Overspill: Shuffling the Deck

In the words of Robert Pacitti, in the introduction to the limited edition SPILL Tarot pack, ‘the tarot stands as viable a means of interpreting the world as any other – including science, philosophy and mathematics – and I defy any sceptic to prove otherwise.’ A Tarot pack is a set of 78 cards most often used, in English speaking countries at least, for the purposes of divination (in France and Italy it’s also used for playing games). The pack is made up of the Major and Minor Arcana, people and things that represent the elements of our world and the characters within it, and Tarot readings are carried out in relation to spiritual enlightenment, psychic communication, and the occult. But, as Robert Pacitti points out, a reading is as much an act of interpretation as one of prediction – the meaning of the cards reflects the reader’s frame of reference as well as her frame of mind. It’s this ability to crystallise thought that gives the cards their power.

In the case of the SPILL pack, the cards’ power is enhanced by the symbolic resonance of the images, and the way they have been produced. The Major Arcana – character types that include The Fool, The Hermit, The Moon, and everything in-between – are pictures of artists and other contemporary ‘mavericks’ from across the fields of art, academia, cultural activism and beyond. I have just cut the pack in three to reveal Robert Pacitti – Artistic Director of the Pacitti Company and creator, producer and curator of the SPILL Festival (‘Death’); Lois Kiedan – co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (‘Justice’); and Empress Stah – trapeze artist, Neo Cabaret performer and producer (‘The Star’). The pictures were taken by the photographer Manuel Vason, who has devised a unique working method in which he collaborates with his subjects to capture performances made for the camera. As a result, the SPILL Tarot pack does not just help crystallise the thoughts of the person using it; it also goes some way to crystallise the processes of collaboration, challenge and knowledge-sharing inherent in the SPILL Festival itself.

Coming at the start of the pack, The Fool is the journeyman of the Tarot, an innocent and a visionary who may be drawn in any direction by the rest of the cards. As such, the Fool embodies the reader and all her potential. The SPILL Tarot Fool is a figure in mid-air, leaping with abandon against the greying landscape of modern agriculture. A stony, pit-holed path winds through fields of dried out crops; an energy pylon and other industrial buildings line the horizon. As s/he jumps, the androgynous figure of the Fool stretches out of her newspaper costume, and pulls her mouth tight between a grin and a grimace. Above, a small clear moon makes an early appearance before sunset. Behind, a dog looks warily at the strange traveller with her eyes covered and her feet bare.

It’s hard to tell if the Fool is jumping for joy or desperation. She exists in both day and night, in the freedom of outdoors and within the cultivation of industrial agriculture. Suspended in the air, suspended in time and suspended between places, this figure embodies the ‘unbridled primal energy’ of the Fool.

But the card is also a picture of Rajni Shah, whose performance piece Dinner with America, was programmed into the SPILL Festival; and it’s easy to see how, like her performance, this image draws on the potency of symbols that slip in and out of recognition. But the energy of this suspended image – with Shah’s head thrown back and her arms stretching away from her body– must also be down to the eye of the photographer, Manuel Vason, and the synergy of the collaboration. There was also another collaborator in this image – Lucille Acevedo-Jones, a costume designer who works regularly with Shah, and who designed the newspaper dress for this Fool.

Like all the cards of the Major Arcana in this Tarot pack, the Fool is dripping with the residue of multiple and combined professional practices – the traces of as many professional practices, perhaps, as there are knowledge systems touched by Tarot itself. By bringing together this collection of people inside the rich symbolic web of Tarot , the project of the SPILL Tarot pack represents the working methodology behind the festival. As a whole, SPILL 09 was a collaboration between artists, producers, venues and audiences across a wide terrain – large theatres as well as site-specific spaces; performers familiar to London audiences as well as artists and work that was wholly unfamiliar; live art, theatre, performance, explicit bodies, music, dance, and much more. It brought artists to London from all over the world, and it did the same for audiences. As such, it reflected the vision of the Pacitti Company and its Director, Robert Pacitti. But SPILL was also woven from the enthusiasm, interest and sometimes controversy sparked in the minds and conversations of the people who participated by performing, producing or watching the work. Just like Tarot, it offered up glimpses of human experience, with the desire to be read and absorbed into others’ lives.

