Written by Angela Dematté, L'estasi della lotta is a very intimate and personal project by Carlotta Viscovo, an actress from Turin who for years was the spokesperson for workers in the performing arts, and whose life resonates with that of the French sculptress Camille Claudel. Two artists who do not know how to hold things together: the ambition linked to their art and the yearning for truth and justice.
On stage, there is a body that becomes sculpture and dialogues with sculpture.
Behind and together with this, the concrete, everyday, logical and strong words and images of a present and past life, that of Carlotta and her union struggles.
A character that runs through Carlotta and Camille. A character that investigates the relationship between body and protest, between the intimate dimension and the political role of the artist, between art and the market, ambition and self-sabotage.
The word as an instrument of struggle is not enough, it is necessary to return to the body, to make it vibrate in its power, to reach ecstasy.
project by and with
Carlotta Viscovo
dramaturgy
Angela Dematté
movement supervision
Alessandra Cristiani
dramaturg
Alice Sinigaglia
lighting design
Luigi Biondi
music and sound project
Marco Mantovani
costumes supervision
Margherita Baldoni
scenographic/sculptural installation
Ettore Greco
assistant sculptor
Anna Velludo
video artist
Ivonne Capece
biographical video archive
Lorenzo Ponte
Margherita Orsini
production
LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, TrentoSpettacoli, Elsinor Centro di Produzione Teatrale
with the support of
Qui e Ora Residenza Teatrale, Campsirago Residenza, Festival Il Giardino delle Esperidi
I cannot find adequate reasons for my interpenetration with the artist Camille Claudel. She has lived in me since 2004, ever since I saw her works in Paris. I have wanted since then to tell her story in order to remove her from her role of paranoid victim and abandoned lover, and to honour her work. As soon as I tried to work on it, however, I felt myself losing lucidity, I suffered and could not continue. In the meantime, she remained inside me, silently accompanying me, contaminating me with her.
I was the national coordinator of the actors section of the SLC CGIL (Communication Workers Union) for four and a half years. I accepted this position because I felt the need to do something in defence of my work, exposing myself publicly. The concrete consequence was the feeling of exclusion, isolation, persecution. The decision to lend my name to that role identified me completely with it, making me feel caged in something obsessive from which it seemed impossible to free myself. Lorenzo Ponte and Margherita Orsini, two young directors, collected hours and hours of my daily life, at times when I was abandoning my role as union coordinator. This is all the material from which Angela and I started.
We felt cross-references between my life and Claudel's. Investigating those shots, trying to superimpose them on the sculpture, on the places of Camille's life, on my body vibrating and trying to renew a meaning, we built the dramaturgy. We explore the relationship between body and protest, between the intimate dimension and the political role of the artist, between art and market, ambition and self-sabotage.
The formal way will be to make sculpture of my body on stage. Together with this, the concrete, logical and strong words and images of a present and past life, mine and her tumultuous one, alternate in the video and in the text.
Camille and Carlotta do not know how to hold things together: their creative expression, their ambition to emerge and their yearning for justice, for truth.
The mistake was to think it was right to separate my protest from the stage, instead one must put the protest into art, embodying it.
Carlotta Viscovo came to me, more than two years ago, coming out of that pandemic period that had wiped us out and annihilated us, and which had seen her for hours connected to interminable video calls, as a representative of the actress and actor category of the union. She came to me to ask me to work together on Camille Claudel.
Claudel is a figure that has affected many women.
She had also interested me, around the age of 20, carried away by the imagination of another, August Rodin, the sculptor's master and lover. The story of the woman who, in an attempt to emancipate herself, succumbs to the System and the notoriety of the master, seems to be a magnetic and, in the end, clear and comforting role. But reading the sculptor's letters, one discovers something different.
I well remember the disappointment that gripped me already at the age of 20 - as I progressed in my reading of the letters - in seeing her claims as an artist slip from a just and important demand to a nauseating paranoia.
Carlotta's proposal interested me greatly, above all I was interested in understanding what made it so difficult and, at the same time, necessary for her to work on the sculptor. We talked a lot. The intuition about the dramaturgy came clear during long elaborations in the first residency with Carlotta and Alessandra Cristiani: we had to build a theatrical device that would allow us to cross this obsession of Claudel's, to free ourselves from it. The crossing, to be effective, implied a confrontation with the condition of the artist today and, above all, with his concrete (economic) and intimate (need for recognition) needs.
Thus began the construction of a text in which Carlotta could speak through Camille and Camille through Carlotta: a new Cassandra who knows she is not liked because she sees injustices and truths that others do not see. But only by talking can she exist and therefore she speaks, mixing truths and fears, thus constructing her destruction and tragically nailing herself to the role she would like to abandon. We then asked Alice Sinigaglia, with her young lucidity, to help us look at this obsessive magma in which we wanted to immerse the audience. It was now impossible for us, after the long immersion, to understand whether the irony and tragic nature of the character we were creating was what we were looking for. With the whole team, we are trying, to the very end, to construct a device in which truth can reveal itself through paranoia, forcing us to decide whether we have the courage to follow it. Above all, we want paranoia to finally be forced to reveal itself and thus be annihilated, unmasked by the truth. The truth that, in the last place, is the body of the artist, disarmed, laughing at her and our fears, intent only on doing her job well.
Camille Claudel
Born in 1864 in Fère-en-Tardenois. First-born, Louise and Paul, a writer, were born after her.
