“‘Midway upon the journey of our life, we could found ourselves within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.’ Never there was a sentence more apt to describe the disturbance we all feel at some point of our lives, when we feel lost, empty and we don’t know if the road that we have chosen, the journey of life undertaken, is actually the right one for us. Hexperos’ 2020 release, “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life” draws inspiration from Canto I of the Inferno. This theatrical piece will be discussed by scholar Sara Fontana in her contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.Ĭategories: Performing Arts Tagged with: 2008, Adaptations, Animals, Architecture, Costumes, Dark Wood, Dogs, Festivals, France, Journeys, Live Performances, Paris, Performance Art, Suffering, Theatre, Translations Hexperos, “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life” (2020) Relatedly, see our post on Romeo Castellucci’s earlier 2002 commendation here.
Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that at the bottom of his own fears there is a secret space, marked by melancholy, in which he hangs on to life, to ‘the incredible nostalgia of his own life.'” - Festival D’Avignon, 2008 But this fragility is a resource, however, because it is the condition of a paradoxical gentleness. The visual dynamic of this show possesses the consistency of this stupor, sometimes this dread, that seizes the man when he is reduced to his paltriness, defenceless faced with the elements that overwhelm him. Everything here aggresses him, the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. Alone on the large stage, or on the contrary, walled in by the crowd and confronted with the world’s hubbub, the man that Romeo Castellucci puts on stage fully suffers, bewildered from this experience of loss of self. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is thus lost, it is because he does not know the answer to this question. In a dark wood in which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. He offers the spectator, in three stages and at three venues of the Festival, a crossing, the experience of a Divine Comedy. “Romeo Castellucci attempts to ‘hurl down The Divine Comedy on the earth of a stage’. Read more about Senegalese sculptor Ndary Lô, see .Ĭategories: Visual Art & Architecture Tagged with: Africa, Art, Art Books, Circles, Dark Wood, Energy, Heaven, Hell, Installation Art, Iron, Journeys, Metal, Purgatory, Sculptures, Senegal Inferno, Romeo Castellucci (2008)
The circle, in fact a spiral, symbolizes the energy of human beings, who find themselves in a new configuration, and they feel disoriented and experience a feeling of unreality.”įrom The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artistsby Simon Njami. The place is organized in a materialized circle and inhabited by iron characters which are ready to take off. The Day After is an installation in which, after walking a long way through a dense and dark forest, one reaches that space where everything seems to be suspended, where one can feel this particular tension that we experience before embarking on a journey of which we don’t really know the name. Our only hope in this life of ours, all that we have left is to try our best to be admitted to heaven someday. “I see the world we are living in as both Hell and Purgatory.
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