SPILL: Overspill was an attempt to respond to the energy and achievement of SPILL through writing that respected the form and content of the festival and its processes, and that developed with the festival over time. Together, the seven writers involved (David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt) created 55 pieces of writing. As well as responding to the work as we saw it during the festival, Overspill writers investigated the processes behind the finished product – interviewing artists, visiting rehearsals, and in most cases developing a collaborative process with the artist. We addressed questions to the audience and, within the confines of free blogging software, we tried to experiment with form. There were three days of writing workshops, two peer critiques, a complicated group editing system and ticket schedule, and one all night live writing performance. Like the SPILL Tarot, each individual blog post represents a complex web of professional practices and collaborations; what you’re reading here is the first card in the deck. We hope you will shuffle your own way through, and use this site to crystallise your thoughts in response to the SPILL Festival. Please make comments below, or email opendialogues@gmail.com

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

Telling the telling of a tale by Mary Paterson

Void Story

by Forced Entertainment

Soho Theatre

21- 25 April

The set for Void Story, Forced Entertainment’s latest show, is made up of two small desks, one large desk and four chairs. There are four lamps – one to illuminate the desk space of each actor – four scripts, and four microphones. On the long desk, there are two Apple Mac laptops and a mixing desk with a complex system of dials and wires. At the back of the stage is a screen, onto which are projected a series of static, collaged images in black and white that correspond to the story. The story is being told by the four actors at the utilitarian desks, reading their scripts, and speaking into their microphones.

In other words, Void Story looks like the making of a radio play. The actors perform for an aural, and not a visual, effect – the mixing deck provides background noise and other distortions, and they also use more old fashioned techniques like rustling a crisp packet to make a phone line crack up. The images onscreen look like black and white photos that have been cut and pasted, then photocopied together. The result is a collection of flat, studio poses (woman and man standing, woman and man looking surprised, woman and man lying on floor) inside a series of banal, disjointed landscapes (tower next to tree next to lamppost) which make no attempt at perspective or verisimilitude. Rather than illustrate the story being told – a twisting tale of two protagonists caught in a hostile, post-apocalyptic world – these collages approximate elements of it. Just like listening to a play on the radio, then, the real pictures are conjured in the audience’s minds.

But the presence of these almost-illustrations, as well as the physical presence of the actors and equipment onstage, means that the viewer cannot simply drift into an imagined landscape of her own. Seeing the constituent parts means you can never quite suspend your disbelief and surrender to the fictional whole. That child you hear is actually the voice of a grown woman, distorted through an orange microphone and a glowing computer; that robot is the voice of a middle aged man. Both product and production, Void Story dissects the body of the play like a living autopsy. It’s not just the inanimate objects that make up the ‘equipment’ in this show; I should also have listed the voices of two women and two men, not anchored to their bodies but practically deployed wherever they come in useful.

In fact, voices, images, plot devices and other pieces of equipment are used and re-used throughout the play, as if they are interchangeable tools fit for any purpose. Photographs that show a woman and man scream, for example, are used later in the play to represent them dance. In the context of theatre, of course, the word for this is 'prop': an incidental, almost abritrary object that carries no value of its own.  Void Story uses props as props –as tools to point towards an act of storytelling, rather than elements subsumed into a story.

And what of the story itself? The protagonists, Kim and Jackson, are chased, attacked, victimised, cheated and conned by people acting in inexplicable ways. They are pushed from event to event, journeying to unknown places and meeting a cast of strangers. In other words, it is every story ever told, every fairytale ever uttered, every dream you’ve ever had. It is Everyman and Everywoman, in Everywhere, affected by everything. As such, the story is both the bare skeletons of a tale and the full body of an epic. On one hand it is a series of unlikely things happening to two people you don’t know; but on the other it is a universal story of people dealing with adversity, of humanity in the face of fear. There is so much left unsaid that the story never reaches a narrative arc. Instead, it begins with a bang and ends only when the protagonists fail to react to the world around them. And this ending, too, is unresolved – like a computer game, the characters could just have faded away to start once again at the beginning.

