Staging the Genesis of a World:
The Visual Theatres of Edward Gordon Craig
and Societas Raffaello Sanzio
During his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush,
Donald Rumsfeld's mastery of circumlocution achieved the highest states of obfuscation. Like
carefully constructed koans, Rumsfeld’s statements sought to give the impression of an answer
while holding any assignable meaning in reserve; an exhibition of power, they announced his
potentiality to say without committing to a meaningful articulation. In a press briefing on
February 12, 2002, Rumsfeld presented perhaps his most famous pronouncement. Widely
ridiculed for its masterful indirectness, his signature speech nonetheless addresses the terms I
would like to discuss today with a singular clarity [SLIDE]:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.i
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The "unknown unknowns" statement was variously hailed and lambasted internationally,
receiving among other citations a 2003 "Foot in the Mouth" award from the UK-based Plain
Speech Campaign.ii Yet for all its seeming obscurity Rumsfeld's taxonomy of the limits of
expectation pinpoints a very contemporary concern with how we comprehend future events. Here,
the "known knowns" refer to that which one already possesses as a form of knowledge or
experience, so that in the present one recalls and restages a past understanding. To my mind, the
more compelling distinction concerns the latter two concepts. "Known unknowns" are future
events that behave according to presupposed forms or shapes. One projects such defined
knowledge into the future "unknown," colonizing its uncertainty and making a distinct and stable
territory out of what is otherwise a vast and unpredictable sea. I call the defined objects or
objectives towards which we move, a possibility. Such possibility offers us a humanized version
of the future, spoken in language our bodies understand intellectually. Finally, "unknown
unknowns" break with the expected orders of past and present to expose an indeterminate future
without rational end or function—in other words, a boundless and unscripted potentiality.
Something may come, but it will be a thing or motion that we cannot name or know. [ASIDE:
Potentiality as a concept first proposed in Aristotle’s metaphysics and more recently taken
up by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. My book project explore this notion
extensively. For now, we could talk of potentiality as the capacity to do without doing a
knowable thing—as, for example, in blank page’s potentiality to contain any inscription or
the block of stone containing an infinite sculpture]
As one of the chief architects of the global state of emergency still ruling the day nearly a
decade later, Rumsfeld formulates the unknown unknowns of such potentiality in the darkest
light, invoking it as a Terror putting pressure on the habitual everyday in new and frightening
ways. Here we face the threat that any individual may harbor motives beyond the seeming
expectations or possibilities of his or her place and identity, carrying "suspicious" packages that
contain who knows what towards who knows what end, or--following the 2001 Anthrax scare--
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that the white dust of matter coating the very lines of our waylaid letters may effect bodies in
catastrophic ways. Here the firm architecture of the places that surround us may give way against
all our expectations, the walls and floor falling out from under us. Potentiality implies the
disappearance of our placement in the known world.
[SLIDE] I want to talk today about how certain live performances give us access to an
experience of a future of unknown unknowns, how they give us an opportunity to encounter the
creative wonder and horror of the unknowable, the potentiality of a living present to change
radically. It is my conviction that the conventional dramatic theatre of scripts and characters
pursuing plots and objectives has long served to tame this unknowable future and place it within a
network of distinct paths and possibilities. For more than 2500 years Western drama has served as
a site for a community to gather together and practice making the future known. But, as the
theatre theorist and madman Antonin Artaud presciently wrote in the middle of the last century,
“We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach
us that first of all.”iii This catastrophic and unknowable futurity runs as an unruly undercurrent
throughout the dramatic theatre, but it is only in the 20th century that experimenters in
performance began to isolate and foreground these instances of potentiality.
[This afternoon I want to discuss 2 performances—one from the beginning of 20th c,
at the outset of modernism, with its faith in progressive creation, the other at the beginning
of 21st c, after modernism (and arguably postmodernism) have run their course and futurity
is rife with the kind of menace implied by Rumsfeld’s diagnostic. ]
In addition to authoring influential essays such as "the Actor and the Übermarionette,"
and editing Mask and its subsidiary publications (the first periodicals to look at performance
across cultures and traditions), the theatrical visionary Edward Gordon Craig is perhaps most
remembered for his designs and writings on theatrical space and scenography [SLIDE].
