Staging the Genesis of a World:
Potentiality and the theatre of
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 knowledge or experience. 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 I use the concept was first proposed in Aristotle’s metaphysics (de anima)
and more recently taken up by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. My book project
and related essays 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.
Michaelangelo.]
As one of the chief architects of the global state of emergency still ruling the day a little
over 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
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Anthrax scare--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 been a
site for a community to gather together and practice making the future known. Together, we
rehearse how to move through the future. 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 dramatic theatre history, but it is
only in the 20th century that experimenters in performance began to isolate and foreground these
instances of potentiality.
[Ultimately concerned with the theatre as a creative space, or even tapping into
THE creative potential of a time and space. What is the potentiality of the theatre? What
worlds does it hold just beyond our sight? This afternoon I want to discuss a performance
from 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. I will
focus my discussion on a short site-specific staged by the Italian experimental theatre
company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Here we see a theatre that must first destroy the world
of representation in order to create anew. It must join creation with destruction, apocalypse
3
with genesis. It is my conviction that the theatre is by nature an apocalyptic art: every night
it creates a world anew, a world rushing irrevocably toward its own destruction.]
[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.
[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 the 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
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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.iv 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,
keeps spitting out new actualizations.v 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 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.vi The
Crescita XII, staged in 2005 at the Avignon International Theatre Festival in Southern France,
stands to my mind as the most striking and purified form of this endless creation-destruction at
the foundation of theatrical potentiality.
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[narrative re-performance] 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.vii 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
feet and walks a few steps to face the wall again [SLIDE], 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".
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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.viii 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
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.
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.
7
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
of that sacrificial substitute—the boy—a literal shift in perspective and our accompanying
awareness that this reality, too, may at any moment open up to another world. The theorist Walter
Benjamin once 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.ix
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
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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
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, may, on the other side of the millennial shift, require a parallel destruction of preexisting possibilities. "Apocalypse" derives from the Greek word for "unveiling." 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?"x 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.
Such an affirmative void lives on even after it has 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, its messianic announcement opens out into alternate worlds, strange and
darkening, that live on without us. This is not necessarily a benign or positive proposition.
Writing today, the messianic event's opening into the abyss of potentiality and its ending of this
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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 free fall.xi An
improvised explosion, an atomic explosion, a 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.
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
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,
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).
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v
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.
vi
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.
vii
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.
viii
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
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),
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23.
Walter Benjamin, "In the Sun" in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 665.
x
Castellucci, et al., the Theatre of SRS, 216.
xi
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.
ix
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