In Void Story, then, even the plot is a prop – one of a collection of instruments that can sustain the whole. But if everything is a tool, what can the greater whole be?  Instead of a whole there is a hole, a void, at the the heart of this story. What is left is the process of story-telling and story-watching itself. Beneath the thick and delicious syrup of fiction, lies an equally warm and spicy blend – the desire for fiction to take place. It is made in the affectionate looks between actors as they wait for each other’s cues. It is the cocked heads of the audience as they follow the actor’s leads. It is also the naïve collages that bear so obviously the mark of a human hand. Unlike pictures made in Photoshop, for example, the smudges and imperfections of these images trace their own means of production. In the same way, by exposing the aural ‘tricks’ of a radio play, Void Story does not simply tell a tale, but also tells the telling of the tale.

Sitting in the packed auditorium of Soho Theatre, it felt like the play was a balloon that the audience and the actors were bouncing in the air between them. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the balloon fell to the ground – we can always pick it up and start again. But first, let’s enjoy the game of keeping it afloat, of making the play together.

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues

Impossible Tolerance by Mary Paterson

Orgy of Tolerance

Jan Fabre

Royal Festival Hall

15 and 16 April.

In a world where everything is tolerated, how do you know what it means? If we agree that taste is relative, then what’s the point discussing taste at all? If consumerism doesn’t have a moral or ethical cloak – you don’t need to consume for any other reason – then why will having things make you happy?

In a world like this, mightn’t the journey of life just as well be a round of competitive masturbation – an exercise in ostentatious self pleasuring, the rivalry of which stops it being pleasurable at all?

If there is no moral compass, in other words, the drive for personal fulfilment has no context, and no prize.

Welcome, to the Orgy of Tolerance.

Jan Fabre’s production really does begin with a round of competitive masturbation, in which two men and two women try to orgasm to the vicious encouragement of a team of military coaches. It is the woman who loses, lying shivering and unfulfilled at the front of the stage, who introduces the rest of the show - she is ‘very excited’ [to welcome us to the show] she tells us, although she is crying with the frustration of not being able to come. Unable to amuse herself like the other contestants, this loser sets the scene for an indictment of contemporary culture, consumerism and the liberals who pretend they don’t take part.

In a collection of scenes that dissolve into each other like photos in a digital picture frame, Orgy of Tolerance tweaks the small things in otherwise recognisable scenarios. A group of people takes an exercise class – to exercise money. Three pregnant women give birth – to supermarket goods. The result is a grotesque image of modern values, obsessed with the inexplicable pursuit of inexplicable things. In one scene a woman has sex with a sofa, with the help of two leering and excited men. It is hard to think of an object that is less erotic, less able to resemble a human, less an object of desire than a sofa. And yet here in the UK, furniture giant DFS is having its famous sale again every weekend, so there must be something attractive about spending hundreds of pounds on a leather three-seater.

This complacency of desire in Fabre’s play is neither a solution to unhappiness, nor a useful tonic for it. Early on, Jesus makes an entrance. Bearing his cross on the way to dying for man’s sins, he is immediately spotted and styled by a camp fashion director, and his cross is removed. Instead of relieving Jesus of his burden, however, this propels him to spend the rest of the play wandering on and off stage, balancing an imaginary cross like a deluded circus performer. Later, couples wander on stage and start to pick out parts of the set to buy for their living rooms, but they can’t get their fix from consumerism alone: they also need a good snorting of cocaine to help them on their way. And what of the men who are fellated by silent, stiletto-wearing slaves as they discuss their ‘trophies’ from human hunts? Nodding sagely at each other’s racist jokes, they slide imperceptibly into barking madness – one of them sticks his rifle up his arse and yelps like a rabid dog.

