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Beyond the Species and Beyond Death: Staging Mozart’s Requiem

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00667

1537-9477

Romeo Castellucci, Piersandra Di Matteo,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Spirituality linked to the theme of loss lies in a space between the loss of presence and the crisis of grief. Since the dawn of time and throughout the world, this is a space in which the bond between the living, who remain, and the dead, who pass into a condition of non-presence, has given rise to forms of rituals, votive offerings and funeral cults, formalized mourning.Over the course of the centuries, and increasingly since early modern times, Western culture has activated strategies aimed at obscuring death as a concrete and recognizable event and placing its representation within imaginaries that move towards a collective repression. Thus, death and forms of mourning have been transformed along the same lines as the change between “body” and “corpse,” casting a shadow over the experience of loss in public life. On the contrary, in contemporary necropolitics, the instrumental use of human existence (and of its end) is exhibited as a political-symbolic legitimization of how particular groups and subjects are exposed to the risk of death, accepted as a socially acceptable eventuality (as in the care of migrants).1 Within the context of this paradoxical imbalance, in Judith Butler’s studies on contemporary forms of mourning, the urgency of reconnecting grief is considered within the community. This not only leads to a need to redefine the concept of what is “human,” based on an awareness of our shared vulnerability and the precariousness of our lives, but also to reclaim collective mourning as an exercise of social justice and an ethical responsibility that must be shared.2Can performative experience inherit the spiritual, even liturgical dimension of the funeral rite? How can theatrical elements spark an affective dynamic, capable of suggesting a spiritual and existential crossing of the condition of mourning?In 2019, Romeo Castellucci attempted the unprecedented operation of “staging” Mozart’s Requiem. He did so by collectivizing grief within the horizon of the community of the living. Faced with the wrathful God of the Last Judgment, portrayed in this Missa pro defunctis by the composer, Castellucci holds up an inverted pagan mirror: the popular Festival. The Festival—understood as an all-embracing social fact and a repository of ritualized behavior, collective practices and symbolic devices belonging to all societies and eras—literally “visits” Mozart’s Requiem: precisely where one expects an exit from the stage, an excess of life arrives.The Festival, which is an intensification of life and a collective expenditure of energy, comes at the moment in which the community suspends its ordinary activities to a timeless time, with all individuals’ joyful passing into a common body. Castellucci grafts a “counter-rhythm” onto the ceremony of the Réquiem aetérnam, opening up towards another side of time and overturning the ordinary conception of death as the teleological terminus of life, in favor of a collective now. The introduction of the Festival, which is a transgression of social order and productive rationality, is materially articulated onstage through the bodily bond of the vocal unison sung by the chorus (in the musical performance), engaged in a simultaneous sequence of steps and movements in an atmosphere of joy that rises to a crescendo. Among the transformations the group first wear everyday clothes, then dress in a syncretic mélange of clothes from popular traditions (a sort of folk Über-Kostüm), and finally disrobe, alluding to the naked life of the community.The gestural syntax exceptionally acted out onstage by the singers is drawn from folk dances from across the world, from the Sardinian Ballu Tundu to the Belarusian Liavonica, from the Provençal Farandola to the Ukrainian Hopak.3 The dancers give themselves over to a score composed of movements based on the organic line of the circle, reminiscent of a rite revolving around a cult object, which activates and undoes a rotatory dynamic that in turn ignites a spiraling excitement. While intoning the Kyrie Eleison or the Dies irae, the participants follow various metrical patterns and find themselves connected by the hands and wrists. Shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, they enter and exit the circle to perform individual movements, later joining in pairs and intertwining with each other in two concentric circles. Now they form a chain with vigorous leaps, on one leg or two, then stand in a long line, joined by the palm of the hand or tied by handkerchiefs, their fists at waist height, with alternating leaps, or kicks back and forth. They exchange places, with a constant rhythm and moving around the maypole, all with their own colored ribbon intertwining and untwining from the top of the pole.The singular life of an elderly woman cuts transversely across this tableau. We see her disappear in her bed with the first Gregorian notes, and later reappear as a woman/child/infant, following the stages of a life in reverse. Along this movement à rebours, what occurs is the ancestral rite of a little girl’s passage to adult life. A figure of the scapegoat, she takes upon herself the evil and wrongdoings of the community and is demeaned by wearing cowbells, horns and fur, as in the sacrifice of an animal; in the end, she is crowned with a sprinkling of honey, feathers, and colored powders. Weaving together debts and the afterlife (Nachleben) of ancestral rites, a skull, universal symbol of the memento mori and a spectral reminder of the corpse to come, is kicked as if it were a ball by a child, just before intoning Mozart’s Solfeggio, K. 393 (No. 2 in F Major) in a celestial voice.The essence of festive practices, as Roger Caillois argued in his lecture at the Collège de Sociologie in Paris