Bros
Onassis Stegi, Athens
Winter 2022
To conceive the Bartian concept of a theatricality that transcends text, is to perceive what is inherently and unquestionably theatrical in Castellucci’s work. Not only in terms of an arbitrary visual axis, but as a concept firmly based on a semiotic field of application. The density with which Bros’ tableaux vivants emerge, evokes sensations and impressions that interact with textual sources. However, the external language of the performance, based on staging and physicality, overwhelms and exceeds the semiotic limits of a textual authority. The act of viewing tightens around the performers until the knot compels the actors to become spectators of their own hallucinatory executions. Any distinction is suffocated and what remains is the pleasure of partaking is this communion of guilt. The time of each performance, utterly compressed in its present, restores Barthes’ mythic time, whilst deconstructing the pluralities out of which it sprouts.
Applying Lehmann's repetitive perception reveals how the very repetition of these themes through their performance, comments on the cyclical and violent symptoms of this parading brotherhood. Even if one were to argue that the structure of the performance is known to the viewer and all variations were to be expected, the semiotic value of the piece is not nullified. Though its model is structured and timed, each performance bends and forms into new shapes. There is no question of repetition in Castellucci’s work. The accumulative speed with which actions are presented is such that Rorschach blots form out of their mass. The stage becomes saturated to the point that it is reduced to zero and the actors pour out of it.
Castellucci, who has throughout his career navigated the obscure semioses of Tragedy, cites Keaton’s Cops as an influence to the work. He even titles the prototype upon which Bros is reconstructed, Buster. He studies Cops as the reinforcement of Law triggering the apparatus of disaster in a systematic volume and tightening farce’s grip. And as the compaction of time is crucial in his corpus, Bros observes how comedy without tempo swerves towards tragedy. Ripping through the thematic axes of militarism, machoism, mortality, divinity and fatherhood, the images parade, clash, and bombard, opening up Castellucci's work to new emergent thematic endings.
Buster, Anna Van Waeg (RHoK).