The irony of Orgy of Tolerance is that one of the ways it fulfils its title by trying to be as offensive as possible. At one stage all the actors line up and shout ‘Fuck You!’ at every social group imaginable. Personally, the moment I got offended was when a woman wearing a Klu Klux Klan outfit started moonwalking to the sound of The Beatles' 'Come Together'. What was this collection of cultural references doing together in a visual trick? And when did it become ok to impersonate the KKK?

The point, of course, is that it’s not ok. It is also not ok to turn the famous images of torture at Abu Ghraib into jokes for an audience to smirk at in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It is by being so relentlessly offensive that Fabre hopes to make his point – moral relativism can only go so far; you need to have a sense of right and wrong before anything can make sense at all. An Orgy of Tolerance, the play suggests, is a degraded and putrid place, where meaning is squeezed out of the vacuum packaging of consumer goods. Tolerance, paradoxically, is only feasible if the rest of the world is tolerable. The problem the play sets itself is: how do you make this point without simulating the Orgy?

Mary Paterson is Co-director of Open Dialogues mary@opendialogues.com

National Platform - Day One - 18th April 2009

National Theatre Studio

18 April 2009

Over two days, the SPILL National Platform presented 20 performance works by emerging artists, selected from almost 300 applications. The works reflected an incredibly diverse range of forms and themes: durational and installation work, engagements with the conventions of theatre, interactive provocations, and autobiographical narrative.

As writers, we knew we would be unable to respond in detail to all of the work, but we also wanted to avoid imposing any selective criteria, even a random one, on which work was covered. We decided in advance of the Platform that we would impose a constraint on our responses. This would provide a structure for giving equal space to each of the performances and would make the most of our limited time. We decided that we would respond to each of the works, and we would limit our response to the space of a 3x5 index card.

We like the idea that each of the identical cards seems analogous to the opportunity offered to the emerging artists: a blank slot, to be filled individually, but unavoidably to be experienced side-by-side with the rest of the programme, as part of an assembly or collection of material.

Although for the most part we have prepared our cards after the event, there’s also something about this format that reflects the experience of writing: taking notes in the dark, collecting fragments and impressions and responses. Trying to capture not just the event on stage but our internal journeys. Thinking always, at every moment, even before the moment has finished, about how to translate into words the transient and complex experience.

These cards are only scraps, only partial and inadequate records of the events of the weekend, but we hope something of the extraordinary and boundless diversity of work is reflected by these responses. Perhaps they can stand as the beginning of a discussion – please add your own comments below.

Theron Schmidt

Please click on each image to view larger.

Please Note: You made need to zoom out/in using your browser to view the image in a suitable size.

Mamoru Iriguchi - Pregnant?!

by Alex Eisenberg

Madeleine Trigg - Sutre

by Mary Paterson

Elyssa Livergant - A Kiss From the Last Red Squirrel

by Mary Kate Connolly

Neil Trefor Hughes

Minimalist Music for Young People

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Claire Adams -Photopollution

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Catalina Garces - Identi-ffy

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Mitch and Parry

I Host You, Now Tonight, Let Me Show You How

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to Mitch and Parry here.

Amanda Couch - Dust Passing

by Mary Paterson

Other, Other, Other

Long Winded in Five Parts

by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Nathan Walker - Bad Bad

by Mary Kate Connolly

To read cards from day two click here.

The writers participating were Mary Kate Connolly, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.

National Platform - Day Two - 19 April 2009

National Theatre Studio

19 April 2009

Over two days, the SPILL National Platform presented 20 performance works by emerging artists, selected from almost 300 applications. The works reflected an incredibly diverse range of forms and themes: durational and installation work, engagements with the conventions of theatre, interactive provocations, and autobiographical narrative.

As writers, we knew we would be unable to respond in detail to all of the work, but we also wanted to avoid imposing any selective criteria, even a random one, on which work was covered. We decided in advance of the Platform that we would impose a constraint on our responses. This would provide a structure for giving equal space to each of the performances and would make the most of our limited time. We decided that we would respond to each of the works, and we would limit our response to the space of a 3x5 index card.

