The rhetoric of words versus the rhetoric of the body | Julius Caesar. Fragments by Romeo Castellucc

The celebrated Italian stage director Romeo Castellucci comes to Greece for the fourth time, within the framework of the Athens Festival 2016. The performance-dramatic intervention Julius Caesar. Fragments was first staged in Bologna, in March 2014, as part of the tribute to the director entitled “And the Fox said to the Crow: a lesson in general linguistics”. It consists in a condensation of the emblematic performance Julius Caesar, staged in 1997, one of the most ground-breaking and subversive art creations of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.

The “fragments” will bring “on stage”, one after the other, three historical figures of theatre and politics: the mysterious Mr. …vski, evoking the father of dramatic art Constantin Stanislavski, the silent and aged Julius Caesar, and the masterly orator Mark Anthony, played by an actor who has undergone tracheotomy.

Through the means of technology, the spectators, as if peeking through a keyhole, will delve into the corporeal interior of the actor, in order to discover the production mechanism of the human voice and speech. The heroic coming together of an internal struggle takes place on stage: the rhetoric of words recedes before the rhetoric of the body, which becomes the sole vector of true discourse. Senses and meanings are gradually bleached, through the very attempt of their verbalization. The performance is centered on questions concerning rhetoric, the art of acting, the power of persuasion, and the omnipotence of hollow political discourse.

Eleni Papalexiou, text for the Athens Festival 2016 official programme.