Alongside his contemporary Adolph Appia, Craig's work in the first decades of the 20th century
represents the first Modernist foray into a visual theatre. My interest in the artist hinges on a
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proposition from early in his oeuvre, undertaken before all the other accomplishments mentioned
above, I want to try to reclaim thus overlooked fragment of his early work as a kind of
manifesto for a theatre of the future, a theatre of potentiality
Craig had been carrying a copy of Sebastiano Serlio's Five Books of Architecture with
him since 1903, inspired by the Renaissance architect's images of street scenes and isometric
studies in perspective to propose his theory of manually movable screens [SLIDE]. If Serlio's
layers of horizontal planes receding towards a single point perspective were literally materialized
in the theatrical "flats" of theatrical illusionism, then Craig abstracted these planes into pure
colored surfaces, albeit surfaces bounded by frames and the limitations of hinged junctures. But
in February of 1907, after hearing of the Asphaleia hydraulic systems [Ahs-Fall-ee-ah greek for
“stability, certainty, safety” SLIDE] then appearing in theatres throughout Europe—systems
which made possible the simultaneous independent movement of sections of stage floor—Craig
looked beyond the fixed framed surfaces of his theatre of folding screens to imagine a theatre of
continuous creation and variation.iv Scrawling in the back pages of his copy of Serlio's book,
Craig relayed the following vision of a theatre of the future [SLIDE]:
The place is without form—[…] the floor seems to be an absence—the
roof a void. Nothing—is before us—
And from that nothing shall come life—Even as we watch, in the very
centre of that void a single atom seems to stir—to rise—it ascends like the
awakening of a thought in a dream—
[…] there to the right—something seems to unfold—something to fold—
what has unfolded? Slowly quickening, without haste, fold after fold loosens
itself and clasps another, till that which was void has become palpable—some
spirit seems to work there in the space, as in a gentle—A wind which blows open
the void and calls it to life—[…]
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Written in words that recalled the Old Testament's staging of the origin of the world, Craig's ideal
theatre was truly a u-topic event in the etymological sense as a ‘non-place’. It would exist in
concept alone. The 1907 vision haunted the artist for the remainder of his life, but technological
limitations coupled with an increasing paranoia regarding the idea's exposure prevented a staged
realization.v For these reasons, aside from this hastily written private description, most of the
other textual reformulations that Craig repeatedly fashioned over the following decades were
intentionally shrouded in obscure language and suggestion.
Of course, Craig attempted to find a means to realize his vision of genesis. In practical
terms, the designer’s plan for a theatrical enactment differs somewhat from that first fantastical
description. He proposes a model that divides the stage floor into a gridwork of movable sections
with a ceiling segmented into an identically delineated arrangement—a kind of literalization of
the coordinate grid of single vanishing point perspective [SLIDE]. Such a model allows for fluid
shifts between walls and chasms, columns and platforms. Craig acknowledges that this
construction would limit the play of possibilities to strictly rectilinear configurations—the
architecture of cellular building blocks we see in his many prints from this period [SLIDE]. He
writes: [SLIDE]"We have, therefore, a room or place moveable at all parts, and all ways, within
certain laws and restriction—That is to say we have the square and the right angle and the
straight line… So far, then we have produced a place possible of all kinds of movement:
straight—square or angular […]"vi Here clear edges and lines of action would presuppose a finite
set of possible stage arrangements, "within certain laws and restriction": the angularity of the
known unknown.
However, Craig's original description of the event quoted above, particularly the
material-like folds "clasping" one another, surely signals a less geometrically organized intent.
This original folding does not evoke the interplay of various fixed forms passing along
predetermined paths, but a kind of fluid, even chaotic, stirring of the primordial soup. [ASIDE]vii
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In other words, there is a significant difference between the vision and its proposed
implementation. At least as imagined event, Craig wants to stage the beginning of the world
anew, before shape and contour define place and use. Grammatically speaking, we could say this
is a beginning not as transitive relation to an end, but as an intransitive opening towards whatever
future: a doing without a thing done. Craig does not describe a conclusion to his initial
articulation of Scene, closing instead with the phrase: "And may my love beginning, have no
end."viii In essence, Scene describes a material life process of a potentiality to do, not as human or
animal, but as the constant labor of appearance and change that consumes itself in the process of
creating itself.
