While I was volunteering at the Push Festival I have the luck to see Hey Girl! By Romeo Castellucci. To be honest I was expecting something similar to what I had been seeing for the last two years, traditional theatre with long texts and once in a blue moon a strong good performance. My surprise was big because I got to see a once in a life experience art work which totally influenced and inspired me.
The stage was totally dark and there is just ambience music like texture music. One light points into a mass of a sort of melting clay. A girl starts ascending from underneath of the melting clay. Her body is delicate and fragile but at the same time strong and determined. She then puts a white t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Then she goes through many symbolic images that represent the experiences women face in a traditionally phallic society. She looks herself in the mirror, she lies down next to a sword, she sprinkles perfume on the sword which is hot and makes a hissing sound, she carries the sword around the stage and she uses it to burn in a white sheet an X. She whispers the names Jeanne d’Arc and Maria Stuart. She picks up the sword. A loud noise. A neon sign in the upper right corner of the stage displays an R. The girl walks to the right. Another loud noise. A neon sign on the upper left side of the stage displays an L. The girl walks to the left. Right. Left. Right. The girl is beaten down with pillows by a group of some 30 men. The girl emerges with an enlarged mask of her own head. The girl cries. The men disperse. Some look at her through glass windows. Words and fragments from Shakespeare are projected on a screen. A black woman wearing a mask of the girl’s enlarged head emerges from the crowd of onlooking men. An old man with a beard. The black woman is undressed and chained. The glass windows break. Music. The black woman dances. Shrinking noise.
All this images are artfully sync with sounds and lights. The stage is mostly dark for the whole time and it has good depth of field. The images are produce sometimes in the background ( men beateb her down), in the middleground ( the melting clay) or in the foreground ( she holding the hot sword). All this images were there to be interpret, to be imagen, and to be descipher for the audience so they can built the work for themselves. It was like a visual poem and a totally sensorial journey that right away get you involve. From the beginning the sound, images, lights and performance were interecting and the dominance among them was changeable. Sometimes was the movement of the girl, sometimes the overwhelming soundscape, sometims the image composed as a painting by lights, and the positioning of the subjects. There was a constant stimulus to your senses.
After the show I went to commented with different people and I read about it in order to understand what I saw. I was totallly impressed, finally I got to see something innovative. However to my surprise few people like it which is easy to understand since Hey Girl! barely uses, one of the most relevant characteristics of traditional theatre, the text. Hey Girl! hardly has text, except for the couple times that she (the main character) whisper some names. The rest of the work is about images and soundscape. It was like seeing a bunch of paintings animated by sound and the movement of the performance. There was different art forms being put together to create something new. The compositional qualities of painting, sculture in motion as when she is getting out of the melting clay, excellent used of new media making technology invisible, irrelevant. For instance, although the sound goes a long for the whole piece, it calls your attention a couple times.
Hey Girl! is definetly one of the best play I have seen. Some purist might argue that Hey Girl! is not theatre but for me it is because it has narrative qualities, it is perform for live actors, it has direct interaction with the audience and moreover challenge them to think harder.
The director Romeo Castellucci did not study theatre he studied painting and sculture. He uses dancers, professional actor, and non- actors in his works. He confess that his way to work is not based on a text of literature. He mantains that his works reveals itself like a photographic process.
Filed under: DIVA200 | Tagged: Critical Review
