinatoria, and accordingly of figures in an iconoclastic manner. The SRS considers itself iconoclastic because, contrarily to what one may believe, iconoclasm does not consist in the negation of the image, rather, this movement believed that the image of the god was not only a representation but god himself. For this reason, the production of icons was restricted to those painters who were considered saints.  Castellucci breaks the icons which are part of the Western tradition and through them he aims at affecting the nervous system of the viewers, revealing to them their real condition,  which, we would like to point out, is the exact definition of Theatre of Cruelty provided by Artaud: “Spatial, thundering images replete with sound also speak. […] Such a show, unafraid to explore the limits of our nervous sensibility, uses rhythm, sound, words, resounding with song.”

The intuition of Sacchi to regard the ars combinatoria as the modus operandi of the SRS suggests another connection between Robert Fludd’s Memory Theatre and Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del theatro and the SRS. These forms of theatre use the ars combinatoria invented by Ramon Llull which consists of alchemical revolving figures which were part of the tradition of prosthetic memory and which was partially rediscovered between the 15th and 16th Century. Both Fludd and Camillo took what was left of the classical tradition of the ars memoria which was based on active figures, overturning their original meaning to create theatrical spaces that are the embodiment of those magical memory spaces. The magical path of SRS is also suggested by Cristina Raggio, who, in her essay about Tragedia Endogonidia titled Ipostesi di un ascolto tragico, argues that the theatrical language used by the SRS is a kind of magic formula in which the hidden secret of reality is concealed. Interestingly, the use of organically active words and images as a renewed exorcism of the theatre is again what Artaud proposed in the First Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty. 

Even if the SRS seems to take a distance from God and the theological implications of theatre through the elimination of the text to cease the Socratic principle which once led to the suicide of the tragedy, we may notice how the mere use of matter on the stage, as a way to communicate as less as possible, leads to the opposite result. The use of archetypes and classical texts, despite they are unrecognisable since they have been completely deconstructed also through the help of technology, creates images that are iconoclastic, in the sense that they bring with them active powers able to shake to the core the nervous system of the viewers, revealing to them the contemporary condition of men which is to be bare life. This deconstructive process can be compared to Fludd and Camillo’s theatres which, analogously to the SRS, took back ancient forgotten principles belonging to the art of memory, to create magical forms of theatres animated by renewed archetypes.