In other words, the original vision of Scene acquires its significant capacity to express
potentiality precisely because it never had to show a defined object at its conclusion. As
semioticians of the theatre would remind us, as soon as something appears on the stage it begins
to mean something, to project a future expectation, an objective. Craig seems to understand this
difficulty even in the transcription of his original vision [SLIDE], as evinced by the vague
reference to [SLIDE]"something that unfolds" and the many [SLIDE]"seems" throughout the text
(four uses of the word in as many sentences). It is as if he were reluctant to place the event in
certain terms. He asks himself [SLIDE] "what has unfolded?," but leaves the question
unanswered, as if to say it is not so much a thing acting as an unfolding as such—the movement
of unfolding. Rather than an instance of genesis that posits order atop the indistinct chaos of the
void, naming the indeterminate as in the Old Testament's many divisions of light from dark, earth
from waters, this is a kind of Lucretian procession of endlessly falling atoms in constant
variation.
Indeed, Craig initially referred to the imagined event as Motions and then simply as
Scene, suggesting not only that movement and scenic image are one and the same
[motion=scene], but also that his utopic performance approaches the essence of eventhood itself,
an essence that he anchors in movement. [SLIDE] Scene manifests a theatre where to move is to
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appear and to appear is to move, to keep moving. But how to make a moving appear without
making a thing that moves? How can we show the theatre as that blank slate teeming with life,
that block of stone vibrating with potentiality? [SLIDE]
Nearly one hundred years after Craig first penned Scene—after the Modernism’s promise
of a better future had run its course and after Rumsfeld declared war on the unknown unknowns
of Terrorism—the Italian experimental theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio staged a short
site-specific performance, Crescita XII, at the 2005 Avignon festival in Southern France. In many
respects, the piece recalled the intent of Craig's original spectacle of potentiality. However,
instead of attending to Craig's appearance of an atom centerstage, the SRS performance brings
those mysterious invisible unfoldings out from the wings to brush unseen against the spectator.
Most significantly, instead of allowing for a genesis from an empty void, Crescita XII presents a
theatre that must first destroy the world of representation in order to create anew. It must join
creation with destruction, apocalypse with genesis.
[Before talking this through, let me take a moment's DETOUR to describe the work
of the SRS]
[SLIDE]--The Societas Raffaello Sanzio (or SRS) was founded in 1981 by siblings
Claudia Castellucci and Romeo Castellucci, along with Romeo's wife, Chiara Guidi. Roles in
work. Equally invested in the traditions of both the visual arts and the theatre.
[SLIDE]—Range of Media. Sculpture, Video, Performance, Concerts.
[SLIDE] Throughout the 1990s, the company staged a number of pieces based on
canonical works from western culture. These pieces worked primarily through image and
sensation, employing the full apparatus of the theatre to create a performance centered upon the
body of the spectator. Complete trilogy of the Classical Tragedy by Aeschylus Oresteia,
unconventional bodies and spaces.
[SLIDE] Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar …embodying speech and rhetoric.
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[SLIDE] Genesi…first encounter with work.
[SLIDE] Divine Comedy (awareness to the history of site)
[SLIDE] The question of potentiality is at the root of all of these works.
I’d like to focus on a small fragment of the SRS's massive Tragedia Endogonidia cycle
that they staged from 2002-2004. As its title of the project foregrounds, the Tragedia
Endogonidia cycle [SLIDE] conjoins the tragic drive toward death with a life form that,
possessing both gonads (or sexual organs), constantly replicates itself anew—the endogonidic, in
biological terms. In performance terms, the cycle spawned 11 interconnected but discrete
episodes [SLIDE] in 10 different European cities over three years (the first and last episode
premiered in Cesena, Italy, the company's base of operations). Each episode stages a mutation on
the original constellation of thought (Cesena #01)—sometimes in the reappearance of the same
characters or concepts, sometimes in a related sound or rhythm, a structural element. When
director Romeo Castellucci speaks of the project as an "organism on the run," he refers to this
genetic and geographic mutation, but also to a perpetual mode of escape, exemplifying the
baroque tendency to use the figure to escape figuration
The "organism" of the tragic form replicates itself endlessly in each episode not as a copy
so much as a repetition with a difference, constantly varying.ix To speak of just one of many such
mutating elements: At the start of one episode we see a black cleaning woman in uniform
[SLIDE] mopping a white marble floor that will later be covered in a pool of deep red stage
blood. In another episode, a clown-like figure appears as her double. He, too, cleans the floor, but
instead of wielding a mop, [SLIDE] he uses a meathook to maneuver a cow's liver across the
stage—for, remember, the liver is the organ that cleanses the body of toxins and the like. Clown
and cleaner literalize the tragic "catharsis" meant to purge the taint left by the tragic hero's
disappearance, her sacrifice. In a sense, everything becomes a substitute for something else in a
system that cycles endlessly upon itself, a whirlpool that, in swallowing down one figuration,
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keeps spitting out new actualizations.x This mode of constant pursuit extended to the means of
production, where the company would develop the individual episodes in short periods of
residency at each theatre, following the strand of a thought as it responded to a local landscape
without surveying the whole of the project. [Impossible to see cycle at once]
Alongside the official episodes, the company staged a series of Crescita (or
"tendrils")[SLIDE], short one-off site-specific events that appeared as ephemeral organs
sprouting from the root structure of the cycle and expressing a select genetic "trait" of the larger
organism.xi The Crescita XII stands to my mind as the most striking and purified form of this
endless creation-destruction.
