Eugenio Barba’s Living Archive & Floating Islands – II

“A living memory is a living library, a living museum: a place of metamorphosis.
The past as proof of the impossible that has become possible. ” Eugenio Barba

by Laleen Jayamanne

(First part of this article appeared in The Island of 28 June 2023)

Formation of Odin Teater, 1964

Back in Norway, in 1964, Barba tried to enter the drama school to study directing but when rejected, along with several actors, together, they formed a small theatre group called Odin Teatret, and began to rehearse a play immediately. During this work, the group received an invitation from Denmark to do theatre there. The Mayor of a small rural township, called Holstebro, invited them to come and live there and do theatre for the community. They were offered a regular salary and a farm, with an old cowshed, to convert it as they wished, to a theatre work-shop space. Such were the strange beginnings of what became the world-renowned institution, the Nordisk Theatre Laboratorium and Odin Teatret of Denmark, turning the provincial town of Holstebro into a unique community, making global theatrical history.

A Third Theatre

In 1976, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Barba delivered a short keynote address, titled Third Theatre, at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, on a UNESCO platform. The Third Theatre speech was quickly adopted as a manifesto by a broad base of theatre groups, especially in Latin America, and enabled networking across countries with a common vision. It was also in Belgrade, in 1961, that Marshal Tito launched the famous ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ of the recently de-colonised Asian and African countries. Lanka and India also participated in this event which had the high ideal of not taking sides in the emerging Cold War launched by the US and the Soviet Union. It’s, therefore, reasonable to think that the choice of Belgrade for this theatre event was not entirely coincidental, given that the idea of Third Theatre explicitly addressed theatre folk who lived in, what was then called, the ‘Third World’, a term referring to the newly independent nations. Barba has also reminded us that the French Revolution created the ‘Third Estate,’ the free press. So the idea of ‘thirdness’ was conceptually rich with new potentials. This is the historical origin of what Barba now calls Floating Islands, the numerous nameless theatres of the world.

The idea of the Third Theatre has been the subject of many scholarly debates and writings, some of it a bit arid, scholastic. But, to put it simply, according to Barba, the First Theatre is the institutionalised professional theatre, with its permanent buildings and infrastructure, contracted trained actors and a business model of providing the performance of canonical and new plays on a regular basis. The Second Theatre is what came to be known as Experimental Theatre that came out of the European avant-garde movements of the 20th Century, starting with the Soviet experiments. Many Drama Schools in America have Experimental Theatre Wings which teach students techniques derived from these traditions and newly devised ones, too.

Now, Third Theatre is neither of these and springs up like mushrooms, says Barba, when there is a felt need, an urgency and desire to present a performance to whoever might want to watch it, even on a street corner. They are done by people for whom doing theatre is what is essential for them and they stay together with a group for this very reason. Often, it’s not possible to make a living doing this, so they do paid work and make theatre in their free time. Some train all day, creating a practice and perform, if they have some means of living, without full time work.

This is a very open, quite precarious idea of a way of living which is almost unthinkable, without theatre. I think that the robust ’60s theatre in Lanka was done by people (mostly middle or lower-middle-class), who may be called amateurs, lovers of theatre, not Third Theatre. Perhaps Gamini Hattotuwegama’s Street Theatre group was a Third Theatre.

The International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA)

The only other book of Barba and Savarese I want to mention here is their best-selling, The Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, which has now gone into several editions. This and Five Continents are, I think, indispensable texts if one wants to be educated about global theatre history and theory in what they call EURASIA in the long Twentieth Century. In their theatre history, they prefer to use the concept of ‘Eurasia,’ rather than the usual simplistic categories of ‘East and West’. In this way they focus on the exchanges that have occurred between geographical zones for well over a century. This Eurasian history will become more popular and intelligible to the many nations of the emerging multi-polar world, working against the US-led unipolar capitalist world dominant after 1989 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The idea of the International School of Theatre Anthropology was launched in 1980 in Bonn, Germany. Barba had invited some of the great masters of classical Asian dance-drama to set up exchanges and demonstration of their techniques and practices.

He had also invited a group of Italian historians of theatre to document the proceedings and some of them have stayed on and worked with Barba over the decades. The Italian scholarly community, dedicated to the study of theatre in Universities, seems to be very robust. ISTA gathers regularly to carry out workshops and performances. In the early days, Masters of Japanese Noh Theatre, Balinese dancers, and an Indian Odissi dancer, were invited. Together they have created ambitious theatrical events, such as Ur Hamlet (a proto-Hamlet text), on the grounds of the infamous haunted Elsinor Castle in Denmark, the site for Shakespeare’s play. The different Asiatic classical performances were integrated as part of the open-air spectacle.

