Romeo Castellucci

Romeo Castellucci (Cesena, 1960) is an Italian stage manager, playwright, plastic artist and scenographer. Since the eighties he has been one of the protagonists of the avant-garde theater space in Europe and has been through Temporada Alta with shows like Il Terzo Reich (2022), Bros (2021), Ethica. Natura e origine della mente (2017) or Juli Cèsar. Trossos (2014).

Professional trajectory of Romeo Castellucci

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where Romeo Castellucci graduated in painting and scenography. In 1981, Romeo Castellucci founded, together with his sister Claudia and Chiara Guidi, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, taking the name of the Renaissance painter. Its premises were to make a theater based on plastic, visual and sound. Since then, the company has premiered more than a dozen works and received numerous awards and recognitions. His company, one of the most experimental, cultivates a form of creation that brings together all artistic expressions on stage, and has established itself, from the mid-1980s and, especially in the 1990s, in Italy and Europe , as one of the most radical theater research groups of the contemporary Italian scene.

Romeo Castellucci was appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2002. In 2003, he was appointed director of the theater section of the 37th edition of the Venice Biennale, the title of which was “Pompeii, the novel of the ashes”. Within his programming, he wanted to emphasize an underground dramatic art, under the ashes, and favored an essentially plastic mode of creation, in which the text itself takes on a material value. In 2008, Romeo Castellucci was an “associate artist” of the Avignon Festival and created three pieces inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. This trilogy was considered by the French newspaper Le Monde as the best work of the first decade of the 21st century.

The avant-garde theater of Romeo Castellucci and the company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio

Inscribed in what Antonin Artaud called the Theater of cruelty, in the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio shows the text is diluted in favor of images and sounds, treated in their most radical and exacerbated aspects. The proposals of Romeo Castellucci and the company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio combine the ancient theatrical craftsmanship with the most advanced technology and combine visual, sound and even olfactory devices, to create works in which the body predominates over the word. With an aesthetic that is often excessive, but never out of control, these shows can hardly be compared to anything other than themselves, which, provocative and avant-garde, never leave the public indifferent.