It is far in the future, but here is some preliminary information about my thesis project for Columbia. It performs next spring.

Oresteia (a tragic rite) is a new work created from the only extant trilogy of Ancient Greece, The Oresteia. Aeschylus depicts the tragic events at the house of Atreus after the Trojan War. Here, his text is held to the fire. A theatre of image, gesture, and sound emerges from the ashes. Aeschylean dramaturgy contains traces of the Ancient Greek mystery rites. So this will be a journey from darkness to light. Performances are April 20-23, 2011 at Riverside Theater.

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Click to enlarge. The former convent at St. Cecelia’s parish, Brooklyn. Closed since 2008.

“There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event … Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order.”

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Would you say your project as an artist is to allow the spectator to see themselves? To create something through your work?

Yes. Maybe more. I like the idea that the show looks at the spectator, not the opposite. And the spectator is naked in a way in front of the show, in front of ideas, if it works. My necessity is to have, in advance, a certain geometry, order. To make images as a constellation, if you like. Through a constellation you can draw different lines. And I need geometry, I need order, to coalesce in order to find the ambiguities.

In your work you often return to the Rennaissance as a point of reference. What does that period hold that is so crucial to your art?

In general, I prefer to have a confrontation with the idea of classic representation. In classical painting you recognize roles, and rules, and energy, and forces. They are the references of everybody because these rules are there even if you aren’t aware of them. Standing in the middle of the stage has a meaning. If you turn your shoulder, the meaning changes completely. And so I like the perfection of the Renaissance, but also the corruption of the classical.

Theatrically, does a tension exist between your desire to create a perfection of composition and real life? Is that drama?

Exactly. It is a drama inside you. Theatre and art are like the devil. The task of the devil is to separate you from yourself. The etymological meaning of devil, diaballein, is a Greek word that means, “I shear you in two.” And so, there is a diabolic task in art. Not only theatre, but art in general. It comes to separate you from you.

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This evening I saw And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing by Norway’s Verdensteatret. Audiences are invited on stage post-performance. Photos below. This excellent piece is coming to New York early next year.

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Click to enlarge. Romeo Castellucci examines a design element for On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, Vo1. 1 at the Theater der Welt festival in Essen, Germany.

Salvator Mundi by Antonello da Messina.

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The theatre section of the main site has been updated. There are production photographs and credits for three recent projects. They can be viewed here.

“Self-creation does not occur in a vacuum but is delimited by various constraints. The self is never alone but is embedded in the world around it, in what Sartre calls a situation. The situation influences the self and, in a sense, threatens to determine the self. The most important component of the situation is the existence of other people. Because we are never alone, we are confronted not only with the world around us but also with other people, who in turn regard us, approach us, and define us; Sartre goes so far as to say that they try to create us.”

Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas