Le Metope del Partenone

According to Romeo Castellucci, the friezes of the Parthenon (Le Metope del Partenone) represent nothing other than "battles for life". To compose his own scenic "friezes", the Italian director places himself at the point where a terrible accident, the causes of which are unknown, throws his victim between life and death. Only the speed and efficiency of the emergency services can bring him back to one side or tip him over the other. Six accidents would follow one another, forming six tableaux of a city, six states of pain, six possible friezes. The fiction of each accident, whose victim is played by an actor, is countered by the intervention of an authentic medical team at the scene of the tragedy, each time different. The spectators, who enter the show as such, are projected into the voyeurism of mere onlookers, curious about the bloodshed. Each of the six "friezes" becomes "like an emergency scene" where centuries and forms collide, between what Romeo Castellucci considers the artistic summit of the century of Pericles, the friezes of the temple of temples, and the vulgarity of an American TV series. Each accident is punctuated by a series of "riddles" broadcast on screen, like echoes of the enigmatic phrases in Go Down, Moses. These riddles make spectators oscillate between the sensation of horror and the intellectual need to decipher what they can't help but read. Which will win out, reaction or reflection?