We like the idea that each of the identical cards seems analogous to the opportunity offered to the emerging artists: a blank slot, to be filled individually, but unavoidably to be experienced side-by-side with the rest of the programme, as part of an assembly or collection of material.

Although for the most part we have prepared our cards after the event, there’s also something about this format that reflects the experience of writing: taking notes in the dark, collecting fragments and impressions and responses. Trying to capture not just the event on stage but our internal journeys. Thinking always, at every moment, even before the moment has finished, about how to translate into words the transient and complex experience.

These cards are only scraps, only partial and inadequate records of the events of the weekend, but we hope something of the extraordinary and boundless diversity of work is reflected by these responses. Perhaps they can stand as the beginning of a discussion – please add your own comments below.

Theron Schmidt

Please click on each image to view larger.

Note: You made need to zoom out/in using your browser to view the image in a suitable size.

Victoria Pratt - Chasing Next Door's Cat

by Mary Paterson

Sohail Khan - Stress Positioning

by Rachel Lois Clapham

Simon Bowes - Kings of England

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Silvia Rimat - Being Here While Not Being Here

by Theron Schmidt

Rasp Thorne - Blinded Descention

by Rachel Lois Clapham

Nicola Conibere - Count One

by Mary Paterson

Simone Kenyon and Neil Callaghan

To Begin Where I Am...Mokado

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Sara Popowa - Stick Piece

by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Natasha Davis - Rupture

by Mary Paterson

Taylan Hallici - Introduction to floodlondon

by Mary Kate Connolly

To read cards from day one click here.

The writers participating were Mary Kate Connolly, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.

SPILL Salon – Feasts and Feasting by Mary Paterson

SPILL Salon – Feasts and Feasting

Edge Bar, Soho

Monday 13 April 2009

Martin Jones, an archaeologist of food, has made a ‘thinking map’ of feasts – not a model, exactly, but a layout for the social significance of sharing food. In the centre is the hearth, surrounded by a group of people that eats together, tells stories and follows an etiquette: this constitutes culture. Further afield is a transitional zone, a zone of dancing and drugs, where culture is put to the test. And further still is everything else – the chaos of unmediated life: this is nature. Feasting, then, is at the centre of culture, which is to say the centre of ways of coming to terms with the world. As well as the literal points of reference within the SPILL Festival – the SPILL Feasts, for example, and the feast at the end of Rajni Shah’s ‘Dinner with America’ – feasting is an apt metaphor for work brought together in a festival at all. And the Salon on Monday 13^th April, organised and hosted by SPILL Thinker in Residence Kira O’Reilly, was both a conversation about the relationships involved in food and eating, and a reflection of the community generated and sustained by SPILL.

At the Salon, Australian artist Boo Chapple discussed a work called ‘Hand to Mouth’, in which she and an army of volunteer production line workers cooked a meal for a high table of guests. Unlike a normal fine dining experience, the food was prepared to resemble some of the processes that went into making it: literally, the many hands that have touched the food before it arrives at your table. Later, the British artist John O’Shea talked about ‘The Meat Licence Proposal’, a project which aims to change UK law so that people who eat meat must ‘be equally comfortable with killing animals’. Under O’Shea’s proposed law, people would need a licence to be carnivorous, attained through slaughtering an animal. These projects show that feasting is no longer as simple as sitting round a hearth sharing the spoils of the day’s hunt. Food arrives on our tables via a host of invisible others – the others that grow it, transport it, kill it, preserve it, package it and sometimes prepare it. As anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant kitchen will know, there is a large gap between the pretty stories our plates can tell us and the grim reality of how our meals have arrived. Chapple and O’Shea both try to unearth part of this reality, to turn eating from an act of consumption, perhaps, to one of proper digestion.

