The Child Who Remains: Tragedy, Childhood, and the Refusal of Disappearance in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio

This essay examines the structural role of childhood in classical tragedy and its radical reconfiguration in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia, focusing in particular on the episode B.#03 Berlin (2003). In Greek tragedy, the child occupies a paradoxical position: indispensable to the tragic economy yet deprived of agency, voice, and futurity. Through feminist and ethical readings of Medea (Rabinowitz, Foley, Belfiore), the article reconstructs how the elimination of the child functions as a formal mechanism through which tragic time secures closure by extinguishing futurity. Against this background, the article argues that B.#03 Berlin intervenes not at the level of narrative or ethical revision, but at the ontological foundations of tragic form. By placing a child at the centre of the stage and refusing her disappearance, Socìetas suspends the tragic logic of necessary loss. The child’s persistence disrupts the compressed temporality of tragedy and introduces a different regime of time, one that resists teleology, sacrifice, and closure. Through close analysis of the performance’s scenic dispositifs – auditorium reconfiguration, domestic procedures, fairy-tale resurrection, and the use of Benjamin Britten’s Cuckoo! – the article shows how B.#03 Berlin stages a futurity that is neither symbolic nor redemptive, but ontological. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “the time that remains”, the article concludes that childhood in Socìetas’s work does not represent the future but exercises it, preventing tragic time from sealing itself into destiny. Ultimately, rather than offering a contemporary rewriting of Medea, B.#03 Berlin exposes and disables the tragic machine itself, opening a theatrical space in which time no longer knows how to end.