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It is not easy to describe I La Galigo, a work of drama, dance and music created by Robert Wilson, and inspired by the epic poem, Sureq Galigo, from southern Sulawesi (Indonesia), if not with the simple terms of its glaring figurative beauty, of the emotions evoked by the masterful combination of drama, dance, music, costumes and technical lighting special effects brought to a register of insuperable aesthetic perfection.
The ambition of a complete theatrical work, able to unite drama, dance and music with equal protagonistic dignity, finds a similar precedent in one of the most engrossing shows from the second half of the previous century, which Wilson’s creation reinterprets in many of its aspects: the prodigy of Mahabarata by Peter Brook, who during his time, overturned the standards of show business as well as many Western cultural convictions, with an impassioned and poetic undertaking of immersion in Indian culture and art, discovering the roots of a common culture, with a group of actors from this multi-ethnic company who were confronted with one another in a lengthy training that lasted for years and with mediation for the script by Jean-Claude Carrière. Rendered "exportable" in a version that lasted nine hours, the show presented some of the most important episodes taken from a lengthy Indian poem that tells the story of the Titanic struggle between two clans of cousins.
The show departed from all standard rules of theatre. Characterised by a disproportionate length, it could not be portrayed in traditional settings and therefore provided a formidable impulse for the reinvention of theatre as an event, as an experimentation of places and relationships with its fulcrum as a change in perspective.
Although a peculiar and fascinating accentuation of formal facts separates him from others, Robert Wilson occupies an important place among the creators of this laceration, which in fact tore the theatre away from the certainties of a pacific operation of self-affirmation (Barba, Peter Stein, etc.). In the 1970s, after having already measured himself against this global rediscovery with the show that lasted for seven days and seven nights in Shiraz at the request of the imperial throne of Persia, this time Robert Wilson is inspired by the extremely lengthy and partially mysterious epic poem of the Southern Seas, invented throughout the course of the centuries from the oral stories that were told by pirates. And like all great epic poems, it is rich with contradictions and consonances with the other great anonymous examples from the past.
Perhaps, in this case our Western culture is in some measure an echo of Ulysses’ adventures. In fact, just as in the Homerian poem, the great story of the Sulawesi of Southern Indonesia narrates the hero’s great pilgrimages and his contacts with foreign men and divinities. But above all, he separates himself from the creation of the world of men, a world that lies between celestial gods and infernal ones, arriving at a description of the first era of the kingdom of the divine descendants (children, he from the King of Heaven and her from the King of Hell).
The abstraction of the teogony materializes in the visionary nature of a “human” condition, that of the twins born from the union of two gods and their fatal love: it is a mystic and ancestral impulse more than a melodrama, which was born in the maternal womb and continued throughout their entire lives. The sister refutes the love and locks herself away in a convent; the brother respects her wishes and after this loss, marries a Chinese cousin, the identical copy of his incestuous sisterly love. She bears him a son, the eponymous hero, I La Galigo who, upon reaching adulthood, will face the world with new undertakings. One day, while he is living out his adventures, I La Galigo is called by his grandfather: all of the descendants of the gods must return to Luwuq, the place they had all moved away from, for a family reunion at which the twins meet again for the last time before returning to where they came from. Without the gods, the terrestrial world plunges into chaos until the descendants of the two siblings, united in marriage, become the sovereigns of the “middle world”. The rainbow across which the gods had travelled from one world to the other is rolled up, the passage gates closed forever. From that moment forward there interference between the two worlds no longer exists.

There is no greater disservice to epic poems than recounting their plots, which irreparably impoverishes the fantastic richness of their glutinous and illogical proceedings, of their great narrative deviations, of the prevalence of the fantasy of rationality. The world of Indonesian poetry is certainly not an exception and the simple compensation that can be allowed is that of replicating its non-recountability and for this reason, Wilson chooses the only path available for the entire work, entrusting it to the energy and the mastery of a troupe of fifty extraordinary Indonesian actors-dancers, to the music of the composer and conductor, Rahayu Supanggah, to the voices of the choir and most of all to the force of the narration by Puang Matoa Saidi, who tells the story in the sermon-like style of the Bissu community, in the role of mediator. Certain of their adherence to the culture of origin, Wilson then provides, without ethnic hypocrisy, his own very Western vision of the world, and above all, his own very Western technological skill, his figurative inventiveness, the superhuman use of light and transparency.

credits:.
TEATRO degli ARCIMBOLDI
viale dell'Innovazione, 20
20126 Milano
tel:. +39 02.641142200

ROBERT WILSON
55 Washington Street, Suite 216
Brooklyn, New York 11201
+1 (212) 253-7484
info@robertwilson.com