Where does this kind of activity sit in Jones’ thinking map of the feast? Is this cultural awareness a way of testing culture, or is it one of the stories that we tell at the hearth to let us know who we are? Since beginning ‘The Meat Licence Project’ O’Shea has stopped eating meat. ‘But I’m not’, he says adamantly, ‘a vegetarian.’ While he literally fits the definition, he does not attribute the cultural associations to himself. Similarly, those of us at the Salon all nodded at the materialisation of mechanisms behind food produce in Chapple’s work – we ‘got’ the concept. But it must surely have been a more visceral experience for those doing the eating. Diners at ‘Hand to Mouth’ had to gnaw lamb as if from a human wrist, and to eat chocolate fingers off human ones. Perhaps these reflections on feasting tell a story by rupturing cultural norms - including the ‘norms’ of liberal self-awareness – which can only be reconciled through a process of re-telling, like suture through social exchange. In Chapple’s case, this is achieved through the event of eating itself. And in O’Shea’s, through that other essential part of the feast – dialogue; his project currently exists as a discussion site online: http://www.meatlicence.org.uk/.

But if O’Shea and Chapple are sitting round the central hearth, I don’t think their dinner companions are all the artists in the SPILL Festival. Two of SPILL’s most high profile performers – Romeo Castellucci and Jan Fabre – have also shown some of the most controversial productions. Castellucci’s trilogy of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory was underpinned by a deep and poweful violence which left some audience members moved, others alienated. And Jan Fabre’s ‘Orgy of Tolerance’ set out to offend everyone in the theatre. ‘Fuck You!’ the performers shouted, at every social group imaginable; if you didn’t get offended for yourself, your anger was sure to be piqued on behalf of someone else you know. This work belongs to the realm of the further afield – the transitional zone that tests what is acceptable. This explains why, for me, Castellucci’s work was anchored in ritual. In ‘Inferno’, for example, huge swathes of people took to the stage and obeyed the same unspoken laws – walking, falling, hugging, killing; these hypnotic movements – like a visual chant – washed over the imperatives that were left unexplained, like a ritual that reaches out to an unknowable god. Perhaps this also explains what Fabre’s paradoxical title is getting at: where is the orgy, the excess, the vital controversy in a society that advocates tolerance? Tolerance is for the hearth; orgy is for the in-between place.

If there is a ‘nature’ in this extended metaphor, it could be the landscape of British theatre. Both defining culture and testing it, SPILL is already having an effect on the way we see the world beyond. The question is, what kind of effect will this be?

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

An Awful Responsibility by Mary Paterson

Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

by Romeo Castellucci

Barbican

At the start of Inferno, a line of Alsatians is brought on stage and chained up by the footlights. They bark and growl and snarl at the actor behind them – Romeo Castellucci, the director of this work. Suddenly, like the crack of a whip, a dog runs on from the sides and attacks him; then another; then another. The dogs sink their teeth into Castellucci’s padded armour, shake his limbs, pull him to the ground. The Alsatians at the footlights watch with frenzied excitement. Growling, snarling, yelping - they are baying for Castellucci’s blood.

There is a violence in the relationship between audience and performer, and Castellucci knows it. He knows that we are watching, waiting, willing something to happen.

In Inferno the figure of Andy Warhol – our Virgil, our guide for this trip to the Underworld – points accusingly at the audience as he writhes on stage in agony. He takes our photograph to the sound of an almighty flash, like the sound of worlds breaking.

In Purgatorio, the audience is made to feel complicit with a scene of unspeakable abuse. The words of a script are projected onto the front of the stage which, for a while, enacts the audience’s control over what we see. We know what the actors will do minutes or seconds before they do it, then watch the inevitable play out like a familiar punch-line. But when the script diverges from the events on stage, this relationship becomes an appalling indictment of the audience’s desire for theatre to perform. Put bluntly, we are waiting for something to happen. If the something that happens is horrific, does that mean our expectation is horrific as well?

In Castellucci’s trilogy of heaven and hell the viewers are not just spectators to the worlds conjured up; we conspire in the conjuring act itself. Castellucci creates a waterfall of images laden with meaning, but whose meaning is never resolved.

A white horse, covered in red paint, makes a horde of people back away in fear or awe.

A woman chops carrots in the stifling, noisy silence of her suburban home.

