The Essence of Theatre

Eugenio Barba

“What is left of a Jew who is not religious, Zionist or even familiar with the language of the Torah, the Holy Book?” Sigmund Freud asked himself this question at the beginning of the 20th century, and his reply was: “Probably the essential,” taking care not to deﬁne it. What is left of the theatre when it is not religious or nationalistic and does not believe in books, theories, or ideologies that try to explain and spread certainties in the world? Freud’s question contains the seeds of the unrest that, in the same period, pushed visionary theatre reformers in Europe to implode the century-old theatre culture, generating new and unexpected identities and attitudes. These visionaries chose to confront themselves with the four fundamental problems for an actor: not only how to be effective as a performer, but also why, where, and for whom. These reformers are our ancestors, the founders of the 20th century’s traditions. The word “tradition” is ambiguous. It brings to mind something that we are given, that we have idly received from the past. But tradition is also the exercising of refusal. It is our retrospective look at the human beings, the craft, the very History that has preceded us and from which we choose to distance ourselves through the continuity of our work.

The Invention of Tradition I am merely an epigone who lives in the ancestors’ old house. But my journey to reach it has been long. After four years in Poland—two and a half of these with Grotowski in Opole— I returned to Norway in 1964. I knocked in vain at the doors of every single theatre in Oslo in search of employment. I assembled a few young people who had been rejected by the National Theatre School. At that time the word “theatre” evoked a building or a text. A group of youngsters wanting to be actors, starting out from nothing and with no place to work were treated as though they were deaf-mutes wanting to perform a Beethoven symphony without instruments. That is how we came to found Odin Teatret. A loss, a privation, a lack, an exclusion—these are the wounds that secrete the essential. For us of the Odin, expulsion from the world that was supposed to initiate us into the profession and help us to consolidate the foundations of the craft represented a sentence with no appeal: we did not possess artistic qualities.

The Drama Review 46, 3 (T175), Fall 2002. Copyright ᭧ 2002 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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1. Pantomime training at Odin Teatret, 1964, the year the group was founded in Oslo. From left: Torgeir Wethal, Else Marie Lau- vik, Anne Trine Grimnes, and Tor Sannum. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teater- laboratorium)

In those days there were no groups or alternative theatre cultures to inspire us or with whom we could join forces. We were excluded. Nobody came begging us to enrich the performing art. Theatre was our personal malaria, our endemic necessity. The world had no need for us as actors. We needed the theatre. It was right that we should pay out of our own pockets. All forms of theatre, even under the most favorable conditions, are subject to constraints: time, money, space, and quantity or quality of collaborators. These constraints decide the rules of the game and mark the boundaries of what is possible. Although they may be foreseen—especially when you are nobody and have nothing—you must bow to them in order to survive. Or else you can force yourself to outflank them, thus at times achieving unexpected and original results. You can also destroy them with a hammer, shattering them in a thousand pieces with which to build your “habitat,” the ideal and material world for work and the results generated by it. This is how I remember our beginnings in a capital city that seemed like a desert. That is the origin of Odin Teatret in Norway—a tiny nucleus of amateurs who dreamed of becoming professional, five young people who took themselves terribly seriously: the faultless execution of an exercise performed on a spotlessly clean floor; vocal training as uninterrupted shouts, whispers, resonances, and vibrations, and absolute silence during the intervals. A small group, who clung to their own “superstition” and who, through lack of experience, imagined that theatre was a craft with a human face. In solitude, outside the geography of the recognized and recognizable theatres, we carried on imperturbably in this desert in which the only presence was the invisible shadow of the dead and a beloved master glimpsed at a distance: Grotowski. It is by bestriding circumstances that we determine the true course of events

