Named for the small girl in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the members of Dewey Dell are a collective of theatre artists from Cesena, Italy. In September they made their U.S. debut at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. Philadelphia-based director and performer Mark McCloughan, Co-Artistic Director of No Face Performance Group, talked with Agata Castellucci, Demetrio Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci and Eugenio Resta about the intricate relationship between movement, music and design in their work.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Dewey Dell
Interview date: September 9, 2011
View a PDF version of this document
Mark McCloughan: You met at the School for Rhythmic Movement in Cesena, Italy. What is the training there like? What did you study?
Eugenio Resta: We met one day a week for three or four hours each day and we did rhythmic exercises about the interpretation or the expression of an idea. Or we would write on philosophy or art history and discuss it. We also created movement for dances. We never called it dance because it was more of a folkloric type of dance, ballo in Italian, a circular dance with sometimes 28 people, sometimes 12, sometimes 30. We met each other there and did some short performances and then Teodora started to think more about the work. She asked the rest of us to be involved in the work and to do a one-day public exposition at the school. Then we decided to participate in a contest. We won a little prize and we decided to keep working together and create another work. That happened in 2007.
Mark: When you make a new piece, do you start from rhythm, movement or a text?
Eugenio: It depends. From a text, never. But, it always changes. For example, for à elle vide, Teodora started to create movement with one piece of music and then gave it to Demetrio. Demetrio started to create new music for the piece. Then Teodora adapted the movement to the new music and went forward in that way. Every time we start from movement or music or, sometimes, from an idea. After, we try to link everything together, changing our ideas or adapting the ideas to the idea of the author. We try to also change and experiment with new ways of adapting to each other.
Mark: When you begin a new piece, do you all work together? I understand you all have different areas of expertise. You do the lights and the sets, correct?
Eugenio: Yes.
Mark: So, when you start a new piece, you’re all in the same room giving input on each facet of the performance?
Eugenio: Every one of us has some clear aspect or specific thing to do. For example I do light and scenery; Demetrio does music; Teodora and Agata do movement and choreography; also, Teodora does costumes. But, we don’t start together working in the same room. Everyone, at the beginning, works alone. And, then, we meet and confront what everyone thinks. After that we work and think together in the same space to construct movement, or try, for example, an idea of flight with the movement. But, really, it’s step by step.
Mark: I am really interested in how groups structure their work together. I am wondering is one of you the final moderator of the piece? Who has the final say if the lights are going to look this way, and the movement is going to be this way? Or, do you work that out as a group?
Eugenio: We work really as a group. Everyone can say something about music or about movement. Everyone can give some new idea on the movement or costumes. The final decisions depend on everyone. If I want to use a laser effect, I try it. But, for the group, if it’s not a good idea or it’s not the right thing we’ll discuss it, of course. There is no one in the group that has the final decision.
Mark: Do you have a studio where you can experiment with lights during the creation of the piece?
Eugenio: Do we have a space? No, in Italy, we search for residencies. For example, in Cesena, we can ask for space or we work in a group. In Tirol, a little village in north Italy, there is a really big and beautiful space for us to stay and have a longer residency. Also we know some Italian companies and sometimes we ask to stay in their spaces. But, we still don’t have our own place.
Mark: Have a lot of your pieces been developed in residencies like that? Is it a concentrated development period?
Eugenio: Yes. It is a concentrated period in which everyone stays together. Of course, at home everyone can work on it, but a residency is a moment in which we can really concentrate on it so it’s the most productive moment for the piece.
Mark: Demetrio, you are the music guy of the group, correct?
Demetrio Castellucci: Yes. I always relate music with movement since I started playing music first. Also, before Dewey Dell, I was in the school that Eugenio was talking about, the school in Cesena. Since 2005, I was asked to create sounds and think about ambient sounds or sound colors for different performances at the school. I was really free to choose what I wanted to do, so in front of me there was the possibility to develop my own music or to choose other music. That was a big freedom, like a white page in front of me. I think usually in theater when there is an already finished piece of music that brings a risk. When I listen to already existing music in theater and I know it, after a few seconds I already have all the information that is going to come after [hearing the whole piece] and it brings me to another background that comes from my own taste in music. For me, it is important to immediately create a sound coming from the movement and the choreography. A simultaneous birth between movement and sound.
Another interesting thing is the fact that I was there to give sound to objects or steps or movements. The movements were made in a circular way, like in the way a lot of folkloric dances are made. For me, the circle is an interesting shape when it’s moving. It brings the accumulation of things. They are consuming themselves after every [cycle]. The creative process with this movement was never certain about where it was going. It always changes. The steps with the movements, the sounds, the percussions, the rhythms, are always changing.
Mark: When you compose for Dewey Dell, are you usually in the room when the choreography is being worked on? And then you give sound to that work?
Demetrio: I must say, it changes every time. I don’t know when I am going to do something. I don’t know what the process will be. For example, for the first work, Teodora asked me to make the sound of a rooster because the performance space had figures of animals. It was very different because there was the element of characters in the animals.