At their assigned time, an audience of twenty gathers inside the Cloitre Saint-Louis
[SLIDE], a16th century Jesuit seminary recently converted into a hotel and now headquarters for
the month-long Avignon international theatre festival. Lead up a set of stairs and along a stone
corridor drenched in sun, the group walks past conference rooms where the press interview artists
and public officials, while amplified voices echo up from a public lecture in the courtyard below
[SLIDE]. Arriving at the corridor's end, they face a door like any other they had passed. Then
stepping inside, parting thick velvet masking, they find a hermetically sealed black box theatre
nestled within the heart of the hotel. It is as if they have stepped from the world of recognizable
and place-able reality, authorized by history's uses, into a pit of anywhere and anytime.xii Three
rows of seats in this most minimal of theatre auditoriums all face a box set that has similarly been
reduced to become the proverbial white cube, all even industrial surface with no maker's mark to
mar the gleam. There are no entrances or exits, only the invisible "fourth wall" allowing
passage—a brilliant hard edge of incandescent white against black velvet surround.
Some way back in the box is a small boy [SLIDE], maybe ten or eleven years old, sitting
on a basketball and facing upstage. He is the only difference in a field of white. Slowly he raises
his head to look at the blank wall opposite the audience. A moment. Eventually, he rises to his
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feet and walks a few steps to face the wall again, then picks up the ball and begins to bounce it
calmly in an even rhythm. He is passing time with an object, but soon his attention turns more
forcefully toward the ball, involving himself in the play with more intention, performing
impressive maneuvers and manipulations [SLIDE]. Not much happening, but utterly compelling
to observe the boy's commitment to the playing, his almost virtuosic engagement with the object
at hand. And yet, a nagging sense of expectation gathers. The white room sits inside the theatre's
playing space and it, too, is a character acting something out. Something has to happen.
The boy stops to regain his breath. He tosses the ball at the wall, catches it. Waits.
Then a voice whispers from beyond the walls: "Sebastiano".
He stops, clutching the ball and waiting.
Then "Sebastiano" and a third time "Sebastiano."
Suddenly the theatre is doused in complete and utter blackness [SLIDE] and a great
deafening roar pours out from the stage onto the audience. This is not the theatrical darkness of
dim glow tape and exit signs to anchor vision, but a thick and viscous absence of light, forbidden
by the strictures of commercial safety and sense.xiii Even more peculiar within this sudden void is
the cool wind that batters from every angle, submerging the beholder in a chaos of motions. The
roar runs through all registers of sound, overtones and undertows in all one's cavities, until one's
voice seems to join in with screams and laughs of its own—no speech heard or made, but sound
as sensation. Time stands still and surrounding, so that it feels like hours underwater or perhaps
mere seconds. The remove of visual distance is not possible—utterly alone in perception, where
the question of possession falls away, I can no longer determine whether an event belongs to my
experience or I belong to its enactment. The limits of my body are no longer determinate and I
cannot discern a possible end to my actions or the event's motions.
In any case, the material void does end eventually, the roar and its wind receding back
into the stage and seeming to circle within the abstract white cube now lit once more. It is as
pristinely bright as before, though now the child is nowhere in sight. His ball remains [SLIDE], a
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trace wedged in the corner of the room, but he is gone. Something else is wrong here: the white
room now sits slightly tilted on one end, though it is initially unclear whether it has shifted or we
have shifted—as if the entire world were thrown off its tectonic axis. It is like an earthquake that
changes the laws of nature or proves them false. Craig’s coordinate plane of columns and corners
sits askance; the whole axis and orientation of escape thrown off, fleeing itself.
