L.#09 London Episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia (review)

Director Romeo Castellucci calls the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle "an organism on the run," comprising events that leave no time for intelligence or interpretation, only immediate response. For the past four years spectators around the world have been chasing the eleven episodes of this mutating rumination on contemporary tragedy, but it was not until autumn 2005 that the performance company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) managed to find an American host city for its project. For three nights in October, New Jersey's Montclair State University presented the American premiere of the London Episode (L.#09) in its year-old Alexander Kasser Theater.

Based in Cesena, Italy, the SRS was founded in 1981 by Castellucci, his sister Claudia, and his wife Chiara Guidi. In twenty-five years, the company has produced a remarkable body of iconoclastic work, grafting its singular vision to the roots of classical Indo-European theatricality. Previous performances include revisions of canonical dramas such as Julius Caesar and the Oresteia alongside adaptations of foundational texts such as the Book of Genesis and Gilgamesh. Their most recent project, the Tragedia Endogonidia (2002–present), is a cycle of eleven episodes spanning ten different European cities (beginning and ending in Cesena) that conceives contemporary tragedy as an open system of evolution.

Each episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia functions as a mutation of the same constellation of forms, a recurrence that suspends the arrival of a final act / image. As the title of the project evinces, here the tragedy's drive toward death fuses with the moment of conception in an endless spiral of production ("endogonidic" is the biological term for an organism possessing both male and female gonads and therefore capable of ceaseless self-reproduction). That this endless cycling operates on both the level of form and content was readily apparent in the New Jersey incarnation of L.#09.

L.#09 acts as a microcosm for the Tragedia as a whole, replicating the peripatetic movement that returns to its origin a changed, but related body. At the start of the piece, Yourself Before (Francesca Proia), a woman with long blond hair and face entirely painted black, murders Yourself After (Eva Castellucci), an identically dressed child, with a simple stylized cutting gesture. Yourself Before is stripped of clothing and, donning a mask, ritually mourns her loss within a timeless landscape of geometrical forms, her body wracked in contortions as if trying to give birth again or to excise the event. Actress Francesca Proia miraculously twists her body into depths of sorrow and distraction, passing between grieving mother and raging animal. Eventually, she steps inside one of the rectangles and emerges half-covered with black liquid. Backing up against the scrim that encloses the downstage edge of the interior, she leaves a small stain on the screen before exiting the stage.

The second half of L.#09 follows the child, Yourself After, into a dream on the edge of death where a second ritual elaborately portrays the mythic birth of the British nation. The episode closes as blackness envelops the stage, turning its interior white space inside out and returning both the protagonists to the moment immediately before the murderous act. Now they dress in black with faces painted white, staring out into the audience, photographic negatives of the event they are about to repeat. This final image projects an endless cycle of inversions spinning beyond the curtain's close, encapsulating all the potential worlds at play in the Tragedia's other episodes.

Once detached from its original host city, each episode refigures itself within the new site of performance. Among other changes to the New Jersey version, an infamous scene that showed Saint Paul cutting out his tongue and feeding it to a mass of kittens was removed, because the company feared the reference would be indecipherable to an American audience. A productive addition to the piece...