Romeo Castellucci's Go Down, Moses
Text by Claudia Castelluci and Romeo Castelluci. Music. Scott Gibbins.
Cast: Rascia Darwish, Gloria Dorliguzzo,Luca Nava, Stefano Questorio,Sergi Scarlatella.
Extras: Karen Beins, Kim Browne
Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016. The Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre. February 25-28. 2016
There are many reasons to attend
an Adelaide Festival of Arts. One is the opportunity to see acclaimed
international works that will be performed nowhere else other than at the
festival. Some are narrative dramas such as the brilliantly staged The James Plays
trilogy, currently playing in the Festival Theatre, and able to be seen
individually over a number of days or all on a single day. Others may be
startlingly avant-garde or experimental, challenging the intellect, probing the
psyche and transforming the perception of a modern world . Romeo Castellucci’s
mind-blowing evocation of the Moses legend, Go
Down Moses is such a production.
Castelluci’s art is layered with
a multiplicity of meaning. With an ensemble of seven actors, he explores the
very depths of the human psyche in a series of revelatory images that expose
the frailty and desperation of the universal human condition. A wandering group
of contemporary people, like ghosts within an ethereal universe of whiteness
confront the power and weakness of the tribe, the oppressor and the oppressed,
caught in a cycle of perpetual behavior. A woman bleeds profusely inside a
locked toilet cubicle, bearing the eternal pain of her sex during childbirth.
The stage, enveloped in fog, emits a deafening roar, subsiding to reveal a dumpster
with sounds of a screaming baby emitting
from a plastic garbage bag. An inspector, attended by police and a nurse
struggle to discover the motive for the distressed woman’s apparent murder of
her child. The woman, drowned in delirium reveals the fate of Moses, abandoned
to bring salvation to the human race, by leading them from oppression and into
a promised land. An MRI draws the woman towards an ancient world of prehistoric
people, huddled as a primeval tribe within the sheltering caves. It is here
that Castelluci’s imagination explodes with resonating realism, a living diorama
of humanity’s origin. A cavewoman, convulsed by grief, buries her dead child
within the earth with a rock for a headstone. In a moment of palpable grief, motherhood
is shared and the past screams out to the present in a huge SOS scrawled upon
the scrim. The woman enters this primitive landscape and in a final gesture
embraces the lovemaking position of the cavewoman, who has given birth to all
womankind.
At the close of Go Down,Moses, I am left with a prophetic foreboding for the
salvation of humanity. Castelluci’s vision offers little hope. As he puts it in
his programme note, “humanity is exiled from its being”. No Red Sea parts. We are
not led from the Egypt of our torment towards God’s Promised Land. And yet, Go Down Moses is not anarchic, or
atheistic. It is a revelation of the human psyche and the human spirit, a
powerful impulse, baffling in purpose, contentious in belief and disturbing in its prophetic depiction of a dislocated existence,fused in space and time.
Go Down Moses presents a visual feast of symbols and metaphors.Some
images, striking though they are, tnd to linger,and would have greater impact
if edited. Make of them what you will, for in the imagery exists a powerful
comment on existence that should not be ignored. Castelluci’s vision, played
out by a brilliantly focused ensemble, demands interpretation. It does not
matter if you understand Go Down Moses
or not. It does matter that you understand what you understand of a
performance, bursting with meaning, exploding with intensity and erupting with
prophetic insight. If you ever have the opportunity to experience the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, do whatever is necessary to get a ticket and make of it what you will.