The door into the outside world stands open and when the audience leaves the theatre to
descend into sunlight and the city beyond, the space remains behind, the sounds and winds still
circling within the emptied cube. One has the sense that the white cube in its black box remains
there still, years later, hidden within that arbitrary room at the end of an arbitrary hallway, that
related spaces of potentiality lurk behind other doors, maybe every door.
What world had called the boy out, remains uncertain, though it would be hard to call it
human. The sounds heard and the sensations evoked extend beyond any system of repetition or
imitation, projecting rather as the voice or breath of a void. While we may have returned from the
world of conception, he has not, instead remaining suspended in its midst. Perhaps this is the
most appropriate solution to the conundrum of an endless staging—the fact that the performance
must end at some time. By taking the child into the realm of the infinite as a sacrificial substitute,
the performance allows us beholders to return to our everyday world of productive objects and
produced subjects. He, however, remains suspended in that other time of labor, sent backwards
from birth—the instance that splits one into the double of representation as Artaud would have
it—to the (endless) moment of conception, when and where stuff is forming, becoming, but
taking action becomes impossible.
We had stepped into the most reductive of theatres, some approximation of the essence of
the medium: there was a space and an actor; he did things; an event waited in the wings. And
when the possible world returns, as it inevitably must for those of us wanting to reclaim ourselves
and act once more, we expect a difference marked in the system or a change in our location. But
the world to come appears no different than that which came before, except for the disappearance
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of the sacrificial substitute, a literal shift in perspective and our accompanying awareness that this
reality, too, may at any moment open up to another world. Walter Benjamin wrote about how the
Jewish Messianic tradition views the apocalyptic as follows[SLIDE]:
The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come. Everything there will be
arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the
world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come.
The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will
be the same as here—only a little bit different. Thus it is with imagination. It
merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the
veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it.xiv
Is this not an image of the theatre par excellence, a world that is quite like our own, yet somehow
distinctly altered or altering in the time that is always to come, a time bordered by the fluttering
appearance of a veil or curtain? Can we not see the curtain as a kind of eyelid blinking closed on
this scene and open on another; closing off our access to this present as it becomes past and
revealing this imperceptibly different present as it becomes future? As it reveals a new world full
of its own distinct potentiality?
Such messianic thought would claim that, in order to create or conceive the world to
come, one must first destroy the world as it is. In Crescita XII, this marriage of the end of a world
and the beginning of another is writ large in the passage from the first white cube to the second,
slightly different variation of the chamber. We may legitimately wonder whether that torrent of
sound and darkness had been interposed as a cover for the laborious removal of one white cube
and its replacement with another nearly identical twin. After all, isn’t this what happens in the
blackout between scene changes when incidental music covers heavy footsteps of stage hands, the
creaking of a turntable or movable wall? In Crescita XII, such a destructive genesis also appears
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more immediately in the shifting sensorium of the void itself, where one repeatedly experiences
different sensations over and over again. Here potentiality expresses itself by absolutely
exhausting the present moment's capacity to produce difference, a difference without reference.
All of which is to suggest that the “staging of the genesis of a world” that my title
promised and that Craig had imagined as a creation from scratch, may, at this other end of the 20th
century, require a parallel destruction of pre-existing possibilities. "Apocalypse" derives from the
Greek word for "unveiling." Craig's Scene had imagined an accumulation of foldings and
unfoldings as the movement of variation, an "unveiling" that did not reveal a nameable character,
but only the movement of disclosure as such. Romeo Castellucci, director of the SRS, has spoken
of the curtain as an "actor" concerned with an ambivalent task fundamental to the theatre
[SLIDE]: "It closes, or it opens. What is the real function of the curtain? To close or to open?"xv
Closed, curtained, or veiled, the theatre maintains its capacity to stage many worlds, the curtain
holds them in abeyance just as the surface of the blank page contains infinite inscriptions.
Castellucci refers to the task of the curtain in active terms: "to close" or “to open,” but it is clearly
both at once: Veiling is a motion that has not arrived in the stable state of the veiled, just as an
unveiling moves towards the open without arrival. The curtain folds and curls upon itself in
undulations, unveiling with one swell and veiling elsewhere, otherwise.
