Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
HEY GIRL!

by: Romeo Castellucci
with: Silvia Costa and Sonia Beltran Napoles
original music: Scott Gibbons
static and dynamic: Stephan Duve
light: Giacomo Gorini
stage design: Plastikart, Istvan Zimmermann
production:  Odeon Théâtre de l'Europe with the Festival d'Automne, Paris; steirischer herbst, Graz; Le-Maillon Théâtre, Strasbourg; de Singel, Antwerp; Productiehuis Rotterdam (Rotterdamse Schouwburg); Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana; Trafò House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
 

The inspiration for the title of the piece came to me in my city when, stuck at a crossroads, I was watching a group of girls waiting at the bus stop. They had full rucksacks and made-up faces.  Each waited for their own bus. All that space around them. They didn't speak to each other. They didn't look at each other.
Waiting for green at the traffic lights, in that split-second, the title of the show came into my mind. From then on I have simply followed those two words. I waited.  And I waited. What happened afterwards I don't know; but I think it has to do with a portrait of the human heart. Someone wakes, gets up, get ready to go out. Someone goes out. End of story.
It could last a day... or a year, like a calendar.
Hey Girl! is linear, slow, like a river flowing through a plain towards the sea. However, in the sea the entire content of the river disperses, becomes unrecognisable, is no more. (...)  Here, solitude is not a subject, but rather pervades every movement.  Each gesture is new, alone, it resonates and is consigned to the immense repository of things lost without trace. (...) Two enormous halls: one pitch-black, resembling a theatre burned on a pyre, and one so white and flooded with light that when you enter, it seems to float.  Between them a dark blue hallway, in which the light rains from above.
Romeo Castellucci

The piece created by the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is about movement and gesture without content. The only moral seems to be an attention to a kind of psychological nudity. There are no cultural, iconographical or philosophical references, for the Socìetas sets its sights on lone gestures- empty or lost- shed like empty shells.  Does a history of gesture exist? Are the gestures that trace points in space, capable of coming to terms with time? Are they able to penetrate time, that is to say, the land where is not possible to fix or measure anything, because everything is moving, creating constant change. In its repetition, gesture is imprisoned within itself evoking an essence that only to the trajectory of its own weight. One of the objectives of Hey Girl! seems to be to push the gesture to its extreme consequences.
On the stage, Silvia Costa and Sonia Beltran Napoles, one after the other, embody individuality that is born, meets, mixes and disguises itself, all within a space of time that could fill the arc of a day like the duration of a dream.
What counts in Hey Girl! is not the words spoken nor the Shakespearean quotations projected on a screen, but rather the silences and breaths that spell out, like a metronome, the life-breath of a female body, generated at the beginning of the performance by a viscose placenta.
Hey Girl! is a journey into the human unconscious, with a soundtrack by Scott Gibbons that is united with the play of colour and light created by Giacomo Gorini.