REQUIEM • AIX-EN-PROVENCE FESTIVAL
★★★☆☆☆
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
REVIEW REQUIEM: BURIED ALIVE IN AIX-EN-PROVENCE
There are performances where, after five minutes, you find yourself wondering whether you’re in the hands of a genius who’s hard to decipher – or whether you’ve simply ended up in the wrong place. Romeo Castellucci’s stage adaptation of Mozart’s Requiem at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence is one of them.
On an otherwise empty stage, a neatly made bed stands in a featureless void. An elderly woman enters, glances at a television, lies down beneath the sheet and stares up into the darkness. Slowly, a group of people gathers around her. And in a way I still haven’t been able to fathom, she simply vanishes.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
When Mozart’s first notes ring out, the bed is empty. A person has been taken away. Simple. Beautiful. Unsettling. And, unfortunately, far better than anything that follows.
Castellucci is one of the most distinctive visual artists in European performing arts. His productions rarely function as traditional narratives, but rather as rituals or living installations, where images and atmospheres replace dramatic action. In Requiem, he elevates Mozart’s Requiem to an almost cosmic level. It is not merely about the death of a human being, but about everything that disappears: civilisations, religions, species, monuments, cultures and languages.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Since its premiere in Aix in 2019, the production has achieved something close to cult status. Admirers describe it as a requiem for the whole of humanity rather than for the individual. Can the performance live up to such a lofty premise? Only partially.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
After the powerful opening, the performance begins to drift. The stage is filled again and again with groups moving around in hand-in-hand chains and circles. A sort of universal folk dance – a celebration of life amidst death. An ‘ode to life’ rather than a requiem. Seen from the auditorium, however, it looks more like an audition for an amateur troupe. More like folk dance than an existential ritual.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Even amongst the production’s supporters, it is precisely these sequences that have divided opinion. For me, the choreography is the production’s weakest link. It lacks precision, surprise and necessity. There is a lot of dancing, but it isn’t particularly interesting. On the other hand, images do emerge from time to time that remind one why Castellucci continues to hold his status.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
In particular, the scene where a boy of about ten enters and dribbles around with a skull as if it were a football. Shortly afterwards, he sings alone in the summer night with the fragility and innocence that only a child’s voice possesses. Life and death converge in a single image. Here, the performance suddenly strikes a chord that can be felt.
It becomes less convincing when the back wall is filled with ever-longer text projections. Names of extinct species, civilisations, monuments, cultures and sacred sites roll past like an atlas of extinctions.
The intention is obvious: everything disappears. But the longer the list becomes, the more the meaning is diluted.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
A wrecked car appears. People step in one by one and freeze in poses in front of the wrecked car, like road accident victims at the moment of death. Trees are planted. Earth is dug up, painted, built, destroyed, buried. Gradually, so many symbols emerge that the performance seems less like a single idea and more like a collection of scattered associations. Sceptical opening-night reviewers have found the work heavy-going and overloaded with conceptual symbolism.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
But then something happens. Without warning, the stage floor begins to rise at an angle towards the rows of seats in the iconic open-air Théâtre de l’Archevêché in the heart of the exceptionally beautiful city of Aix. Earth, shrouds and trees glide slowly and inexorably towards the audience.
The stage gradually reaches an angle of almost 45 degrees. Gravity takes over. Everything hurtles towards the abyss. Suddenly, the performance feels physical. Not like an academic concept or mansplaining about transience. But like an extremely lifelike experience of being buried alive. In short, it’s bloody terrifying. And this is where, for the first time since the opening, the production really grabs you again. What a shock in slow motion.
Musically, conductor Raphaël Pichons and the Pygmalion ensemble have given the production a kind of cult status, with Mozart’s Requiem expanded to include Gregorian chants and other works in an elegant, seamless blend.
As a staging, Requiem leaves a mixed impression. I acknowledge the ambition, admire several unique images, and have already forgotten long passages in between them.
Verdict: An original, visually striking production with a few scenes of great power – but also with an unevenness which, particularly in the choreography, stands in strange contrast to the artistic ambitions.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Three stars for a performance with flashes of high quality, but not the cohesive revelation its reputation otherwise promises.