Her mother, daughter of the village doctor, is described by Paul as anaffective. The father, a tax collector, approves and supports his children's artistic aspirations. That is why the family moves to Paris.
Camille meets Rodin in 1884; there is a deep artistic understanding between them. Rodin juggles his passion for her and Rose Beuret, whom he will never leave and whom he will marry in 1917. In this whirlwind of feelings, Camille produced absolute masterpieces: Sakountala, La Valse, Clotho, L'Age Mûr.
For Camille, sculpture is everything: the letters and memories of those who knew her are full of it. If she has money, she spends it on buying raw materials and paying models and founders.
The break in her relationship with Rodin leaves an indelible mark. Camille is 20 years old when she meets him; at 33, she finds herself alone, facing a world hostile to a woman who, in addition to doing a man's job, has had a free affair with an older man. Camille begins to neglect herself and feel persecuted, barricading herself in the house and only going out at night. Her mother and brother have her locked up in an asylum on 10 March 1913, a week after her father's death.
Rodin always supported Camille; even when she was interned, he did not fail to help her financially and wanted to dedicate a room to her works in his house/museum.
When Camille died in 1943, there would be no one at her funeral.
Carlotta Viscovo
Born in 1977 in Turin. First born, she was followed by Serena, sales and marketing manager.
Her mother, one of the first women to become a tennis teacher in Italy, runs a sports centre in Turin. Her father is a lawyer at a bank. They transmit to her a strong sense of rigour and justice.
Having failed in her attempt to become a professional tennis player, she showed talent as an actress from her teenage years and so her father was forced to accept her choice to attend the Scuola del Teatro Stabile di Torino where she graduated in 2000. She took part in the second edition of the Thierry Salmon Project, held by Rodrigo García, and trained with masters such as Danio Manfredini, Raffaella Giordano, Claude Coldy, Bruno De Franceschi, Valerio Binasco, Antonio Latella, Andriy Zholdak, Armando Punzo, and Theodoros Terzopoulos. In 2000 she began meeting many masters: Luca Ronconi, Massimo Castri, Cesare Lievi, Valter Malosti, Andrea De Rosa, Carmelo Rifici, Mauro Avogadro, Massimo Popolizio, Emma Dante, Monica Conti, Alvis Hermanis, Christine Marnas, Jean Christophe Saïs, Dominique Pitoiset, Mamadou Dioume.
For Carlotta, theatre is everything: the diaries she keeps in her house are full of it. If she has money, she spends it on research and actor training.
Her encounter with the union leaves an indelible mark. She participates in the conception of a bill to improve the conditions and timing of theatre creation, but the union decides not to support the project. Carlotta is 38 years old when she joins the union and when she leaves, in 2021, she feels excluded, isolated, persecuted by her union role, with which she is identified. She does not work for four years.
She will never lack the desire to carry out the project of a show about Camille Claudel.
From 2022 she returns to work in the shows L'ultimo animale by Caterina Filograno, La pulce nell'orecchio by Carmelo Rifici, Demoni by Claudio Autelli.
Corrispondenza di Camille Claudel, herausgegeben von Anne Rivière und Bruno Gaudichon, ed. Abscondita
Camille Claudel di Anna Maria Panzera, ed. L’Asino d’oro
Mia sorella Camille di Paul Claudel, ed. Felici
Una donna chiamata Camille Claudel di Anne Delbée, ed. TEA
Camille Claudel. La sua vita di Odile Ayral-Clause, ed. Castelvecchi
L’arte di August Rodin, ed. Abscondita
La lezione dell’Antico di August Rodin, ed. Abscondita
La sparizione dell’arte di Jean Baudrillard, ed. Abscondita
Camille Claudel e Paul Claudel: le rêve et la vie, ed. Lienart
Il ritorno di Dyonisos di Theodoros Terzopoulos, ed. Cue Press
Autoritratto di Carla Lonzi, ed. La Tartaruga
Chiara Fumai – Exhibition, ed. Arte
Below is the sequence of sculptures and portraits embodied by Carlotta Viscovo during the performance:
1. Camille Claudel, Rêve au coin du feu
2. Camille Claudel, La Joueuse de flûte
3. Camille Claudel, L’implorante [reversed]
4. Camille Claudel, La jeune fille à la gerbe
5. Camille Claudel, Les Causeuses
6. Camille Claudel, Profonde pensée
7. Camille Claudel, L’implorante
8. Camille Claudel, L’homme penché
9. Camille Claudel, L’écume
10. Camille Claudel, L’implorante [reversed]
11. Auguste Rodin, La pensée
12. Camille Claudel, L’aurore
13. Auguste Rodin, La convalescente
14. Auguste Rodin, L’adieu
15. Auguste Rodin, La cathédrale
16. Auguste Rodin, Tête de Camille Claudel [+ hand]
17. Auguste Rodin, Femme accroupie
18. Auguste Rodin, Le Baiser
19. Camille Claudel, Clotho
20. Camille Claudel, Sakountala
21. Camille Claudel, La Vague
22. Camille Claudel, L’Âge mûr
23. Camille Claudel, Persée et la Gorgone
24. Photo Camille in the Asylum
LAC, Lugano
11.10.2024
LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura
11-12.10.2025
Teatro Fontana, Milano
11/12.02.2025
Teatro Testori, Forlì
15.04.2025
Il corpo della lotta
(site-specific version)
26.01.2025
Studio di Federico Seppi, Malgolo (TN)
Stage Photo