Two fountains of warm water cascade endlessly from a dark vanishing point.

These are symbolic images that symbolise nothing (yet). They are like floating signifiers – terms that mean something, although it is not clear what they mean. In order to make sense of them, the viewer must season these images and wash them down with a few more of her own.

And yet instead of floating, Castellucci’s signifiers seem weighted down. They are tied to the reality of theatrical space, to the space of image making that is signified over and over again as each image comes into being. With a set that is heaved and scraped and bumped around, or a mirror that literally reflects the audience onto itself, this is theatre-making that knows it is being made. And it is creation in which the viewer knows she is involved. She watches herself imagining the image at the same time as she explores the resonance of the image itself. She watches herself watching (a scene that represents) abuse, aware that she has called the scene into being.

This is not to say that Castellucci’s theatrical worlds begin and end with the viewer. In fact, the visions he creates for Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso don’t seem to have a beginning or an end at all.

Inferno sees a mass of people take part in a cycle of life and death from which none can escape. Even after they have all died, and been reborn, and died again (slitting each other’s throats with an efficient flick of the wrist); even after an old man begs to be released, the mass of bodies rises again and backs away from the stage like the waves of life, as opposed to the individual living.

Purgatorio re-houses its characters in new bodies, committing them to a process that lasts beyond one lifetime, which is to say, beyond the experience of any body watching.

Paradiso writhes in a perpetual act of becoming. A figure, glimpsed in the obfuscating light of a dark inner chamber, stretches like a butterfly reaching out of its chrysalis. But the figure is always stretching - it never quite breaks free.

Performing this cyclical, continual field of creation, Castellucci’s trilogy enacts time and space on a colossal scale. Individual actions are only ever a metaphor or metonym for effects with much larger consequences. In Inferno, a basketball bounces to the sound of catastrophe – crashing, falling, scraping, like metal being compounded or bones being crushed. In Purgatorio giant jungle plants revolve slowly until they have engulfed a man’s struggle and a boy’s imagination. And in Paradiso an endless black horizon is contained – impossibly – inside an endless white one. Operating in this cosmic space and time, it is no wonder that the trilogy feels terrifyingly full when it is realised in the mind of a finite individual – a member of the audience.

Push and pull. Creation and destruction. Experience and awe. The cosmic scale and obscure symbolic weight of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso amounts to a slow, metamorphic force that drives and exceeds each component part, a force that is compelled by a shifting power play between the performers - who signal the production of their performance – and the viewers – who acknowledge the production of their view. The enigma at the heart of this work is that, despite its fantastical image-making, despite its endless space and time, despite its awareness of the making of theatre and its collusion with the audience to bring the image to life, the trilogy returns to a theme of visual obscurity. The mysterious white horse in Inferno is part obscured by a swinging black circle, like an anti-sun. The cycle of violence and impotent redemption in Purgatorio is slowly veiled by a spinning circle of black paint. The twisting figure at the heart of Paradiso lives in such darkness that he could be a trick of the eye.

Paradiso is, then, (only) as heavenly as your imagination, Purgatorio (only) as (ir)reconciled, Inferno (only) as hellish. Seeing these images is not to know them, but watching them is to make them exist. Like forgotten spirits, they spin in their eternal worlds until they are called back to life by the strength of a viewer’s belief.

It is tempting to read the recurring obfuscation as an act of violence from the performer, directed back to the audience in order to protect the integrity of the theatrical whole: it will never be owned or contained by a single point of view. But in fact this obfuscation acts like a kind of pathway. These gaps in vision are stepping stones for the audience’s imagination; they let us know that the grand scale of this trilogy requires us to step inside, to acknowledge our collusion, to understand the imposition of a human-centric viewpoint on the chaos of the world. And this viewpoint is the source of the violence in the relationship between performer and performed-to. By creating one image we destroy another; Castellucci does not let us forget this awful responsibility. In Inferno, red flames lick the animal curves of a grand piano and make the strings buckle and twang. It is a beautiful and compelling sight. The piano, of course, will never be played again.

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com