111 Bene and his dramaturgy ob-scene meaning outside the imposed scene, Pier Paolo Pasolini and his unsustainable Salò or the 120 days of Sodom (1975). Exhausted bodies like requests for help, to learn how not to look the other way. (Ed.'s note: don’t you think I would ever magnify acts of provocation for their own sake; that is just vulgarity. But it does not affect these sublime visions, whose discriminating factor is precisely the trigger of sublimation: the imagistic violence is set in a context of absolute, masterful aesthetics and formal rigor – there lies the majesty of the artist. The estrangement that this contrast produces allows us to set our thoughts in motion, the perturbation sublimates into the search for understanding, which always leads to a new sensitivity. Blessed be the scandal, if in stumbling it can show us the right path). The figure of Egon Schiele bursts into Freud's years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it raises a scandal by representing for the very first time ugly bodies of women, ugly not to arouse any desire, gaunt not to be sexualized or eroticized. Disturbing bodies, full of cavities, voids and shadows. Bodies not to be pigeonholed into the female stereotype. Bodies that in their infinite beauty, human and no longer ideal, conceptually hold something monstrous – following the etymological root of monstrum which derives from monere, to warn: monstrum is the sudden appearance of an anomaly that can be a warning to man. Through Schiele the female body is freed from the mere representation of desire, finally giving it back the possibility of being all the rest. Through Schiele the female body enters the ethical thematization. From Schiele onwards, the body in art detonates as a battlefield, a political place and an ethical theme raised through restless visions. A witness that will be picked up, in that same Austria, also by Viennese Actionism, bodies like canvases and bodily fluids like paints, celebrated through actions that bring man back to his most ancestral dimension to sweep away his taboos, between para-Christian liturgy and Greek tragedy. Cathartic acts whose summa is given by the Orgien-Mysterien Theater, Hermann Nitsch's Theater of Orgies and Mysteries, aktionen as total works of art. Faced with the uncanny as art, therefore as ethics, it is difficult to get out of it uninjured. The mind tears itself apart, but in tearing itself it opens up and it can comprehend, and it can embrace. Romeo Castellucci, the greatest contemporary theater director and dramaturg, knows it perfectly well. His theater is built on the awareness that a gaze is never innocent: the image is the scandal of the sight, something which the gaze constantly stumbles into, but at the same time making art and theater is a supremely political act, because it reconfigures the gaze of a community. For this reason, the responsibility of the image creator is crucial; through theatrical expedients totally destabilizing for the spectator, treated by Castellucci with the coldness of a surgeon, in the coldness of neon lights, in order not to fall into a useless emotionality, his theater uses bodies as systems of signs, lives by virtue of the symbol they guard. Whether it is children or animals – equally unaware of the representative dimension, therefore unique truly innocent presences on stage – or gigantic actors like Willem Defoe and Gianni Plazzi, his staging always force us to reconfigure our gaze. In Oresteia (an organic comedy?) The Erinyes, avenging furies, are six macaques difficult to control. In Genesis. From the museum of sleep Eva is breastless because she has lost Abel, her son. In Julius Caesar. Spared parts Marco Antonio is a laryngectomee and his interlocutor speaks through an endoscopic probe, to reveal from the inside how much the Word became flesh, how naked, and at the same time as tiring as a boulder, the verb is. In Hell, it is Castellucci himself who enters declaring his name and then gets attacked by dogs, because theater, in which man is stripped of himself to enter the character, is for the dramaturg anti-biographical, anti-biotic. In On the concept of face, regarding the son of God, the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina invading the scene is the portrait of the Man and the parable of a man, of an elderly man, on stage, who can hardly bear all that corporeally assaults him, laid bare in front of other men, laid bare in turn by that Man. In Salomé, John the Baptist is a fierce thoroughbred. In The Minister's black veil, the preacher of a Puritan community decides to veil his face in black, permanently, throwing the parishioners into anguish and revealing how the face is the first political place, where the non-innocence of the gaze becomes a guilty plea. «There were some concerts in Piazza Grande, in Bologna. I was sixteen, and it has been an aesthetic shock. I understood that all the violence I was trying to feed on was there, it was compressed, it was disciplined, it was ordered, it was a planned violence. At that moment I was very interested in the conflictual relationship with reality and with the world, and I found an answer in that concert. Faced with this virulence, with this violence able to penetrate you, to invade you with great formal rigor, I understood that the appearance could be an extraordinary weapon to modify one's own life – and also that of others, possibly. It was Le Sacre du Printemps. When they
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