Mark: Right. It was no longer like an empty page. You had to make something to fit their movement.
Demetrio: Yes. Especially in this first work, I pretty much had to give sound to a character. It was really linked to comics, also. The way the characters changed and the birth of the character in comics.
Mark: Like comic books?
Demetrio: Yes, we started from that rhythm and it was like our skeleton. The next step was to bring the flesh to it.
Mark: Can you talk about what you mean about the rhythm of a comic book?
Demetrio: For me, the interesting thing about comics is that they are really based on how they move forward in the pages. You have the character and you follow the character in one story, but you see the character and it’s always nice to see the specific elements of one character, which are very often exaggerated. And, how do you say in English, the caricatura? An exaggeration of one shape to bring the specific aspects of this character to life. The music was pretty much the same because, for example, the movement of a rooster was really taking out the aspect of the rhythm.
Mark: Taking out the aspect of rhythm?
Demetrio: Yes, and so the music was there to bring it out more than the aspect of the rooster. It was more like the music was coming not from the space, but more from the shape and color of a rooster and, especially, his movements. In addition to this I used sounds of very old cartoons. For example, Betty Boop or Felix the Cat.
And for the other works, the relationship between music and movement always changes. In our second work, we were in front of the picture of a king, the image of regality. The presence of a figure or a character was inside our space this time (instead of a black space that was in our piece). This space was really important for the music because I had to think about the physicality of sound in the space. It was important to work on a reverb because that gives a sense of melancholy and also mystery. I don’t know why it feels like that. Maybe because reverb can make us realize how big one thing can be. There is always the presence of silence in a reverb of a sound. If you do a sound in a space with a big reverb, such as a cathedral, you hear the peak of the sound.
Mark: And, this king character has been a consistent focus of the group’s work? Has it appeared in more than one piece?
Demetrio: No, it was the work of Kin Keen King, our second work. We usually work starting from simple images and then we tend to bring all of the elements to some crisis point and treat the elements like another member of the group, and make them surprise us. And so the process with the movements and music is always, until the very end, unsure. It’s like some kind of continuous adjustment to relive the same ground that can be really distant from the starting point but contains it in a way that can be explained just from inside.
Mark: Can you talk more about what you mean by pushing the symbols to the “crisis point”?
Demetrio: It’s a really mysterious thing for me. When I see an animal, I see one thing it is and one thing it is not. At some points, I feel like the music doesn’t want to be the music of [the piece], it really wants to be inside of one other thing that has little to do with sound.
Mark: Teodora, I’ve been talking to your collaborators about the process of starting work on a piece. I was just wondering if you could walk me through your process of choreographing.
Teodora: Always in the process of choreography, there is first of all a drawing. In fact, in all of our work, it is really important that art is a composer (and the body of the character on the stage). For example, if I have a big cap on my head, I know that I couldn’t do certain movements. Or, if I know Agata has very big shoes, I know she couldn’t do everything. It’s really important because I can understand the limits of the character. Or, in another way, the power or the point of the figure. For Kin Keen King it was the figure of king. For Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti, the work we are presenting here [at Wesleyan University], the inspiration was the idea of a boat on the sea. The figures are really abstract. The three girls on stage aren’t really someone. But maybe they could be a lot of things together. In another new work called Grave, that is an Italian word that means “something that is weighty,” there are two figures on the stage, me and Agata. We are, for the first time, human. It is really important to know the mechanics of the body, of the actor, of the dancer.
Mark: Do you often begin choreographing with costume in mind? Your work often has a lot of striking costumes that seem to change the biomechanics of the dancer.
Teodora: Yes. But, the main thing is that these complicated figures are not our limits. They are powerful. This is the first step, we can say. After that, comes the idea of movement. For example, in Kin Keen King, Eugenio has a very big head and a dark black costume. With the big head, he couldn’t see anything. So all the movement was created for that.
Also, there is another important thing. That is the knowledge of the character and of the person that is on the stage. For example, when I think of movement for Eugenio and Agata, I know perfectly how they would do it. Also, I have to say that we never really studied dance. The movement is always from something that is outside [everyday] life. For example, we can be inspired from animals, from boats, or something really far from us.
Mark: I find this idea of beginning choreography with a large costume in mind, one that changes the body of the dancer, really interesting. Does the costume come from the character or do you sometimes have specific body modifications that you want to explore?
Teodora: Yes, for us it is really difficult to say that it is really a modification of the body because, for us, it is really a different source. In fact, we don’t think about the body of a human, really. But, something like a unique sensation of a body. For example, the costume of Kin Keen King is a human body with a very big head. We don’t think that he is human, but deformed. We think he is born with a strange figure that I don’t know where he came from. These questions stay the whole time this figure is on the stage. This kind of tension comes from the figure to the audience and it must stay always present.
A special thanks to Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento for her assistance in arranging this interview.