These affirmative voids live on even after they have been veiled again, after whatever
god or director says “let there be light.” Existing alongside our present moment, as it trembles
under our many expectations, their messianic announcements open out into alternate worlds,
strange and darkening, that live on without us. This is not necessarily a benign or positive
proposition. Writing at the beginning of the 20th century, Craig could imagine genesis in an
abstract theatre as a quasi-religious, transcendental potentiality called to life, to love, to hope. At
this turn of the millennium, the messianic event's opening into the abyss of potentiality and its
ending of this world's possibilities is also always coupled with an acute sense of Terror. Any
room or road may suddenly break with our expectations, the sense of firm footing give way into
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free fall.xvi An improvised explosion, an atomic explosion, the sudden reduction to the formal
movement of matter with Lucretius' atoms in fall(out) once more. A world will end and another
will begin without us. To turn back to Donald Rumsfeld's own veiled unveiling with which we
began: in the permanent state of emergency ruling the contemporary global landscape, the
"known unknowns" of the possible no longer hold purchase upon our greatest fears, no longer
offer a resolution to the catastrophic. Instead, we face the Terror of "unknown unknowns", the
chaotic potentiality of a sudden end and sudden beginning from out of this moment. In staging
apocalyptic chaos—endings as beginnings—the live event forces it audience to encounter such
potentiality as something that does not belong to us, as something that takes us up. It allows us to
set its fuse and practice abandoning ourselves to its cruel becomings.
QUESTIONS
POSTMODERNITY…and POSTCOLONIALISM (highlight the fact that this is one
strand)
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i
From Donald Rumsfeld's Press Conference of February 12th, 2002, here set to verse by
Hart Seely of Slate magazine. Hart Seely, "The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld: Recent works
by the secretary of defense," Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/id/2081042 (accessed
March 12, 2010), my emphasis.
ii
Slajov Zizek has referred to this quote in a number of essays surrounding the War on
Terrorism. In these various reiterations, Zizek suggests that the defense secretary tellingly
ignores a fourth configuration for this binary knowledge: the “unknown knowns.” These
are, according to Zizek, the textbook definition of what psychoanalysis would call “the
unconscious” and the “unknown unknowns” are comparable to the Traumatic. See Zizek,
“What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib”, “The Empty
Wheelbarrow” and “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the
Masses” online at http://www.lacan.com (last accessed January 22, 2011). See also
Slajov Zizek, Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle (New York: Verso, 2005), 9-10. My thanks to
Seth Horvitz for bringing these texts to my attention.
iii
Antonin Artaud, the Theatre and Its Double, 72.
iv
Craig encountered the Asphaleia System via Manfred Semper's Handbuch der
Architektur. See Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of Theatre
(Singapore: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 181.
v
Regarding the technical limitations of the Asphaleia system, Innes writes: "They could
only be installed beneath a limited number of sections in the stage, their tempo of
operation could not be varied, and they did not include the retractable walls, filling the
space between a raised section and the floor, that formed the essence of Craig's visual
concept" (Ibid., 181). Craig's excessive suspicion of others taking credit for his
innovations undermined many of his ideas, but he guarded none as closely as his "Scene".
Edward Craig recounts how he secretly built a wooden scale model of "Scene" for his
father's use. After revealing the model as a present, the designer's initial delight with the
working model turned to outrage when he was told that Edward had consulted a friend
regarding the technical feasibility of such a construction in a life-size theatre. The model
was set aside and never used again. See Edward Craig, Gordon Craig: the Story of His
Life (New York; Limelight Books, 1985), 316-317.
vi
Edward Craig, Gordon Craig: the Story of His Life, 235, my emphasis.
vii
The 'Primordial Soup' is a theory of the origin of life or moment when a pre-biotic
system becomes a biotic system, based on the notion that an electric shock could produce
amino acids (organic compounds) out of a combination of gases. Essentially this
supposes an origin of life out of the environment itself, figure out of a ground.
viii
Christopher Innes reads the conclusion of 'Scene' differently: "This metamorphosis
ended when an aesthetically complete form was achieved and the artist-director's vision
reached its definitive expression, then 'all is still'" (Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, 181). It
is unclear where Innes has found the phrase 'all is still' as his citation's merely point
toward the entire passage of Craig's writings in Serlio. In the transcription of this text
printed in Edward Craig's biography, the phrase 'all is still' appears in the beginning of
the vision, in reference to the void before emergence, rather than afterwards.
