Socetas Raffaello Sanzio

JULIUS CAESAR
Spared parts
Dramatic intervention on W. Shakespeare
Conceiving and staging: by Romeo Castellucci
With

Julius Caesare: Gianni Plazzi

Markanton: Dalmazio Masini
vskji: Simone Toni
And with two Extra sto be find in the cities
Director assistant : Silvano Voltolina
Technique : Gionni Gardini
Production : Socetas Raffaello Sanzio
Duration: 45 minutes
Acted in Italian, subtitled in local language

A revisitation of Julius Caesar, staged for the first time by the Socetas Raffaello
Sanzio in 1997, cannot be mistaken for a mere indulgence in nostalgia or a
simple display of vanity.
The separate discourses of vskij and Marco Antonio are now seen directly
facing one another, like two living nuclei. These pieces are detached, as though
they alluded to a whole but, at the same time, went beyond it functionally.
These finely chiselled images of a drama inherent to the voice act out a
struggle against the power shrouded by the force of words. The topology of (the
actors) speech, entirely enveloped by language and its machines, and its
compromise with rhetoric, represent the two extremes of a polarity whose form
consists of moulds and imprints. At the centre lies the body above all, the
locutionary organs.
On one side: the protagonist of vskij, a veiled allusion to one of the founding
fathers of theatre, inserts an endoscopic video camera in his nasal cavity until it
reaches the glottis. The path followed by the endoscope is projected on a
circular screen, visualising a reverse voyage of voice production that continues
until it reaches the vocal cords. This long tube acts as a channel for breath and
for the words of the dialogue between Flavio, Marullo and Ciabattino, up to the
curtain of flesh that shows the sexual origin of words; this tautological limit of
the voice coincides with the audible-visible vibration of the oral cavity. An
absolute tattoo on phonation.
From above: Marco Antonio has undergone a laryngectomy. The funeral oration
at the rhetorical peak of the drama is elevated, as though on a pedestal, and a
singular technique of vocal emission gives tension to this monument. The voice,
deprived of its fleshy throat, becomes an oesophageal pulsation, a pure
commotion of vibration. Any articulation of meaning becomes blurred and
disappears: only vocal modulation remains, already half gone and, suddenly,
absorbed by bodily noises. Speech coming out of the open throat now becomes
the exoskeleton of rhetorical persuasion, and discourse literally coincides with
an utterance from a wound, the only phonation that can support the tale told
by Julius Caesars body, perforated by mute mouths. This body without the
organ of language (the vocal cords) is the emblem of a body that is eloquent in
itself, like an I invaded by a corpse perched on the throne of speech in a
naked exhibition of the scourged body.
In a negative theology of the voice, the hole through which Marco Antonios
breath passes, offers us a glimpse of the (absent) inverted throat of vskij.
Piersandra Di Matteo