The main pedagogic aim of ISTA was to explore how the actor’s body was prepared, strengthened and trained in a precise way, from a very young age, in the great classical theatrical dance forms. Barba discovered that there were a series of, what he named, ‘pre-expressive forms’ of actions that all performers worked on, common to all Eurasian actors. This basic unity of purpose was possible because of the nature of the human anatomy and the nervous system. They developed a series of exercises that could be repeated, internalised and transmitted as the preparatory training for all actors, that they could then build on to develop their unique, idiosyncratic styles.

The dancer-actor I followed at Odin was the late Sanjukta Panigrahi, an Odissi dancer, because she also appears in Kumar Shahani’s film Bhavantharan (1992), a tribute to her guru Kelucharan Mohapatra. She has spoken of her sense of disorientation on encountering a different set of demands and techniques at Barba’s workshops. She, who trained also with Rukmini Devi, the pioneer of Bharathanatyam, at the tender age of 10, took up the challenge to not only demonstrate her exercises but also to participate in Barba’s performances. She said how difficult it was to learn to move differently, to unlearn, so to speak, routines memorised from early childhood.

The Odin actors rarely perform pre-existing plays, instead, they develop their own theatre pieces through a very long process of training and composition of the body, materials, ideas, language, music, song, anecdotes, stories and so on.

Recently, they did a spectacular show at a Theatre Olympics in Budapest, Hungary, called Resurrection (2023), and a performance in Paris called Thebes in the Time of Yellow Fever (2022), with Oedipus Rex in mind but also the painter Van Gogh who explored colour, yellow especially. The floor was layered with reproductions of Van Gogh’s yellow flower paintings. While the title recalls Oedipus Rex and the plague in Thebes as punishment for the crime of incest, Thebes in the Time of Yellow Fever was done at the end of the Covid-19, which plagued the world and appears to be also about creativity under duress. So, their work seems to be made of images, rather than plots, both very free and imaginative and also very rigorously composed. Images of these productions are again on YouTube and also on the Barba-Odin Teatret website, for anyone curious to see them.

Banishment, 2022

In December 2022, Barba was forced to resign from the Danish Theatre Laboratorium he established in 1964. At that time his Odin Teatret legally separated itself from the Nordisk Theatre Laboratorium which was the umbrella institution. Over nearly six decades they had built there a theatre and rehearsal spaces, a research library, a printing press and much else, but the new neoliberal management was impatient and wanted to make saleable shows with quick turn over. Barba’s work and life, thanks to the State subsidy, were built in resistance to this logic of capitalist consumer culture.

He was refused a small sum of money required to publish the third issue of the Journal of Theatre Anthropology, which again is on the website for free. Essential reading for those interested in Barba’s theatre, it is multilingual, in French, Italian, Spanish and English. He was also refused money to continue the annual summer festival of international theatre groups, performing for the Holstebro Township, whose identity now is integrally linked with the Odin Teatret. Their Festuge, a thematic global theatre Festival mounted every three years, is of considerable magnitude drawing in the entire community; schools, churches, the police, hospitals, nursing home, the library, the beach, etc. There is a superb film of this, as well. I am not sure if Barba could mount a festival of such scale without the support of the Nordisk Theatre Laboratorium. One festival was dedicated to theatre done by children’s theatre groups of the world. However, Barba continues to live in Holstebro, which is where his home is.

There is a set of 10 lecture demonstrations for free online, outlining key concepts of Theatre Anthropology and methods of training in different classical Asian theatre cultures. The way a South Indian father trains his little son is a marvellous lesson in how repetition works in mastering the ragas, tuning the ear. Seated cross-legged on the floor, the little boy’s utter focus and effort and the father’s immense patience and care, accompanying him with the harmonium, is moving and at times made me laugh. It was funny in the way small children’s earnest, massive effort to imitate adults are funny. But it’s the sense of rigorous training and utter dedication to a craft that shines through.

Resurrection, 2023

While being brutally pushed out from the theatre institution Barba and his band of theatre folk have created over a lifetime was undoubtedly traumatic for all, it must have been especially hard on Barba at 85. But Italy rose up with open arms to receive her illustrious son and Barba landed running, doing performances, lectures, workshops and promoting of other artists and human rights groups, through their Barba/Varley Foundation in Rome. He is rehearsing two new plays, as well.

Odin had bought a plot of land in the Holstebro cemetery for their theatre folk who wish to be buried there. Exiting stage left, Barba says lightly, ‘No one can chase us from there!’But I still hear the German Jewish writer Walter Benjamin saying (just before committing suicide on the Spanish border, fleeing the Nazis), ‘not even the dead will be safe any longer’. Alas! Lankans who suffered the 25-year civil war know this to be still true. (Concluded)

(Here’s the link to Eugenio Barba’s Course on Theatre Anthropology, in 10 Lessons: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK8iTIUPsd3jHl8NZFDsW7tEDHuMPbRZt)