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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27.3 (2005) 83-92



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Tragedy at Home Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio at Laban

Transport

Laban in Deptford is not yet definitively inscribed in the mental transport maps of London's theatregoers. The new building by Tate Modern architects Herzog and de Meuron won the Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2004, however, and has been widely admired in newspapers, magazines and on television. Its striking glass panels, which allow the outside of the building to change color, also allow visitors to the Centre—which is first and foremost a dance school—to see into the studios, a fact not universally appreciated by the students, apparently. The building itself seems to have landed unexpectedly amid an improbable terrain of sculpted grassy mounds that resembles the landscape of the Teletubbies. Deptford itself, where playwright-spy Christopher Marlowe is said to have been murdered, is today an area of southeast London struggling with many of the difficulties of post-industrial urban life. In May 2004, as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), and in partnership with the enterprising theatre management of Laban, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio presented Episode IX of Tragedia Endogonidia, entitled, in keeping with their established system, L.#09 (each episode is named after the initial letter of the city in which it is presented and is known by its number in the original sequence in which the episodes are created). Each episode is the creative production of four artists, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Claudia Castellucci and Scott Gibbons.

LIFT's public, as so often through the twenty years of the festival's life so far, was taken somewhere new, drawn by the theatrical event into an encounter with what was for many an unknown location and a building seen only through images. For many, of course, the journey on a combination of the London Underground and the once-futuristic, now oddly kitsch Docklands Light Railway, was familiar enough, even if the particular destination was a new one. Negotiating the vast but fragmentary transport system of the city is a daily activity for most Londoners, and these unfashionable corners and hard-to-reach clusters of community are where most of us live. For a very few of us (perhaps only two or three) this part of our own city was now patched into a new European network: the network across which [End Page 83] Tragedia Endogonidia has been created. For four days in sunny May, and in memory forever, Deptford plugged into the circuit on which we had been experiencing the flows, charges and resistances of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's new theatre creation. What would it be like for us, to be bringing it all back home?

By the time it had reached London, Tragedia Endogonidia had already passed through eight incarnations. As Romeo Castellucci explained in his interview with this journal conducted towards the beginning of the project in July 2002:

There are various ways in which a city can be involved in the project; in some cases it can be through a specific reference to something in the city even if the city itself is never actually named. A characteristic of this project on tragedy is that it changes from city to city, therefore it is in a process of becoming, but besides being in a process of becoming it's an organism in continual flux, so the performance is never the same; but that's no reason to call it a work-in-progress. Because it really appears to be the opposite; every time it opens for an audience, it's a finished and complete production that supplies, within itself, the mechanism of endogonidial reproduction, a division of itself by itself, a sort of fall-out of spores, which provide for future and successive growth. Furthermore, it's a system that completely eliminates the problem of repertory and therefore of reproduction, of the characteristic repetitive nature of theatre that's calendar-related, because it is a project that in some way is...

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