on May 2, 1939—clearly drawing on the thought of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille’s notion of dépense—consists in a sacrifice/gift of the self to the collective, a joyful dissipation that manifests itself in the tumult of union. This is where the festival becomes the culmination of an intensely spiritual experience (without following any religious credo). The collective gaiety in the dance does away with any kind of aesthetically intended virtuosity, and any demand for formal perfection in its gestures, focusing on a complete interdependence between bodies: “waste and destruction, forms of unproductive excess, belong by right to the essence of the feast.”4While the space is reconfigured, moving towards an ever-greater degree of disorder, on the back wall a list of words beats another rhythm that ties together micro and macro-cosmos, thanks to a continuous projection of the “Atlas of the Great Extinctions,” an immense catalogue of animals, plants and vegetable creatures, along with peoples, religions, languages and affects that are extinct, that are no more. Everything from trilobites to Michelangelo’s Cupido. These lists, one after the other—while alluding to a scientific taxonomy—compose an “Ode to Loss.” Gradually, the disappearance of all forms of life approaches the present and becomes increasingly anguished. In so doing, it launches the festive occasion beyond the boundaries of life itself, beyond the human. We find ourselves caught up in an inexorable becoming, made up of human and non-human, organic and inorganic processes. This progressive approach to our present time ends up including our own disappearance: the extinction of grass, friendship, weeping, wonder, red, blue, wind, politics, this music, love, this evening, this chair, the self, the verb “to be” … all of these elements remind us that in the era of the disappearance of nature, death does not only belong to humans.As spectators discover that the Requiem they are listening to celebrates their own death, which is inseparable from the death of the universe, they experience their own intimate closeness to death, not as a flight into transcendence but as the radical immanence of life, here and now. The spectacle of our death has always been written in the fine print of the script of our temporality, not as a limit but as a field of possibility. Rosi Braidotti’s reflections on death, considered in a posthuman convergence, help us understand what is at stake: Because humans are mortal, death, or the transience of life, is written at our core: it is the event that structures our time-lines and frames our time-zones, not as a limit, but as a porous threshold. In so far as it is ever-present in our psychic and somatic landscapes, as the event that has always already happened, death as a constitutive event is behind us; it has already taken place as a virtual potential that constructs everything we are.5The dancing bodies of the Requiem, in undoing any clear distinction between living and dying and in being potential corpses, celebrate the life that lies in wait for us, and the death that is already behind us, preconditions for an existence that is heavy with the future.■ When I consider the notion of spirituality and your theatre, I am forced to discard any reference to religious denominations and think of the experience of matter. How do you bring these different universes together?Theatre comes from the sphere of theology; it is born out of it. The empty sky, absence and the withdrawal of the god are what form theatre. The stage was once an altar. There is no longer any animal to slaughter. The knife is no longer physical, it has become a gaze, the gaze of the spectator. The actor is today’s animal. Western theatre established an essential relationship with liturgy, founded on loss. It would perhaps be correct to say that the scene represents nostalgia for a liturgy that celebrates not what it has, but the thing it has lost. Nevertheless, I believe that theatre’s relationship with religion can only come about through sacrilege. The sacrilegious re-enacts the sacred. Sacrilege is the ceremony without the sacrifice. From this point of view, theatre could be seen as a great polemical maneuver with respect to the institution of sacrifice.On a social level, religion manifests itself in the saddest of ways: in a supermarket, in a stadium, in a pharmacy. You don’t need a crucifix. Every time we genuflect in front of someone or something, anything—a commodity or a device—we give ourselves up to a life of faith. Where does the spiritual experience take place in theatre, in your view?I think spirituality has to do with poetry. It takes place when something breaks free from its function. Poetry is not used to communicate, but to hide language and to be able to express the power of “not saying.” In theatre, there is a visual equivalent to all of this. When the image is released from the grip of a message, the spectator is asked to reconfigure their vision. Reconfiguring everything is a spiritual act, because seeing is now about you, you are seen, you are there, you are included in your own gaze. And in that moment, you are outside time and outside history. You are alone. Being spiritual means feeling that you are in your own skin. Mozart’s Requiem was composed for a funeral ceremony. How to stage a work designed for a liturgical ritual?I feel that Mozart’s Requiem resonates quite precisely in this era. It allows us to observe the anguish that unites humanity in the face of the idea of its own extinction, both of the individual and of the species. As is generally known, this is Mozart’s last composition, marked by a presentiment of the end drawing near; it is an unfinished work and, thus, a work whose subject explores the very idea of the end in an unfinished context. Far from completing the composition, the missing parts—reconstructed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr—merely fulfill intentions already contained in the maestro’s design. The end, the