Inferno

Inferno is a monument to pain. The artist must pay. In the dark forest into which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is so lost, it's because he doesn't know the answer to this question. Alone on the great stage of the theater, or on the contrary walled up in the crowd and confronted with the rumor of the world, the man staged by Romeo Castellucci suffers the full force of this experience of loss of self, helpless. Everything here assaults him: the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. The visual dynamics of this show have the consistency of that daze, sometimes dread, which seizes man when he is reduced to his smallness, helpless in the face of the elements that overwhelm him. This fragility is a resource, however, as it is the condition for a paradoxical gentleness. Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that, deep within his own fears, there exists a secret space, imbued with melancholy, where he clings to life, to "the incredible nostalgia of his own life".