Claudia Castellucci
Dramaturge, choreographer and scholar, Claudia Castellucci was born in Cesena in 1958. During the years of her scholastic artistic training (Arts High School, Architecture, and Fine Arts Academy in Bologna, Painting), along with her brother Romeo, Chiara Guidi and Paolo Guidi, she founded the Societas Raffaello Sanzio, a theatre company active from 1981 to 2006, the year in which it was transformed into Societas, leading to separate developments for each of its founding artists. Since then, she has continued to produce art, including the exhibition The Passers-By, an exposition of newspaper clippings with an application of moral judgements, and the Celebration of Illuminated Gestures, an imitative action based on a series of her own drawings. After writing the dialogues for Santa Sofia-Teatro Khmer, the manifesto of an iconoclast theatre staged by the Socìetas in 1986, Claudia Castellucci began her own metric and melodic research that she transmitted to and further studied in the Theatrical school of the descent, a group of young people who met regularly for five years, bringing together gymnastics and a practice of philosophy (1989-1993). In later years, she broadened this study to include rhythmic movement. She was responsible for the main motor sequences in Julius Caesar, 1997, of which she also curated the classical oratorical gestures, and in Genesis. From the museum of sleep, 1999. From 1993 to 1999 she resumed her work on other three-year cycles of free schools, once again involving gymnastics and philosophy, and then, in 2003, began another school more specifically dedicated to rhythmic movement: the Stoa, held in Cesena at the Teatro Comandini, where the Company is based. The Stoa, too, is marked by regular encounters covering all of the seasons and lasts five years, in which the Dances are created, oriented towards an interpretation of movement that takes time as its main dimension. This is when Claudia Castellucci does particular studies on circular rhythmic movement, in relation to music, drawing near to the most archaic folk experiences. Travelling for research to Budapest’s Tànchàztalalkozo in 2004 allowed her to discover the dance fields in the Moldavian region of Romania, where she spent time during two summers. This same interest for rhythm brought her to study Gregorian chant with Nino Albarosa, professor of palaeography and Gregorian semiology at the University of Udine. The Gregorian aesthetic follows a non-mensural principle for rhythm, which does not take quantity into account, and with which Claudia Castellucci experiments in her Dances. In 2009, Claudia Castellucci founded Mòra (whose named indicates the slightest rest required to distinguish two sounds), a dance company that created Homo Turbae, to organ music by Olivier Messiaen. This experience opened up a long period in which she retired from public performance and developed a dance that considers the entirety of rhythm, with its upbeats and downbeats, thanks to an impulse coming from Olivier Messiaen’s conception of ‘melodic rhythm’. This is how the Mòra School originated (2015-2019), and once again, in 2019, became established as a Company, with which she created the dance Towards the Species, a dance modelled on the metrics of archaic Greek poetry, the meta-dance At the beginning of the city of Rome, on the earliest transitions of humanity when dealing with life in a mass society, and the dance The treatment of the waves, based on the sound of bells. In 2011 she led the École du rythme in the city of Bordeaux, as part of the Arte Urban Art Biennial. In 2012 she began writing The deep realm, a drama divided into three parts: the monologue The life of lives, the ballad Dialogue of the slaves, with musical arrangements by Scott Gibbons (2013), and the dialogue Why are you here? (2017). In 2014 she founded the Scuola Cònia, a summer school in Techniques of Representation that is developed over three years, intended for Students who wish to follow through on their ideas in a critical context, helped by various external teachers, all specialists in aesthetic disciplines. Since 2015 she has pursued her idea of a school conceived like a work of art, through the “Rhythmic exercises” and “Scholastic fragments” which take place in Italy and abroad. She writes dialogues for some works by Romeo Castellucci (Metopes of the Parthenon, Go down Moses, Democracy in America, The Minister’s Black Veil and New Life). She has written various texts dedicated to dramaturgy, scholastic art and choreography, including: Mouth Egg (Bollati Boringhieri 2000), Setta Scuola di tecnica drammatica (Quodlibet 2015), and Bollettini della Danza (Edizioni Sete 2019).