demise, is our horizon as well as the horizon of the universe. All will end in a slow dissolution towards nothingness. This very theatre, this very music, this reality. Even the Mona Lisa will one day be dust. The staging seizes on this fading-out of life as the origin of all conceivable human beauty. This Requiem celebrates life. Mourning, for those who remain alive, is one of the most profound spiritual experiences of human beings. How to come to terms with the experience of finiteness on stage?The fascination that flowers exert on human culture certainly also derives from their fragility. We are fascinated by them because they are withering at the very moment while we look at them. Being face to face with the transitory is at the origin of all beauty, for beauty only becomes possible when it does not impose itself, because it passes. Only the experience of finiteness captures the wound of this enchantment. It is about absorbing the full weight of the word “end,” celebrating it, one could say, as its reversal in the form of a Feast, in whose continuous dance all those presences are called upon “to extinguish themselves,” like burning flames. In this context, Mozart’s music acts like the fuel that feeds the pyre from which to “signal through the flames,” in Artaud’s words. In your direction, the Christian Mass for the Dead reappears in a pagan ritual with a collection of syntactic elements taken from the universe of folk dances.The Feast inoculates itself in the Requiem funerary body with an excess of life. It reverses its polarity and meaning through the creation of a Feast that ushers in a different time: it addresses the fundamental question of the hope for rebirth; it explores the origin and the end, but also the end origin.Prior to any aesthetic judgment, the dances on stage symbolize a life principle. The whole village is called to join in the dance because they are all living beings and, as such, dance the dance of life and death. It is not necessary to be a good dancer to participate in a folk dance. On the contrary: inadequacy and breathlessness are extra values. Any formal perfection of steps and gestures is unimportant, precisely because everyone can dance, must dance. While the religious requiem ceremony envisages a distinction between officiants and participants, the staging employs an inclusive motion that welcomes differences in a collective experience. Is this a form of togetherness to counter death?I am not sure that the Feast exorcises death. Rather, I would say that it includes death by plunging into it. The Feast is speeded-up life, impossible to maintain on the plane of reality because of its intensity. This is the moment when the human community interrupts the sequence of everyday activities and abandons itself collectively to forms of exertion. In this sense, the Feast is nothing if not collective. One is linked to the other in a flow from “I” to “you.” Without energy input collective existence is not possible; not even individual existence. The fire of life has to be consumed. It is reasonable, perhaps even obvious, to consider this a metaphor of our human condition. The images of the Feast derail more and more towards a greater degree of disorder.The fundamental physical law of the universe would thus be the one that follows the second law of thermodynamics, which refers to what is called entropy. Physicists maintain that dissipation will lead to the heat death of the universe. I believe that all this has somehow to do with the beauty of flowers. On a stage, entropy sounds like poetry; an exact poetry that is capable of leading us back to Mozart’s Requiem. To see the exhausted singers who at the end of this evening have burnt up all their energy, like supernovas, resembles reading a poetic gesture. They have celebrated the Feast, they have lived. They have danced their own Requiem, and that of the universe. What does it mean that the Feast is broken up by a continuous projection of extinct creatures and things?This era is the first to reflect on the concrete possibility of the extinction of the human species. The list of extinctions is an enormous catalogue of creatures and things that no longer exist. It is a way of delving into the loss, the eclipse of life forms. The history of creation is retraced dizzily in a kind of On the Origin of Species in reverse, in a theory of devolution that recalls above all the weakness, those creatures and things which have been unable—in Darwin’s sense—to withstand the challenges of the environment. A list of people and things is projected on the wall: It is a negative path of creation that functions like a clock to remind us that all that we are now will vanish. It is like a metronome for dancing, a beat marked by geologic eras. However, this cataloguing process takes an unexpected turn by encircling the spectators and placing them center stage.It is not by chance that this catalogue—approaching with ever-growing dismay—brings us to the present, to our very existence, to the extinction of the here and now. It is engaged in a progressive and disturbing approach towards our time, which coincides with a farewell to all things. It is a vanishing of the self that triggers the logic of a gradual “goodbye to life.” These are pieces of this world that disappear, one by one, like blocks of reality detaching themselves now, here, from this room, from these things, this bed, that glass, the red of a notebook, the freshness of the air, my name; just like the enormous stegosauruses, they are doomed to extinction. In this turnaround, the projected sentences will ultimately speak of things that surround me—myself as spectator—now. The extinction that is spoken of is my own. I am listening to my own Requiem.(An earlier version of this interview was published in the program-book of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2019, appearing here with their courtesy. It was then translated into English by Sigrid Szabó for the presentations of Requiem at the Wiener Festwochen in April 2022.)