Claudia Castellucci (ITA)
Dromena and Legomena: A Divergent Concordance
The fundamental model for the art of speech and action that I would like to describe is the ellipse. The centre that unites these two distant focal points is dramaturgy, the theatrical technique that brings together dromena and legomena, words and actions. Here, however, I would like to analyse their separation, which also implies a nostalgia for the centre and for their union.
The centre of the circle is now split into the two focal points of the ellipse: dromena and legomena; words and actions. Each has its own specific and autonomous force field, which we also recognise in many other dualities, such as the difference between myth and ritual. The ellipse thus becomes the curve along which the two fundamental elements of theatrical language, speech and action, are reflected.
Claudia Castellucci is the co-founder, with Romeo Castellucci and with Chiara and Paolo Guidi, of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (now Societas), a theatre company that since the 1980s has established its reputation internationally with a radical reinvention of the language for the stage. In 2020 she received the Silver Lion for Dance from La Biennale di Venezia.
At the beginning of the city of Rome
Choreography by Claudia Castellucci
Music composed by Stefano Bartolini
Production director: Benedetta Briglia
Organisation: Camilla Rizzi
Production: Socìetas
Performed by dancers that have worked with Claudia Castellucci during an intense 9-day seminar in Gothenburg.
This choreography refers to the beginning of Roman civilisation, one of the most vast ever seen in Europe. The accent is placed on the dawn of a social way of life, when forced to conceive an organisation in which many could live together. The fundamental decisions that underlie basic kinds of action, above all those that mark the initial forms of shared life, appear here thanks to the rhythmic and schematic patterns of a dance with strong ties to the sort of collective movement found in folk dance. Rome gave its name to the first forms of law, and the rules of Roman law are an early reference to the collection of behaviour we have accumulated over time, and that covers the legal side of affection. The primitive experience that underlies these legal abstractions also accounts for that which marks human individuals: the instinct of conservation, the sense of property as an inner habit, the concept of justice, a reasoning involving solidarity; and, not least, the relation between these laws and time, which remains in the background, in all its immensity.