We didn’t choose Artaud – and in particular I Cenci – as material intended for the stage. Rather it was because they attest to failure and there is a process linked to the work of an author writing about and for theatre who then gives up and finds himself alone with his hallucinations. It is more than a text for translation on stage; it is immersion into a work that transcends itself to become a reflection-charged theatrical chronicle and biographical event on stage.
Once the first layer of the skin is removed, all that’s left to be said is that our relationship with the stage will have nothing to do with the biographical fact; we aren’t interested in Artaud’s life, but in the cultural conditions of acceptance demonstrated by Artaud’s work. We don’t need to be “loyal” to Artaud; we aren’t motivated by drawing family trees that list the names of those closest to the madman, of those who respected his rules: cruelty, plague, spontaneity, ceremony, politics, double, life, theatre, body and organs.
The only thing left to us is this utopian existential and philosophical tension which makes the subject indissociable from its manifestations and from the way in which it is exposed, which doesn’t treat life like a chronicle, every day life or a spontaneous fact crammed with evidence, but as the dissociation of the soul-animal and death.
The experience Artaud had of failure was linked to what had to endure from critics and audiences: existing in the legitimation of others – an unbearable condition for anyone who has always lived in disequilibrium and the dissociation of the self with the self, without any capacity for doing things differently. It shatters every relationship, starting with the one with the audience who, as it were, declare the success or failure of a work. What does tell us? “I LOVE YOU”, “I NEED YOU”. Ok.
We have ascertained that I Cenci/Spettacolo could be considered as the final part of an imaginary trilogy that starts with My Love For You Will Never Die and is followed by <OTTO>, two of our earlier productions that carve out limits in quite a disenchanted way. Coming away from either of them makes us think about our biographical journey and our way of haunting the stage, but also about what it means for us to produce objects from a political point of view, i. e. in close relation with the contemporary world.
Artaud appears to us to be the essential aid for concluding a discussion, at a time when the relationship between his life and his art becomes so direct and when his work radically challenges the established way of thinking about the stage. We ask ourselves lots of questions about our work, but also about the effective limit of a living performance and on the values that it can generate today when the idea of a performance or a production becomes part of a planned and paid piece of work. Lots of questions when over and above everything else the spectacular system has become a habitat where imagination is compressed into a continuous performance, filling up its voids. Theatre’s pointlessness: its ultimate final necessity.

None of this should be seen as screening of some kind: we declare ourselves to be a starting point for pursuing our process of debating the stage. Now you know.

From now on, you have never seen me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t know me, I’ve never spoken to you and I’ve never said anything to you: for you I don’t have a face or a voice or a breath or a first name, no nape of the neck, no back either. Day or night, it doesn’t really matter. Between us there has never been a conversation, and even less so this meeting; what is happening before your eyes has never happened, nothing is confirmed, you haven’t seenthese movements because I haven’t made them, you haven’t heard these words because I haven’t uttered them. And if you heard them now, it wasn’t me who said them. It would be better to give up our customs and let things flow from themselves. E basta. And that at last they sleep peacefully…