ix
This refers to what Deleuze calls a 'repetition with a difference' under the order of the
'simulacra-phantasm' rather than the 'copy': "Copies are secondary possessors. They are
well-founded pretenders, guaranteed by resemblance; simulacra are like false pretenders,
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built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or a deviation. It is in this
sense that Plato divides in two the domain of image-idols: on one hand there are copesicons, on the other there are simulacra-phantasms" (Deleuze, the Logic of Sense, 256).
x
In one of the statements published towards the beginning of the project, Romeo would
write that "[e]very episode puts on stage its own ontogenesis and that is all it can do. An
episode is closer to a series of pure and complete acts" (Castellucci, et al., Theatre of
SRS, 31). This project of creation was explicitly staged in terms of conception, rather than
birth: "To conceive means to 'receive' (conceptus, con-captio, to take in). Thus, the womb
of Conception becomes a place of incubation and pure invention where every contact
with the real world is suspended and deferred. […] In the realm of Conception it is
possible to see things that have never been seen and hear things that have never been
heard" (Ibid., 33). The theatre becomes the receptacle for the incubation and ceaseless
production of a multiplicitous life at a remove from the 'real' or actual.
xi
This foregrounds the already implicit consanguine nature of all the company's work, so
that the images and structures at play in the crescita not only converse with the Tragedia
Endogonidia episodes, but with subsequent work as well. The husband/father in
Purgatorio (from the Divine Commedia) returns from his unspeakable deed and sits
panting on a bench before the grand piano that occupies one side of the stage. With
infinite exhaustion he lays the backs of his hands upon the keys, palms laid up and open,
and the quiet strains of Satie's Gymnopedes drift through the room. Two years earlier, as
part of an earlier Crescita, within an antechamber in the ancient red stone walls of the hill
city of Urbino (the home city of the painter Raffaello Sanzio), a group of twenty watched
some distant relative of this man lumber towards a battered upright piano, watched him
collapse onto the bench before it, loosen his collar and pull the mask from his face. He,
too, laid his hands upon those keys. He, too, having just come before us after some
horrific abuse. The girl, eight or nine, her loose white nightgown stained with the blood
that drenches her head, would tiptoe in after him. Sit on his lap and embrace him,
brushing hair from his eyes, to say "Do not cry. It is all over now." The same actor,
Sergio Scarlatella, plays both parts, and, in a further involution of the system, is also the
victim of the extended beating in Br.#04.
xii
Crescita XII's sequel, Crescita XIII, staged the following week at the same festival,
contradicted any notion of this mythic performance as divorced from its locale. Driven
out in buses to the industrial outskirts of the old walled city, the audience entered an
anonymous factory warehouse and watched workers building the various apparatus of the
theatre, its white cube sitting off to a side, the unpainted wooden backside of the structure
visible. The set as theatrical construction, as artifice, was brought the fore.
xiii
In this, the Crescita realizes a practical impossibility in the contemporary theatre: the
absolute blackout. As Cathering Clement writes in her study of the "syncope": "No, the
black night, the primal one, will never exist. To have access to its flawless opacity,
perhaps one needs the sudden gap of anesthesia or the experience of syncope. In those
moments there is certainly darkness. As one says in the theater when one wants to
achieve the effect of time passing or of spatial displacement, 'Lights out!'—and
everything is extinguished. It is impossible. One can never extinguish everything. In the
theater one never succeeds. […] There will be no total darkness; the fire-exit signs stay
lit, tiny bright spots that remind the mad idealist of the bounds of human community and
16
the laws of protection. Darkness in the theater is utopian." See Catherine Clément,
Syncope: the Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O'Driscoll and Dierdre M. Mahoney
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994),
23.
xiv
Walter Benjamin, "In the Sun" in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 665.
xv
Castellucci, et al., the Theatre of SRS, 216.
xvi
Irish essayist and cartographer Tim Robinson writes of a quasi-Beckettian scene that
resembles this instance: "Imagine oneself snatched out of the normal course of life and
set down one knows not where, in utter darkness. Eventually one risks a step forward, out
of one's perfect nescience, and finds firm footing. Another step, and then another, add to
one's tentative belief that the ground underfoot, whatever its nature, is supportive. Each
step is progressively less likely to bring one to the edge; in fact, one comes to imagine
that there may not be such an edge. Soon one is striding out confidently, towards the
silently waiting precipice." See Tim Robinson, My Time in Space (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
2001), 116.
17