Encrypting, Inscription and Inspection in Romeo Castellucci’s "Go Down, Moses"

Résumé

Most productions of Romeo Castellucci’s Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio are awesome variations of staging enigma. “Go Down, Moses” is no exception, relating as fragmentally and indirectly to the biblical hero mentioned in its title as Robert Wilson’s legendary productions to Freud, Stalin and Einstein some fifty years ago. Although Castellucci finds the Old Testament one of the psychologically most profound books and Exodus one of the most beautiful stories ever written, his mise-en-scène does not draw a portrait of the prophet but focuses only on the figure of Moses’ mother and the motive of losing a child. As a puzzling example of the theatre of images, “Go Down, Moses” lets us investigate the process of understanding theatre: that despite impressions and meanings ordinarily concretized and verbalized a posteriori we always perceive performance as a flow. My essay models the reception of “Go Down, Moses” while commenting on the process mentioned above.