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 14 Eugenio Barba and construct the hammer that demolishes the constraints. In 1966 Odin Teatret abandoned the protective shell of certainties with which it justified its precarious existence and moved to a small town of 18,000 inhabitants in west Jutland, the least developed and most religious region of Denmark. There, theatre was neither entertainment nor tradition. There were no interested spectators and, in any case, the Odin did not have a language in common with them, text being the essential means of communication on the stage at that time. The Danes had difficulty in understanding the Odin’s Norwegian actors, whose number was soon increased by others from different countries and continents. On top of the existing limitations, we had chosen to add yet another: exile from language, a stammer. Every form of exile is like a poison: if it doesn’t kill you it can give you strength. It is impossible to understand the history of Odin Teatret, our way of thinking and behaving during these 37 years, without keeping in mind these two forms of exclusion: rejection by the theatre world and the mutilation of language. We have shattered this situation of inferiority, these constraints, and from their debris we have molded an attitude of pride and refusal: our source of strength. The history of theatre was my consolation, my flying carpet, my Eldorado. I discovered the essential: Stanislavsky’s solitude and Artaud’s isolation, the exile and loss of language of Michael Chekhov, Max Reinhardt, Irwin Piscator, and Helene Weigel; the importance of amateur theatres for Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Bertolt Brecht, and Federico Garcıá Lorca; the obstinate research into the actor’s scenic “life” by Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold; the Art Theatre’s First 2. Odin members training Studio and Leopold Sulerzhitski’s laboratory of communal life. The chronicles of in Holstebro, 1970. From the past were my Talmud, my Bible, and my Quran. I only had to read attentively left: Iben Nagel Rasmussen and decipher anecdotes, episodes, and details neglected by historians. An Atlantis and Torgeir Wethal. (Photo of information emerged and clarified my hesitations and doubts, revealing the courtesy of Nordisk Teater- original examples and the astute solutions of those who laboratorium) preceded me, their way of brandishing the hammer. We were not alone. Theatre became the place in which the living could meet the nonliving, the dead, the ancestors-reformers who had crossed the desert. Their lives, their performances, and their books have illuminated the Odin’s path, guiding us toward a technical knowledge that is our way of breathing. They have inspired the tacit knowledge we have absorbed during the course of so many years, and they have protected the essential in our productions: the thousand details in the actors’ scores, the flora of impulses and micro-actions, the structure of tensions, sats,1 and intentions that resonate deeply in the spectators’ senses. The living are incapable of no- ticing all the details, but the nonliving accept the details and relish the personal temperature that has forged them in alternate layers of light and darkness.

The Nonliving Spectators For me, the word “spectator” has never evoked merely those who are brought together by a performance. My true spectators have been absences that are forcefully present, most of them nonliving: not only the dead, but also those not yet born. It was and it is to them that the Odin actors address themselves, to those who will clash with the same constraints that we have

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3. Odin member Iben Na- gel Rasmussen training in Carpignano, 1976. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teater- laboratorium)

so often experienced, who will be scorned by the spirit of the time, alone against the indifference of society and the coldness of the craft. We can reach those who are not yet born by contagion. We come into contact with them through the living, through our spectators. It is the performance and its scorpion’s sting that decide. You have to give your utmost to the spectators who come with an extraordinary gift: they offer up two or three hours of their life, placing themselves in our hands with candor and trust. We must repay their generosity with excellence, but also with an obligation to work: their senses, their skepticism, their ingenuousness, and their cruelty must be put to the test, asked to face a storm of contrasting reactions, allusions, ambiguities, and clusters of meanings that grapple with one another. They have to resolve the enigma of a performance—a sphinx ready to devour them. The performance is a burning caress that touches their sensibilities and intimate wounds, pushing them toward the hushed landscape that lives in exile within us. We must open

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 16 Eugenio Barba the spectators’ eyes with the same gentleness that we close those of a loved one who has just died. The spectators must be cradled by a thousand subterfuges: entertainment, sen- sual pleasure, artistic quality, emotional immediacy, and aesthetic refinement. But the essential lies in the transfiguration of the ephemeral quality of the performance into a splinter of life that sinks roots into their flesh and accompanies them through the years. The performance is the sting of a scorpion, which makes them dance. This dancing does not come to an end on leaving the theatre. The toxic secretion penetrates their psychic, mental, and intellectual metabolism and becomes memory. This memory constitutes the unimaginable and unprogrammable message that is handed down to those who are not yet born. It is an undertaking that can only succeed through an autonomy that is based on two conditions: the capacity to keep alive an artistic group with a “superstition” that permeates the behavior of every one of its members like a second nature; and the creation of performances that, like scorpions, bewitch a few spectators willing to be stung. Odin Teatret has stayed alive for almost four decades because we live like Bedouins. Right from the beginning we have been accustomed to possessing only a handful of dates and a tent—rather like the first nomadic caliphs of Arabia who conquered Damascus, Baghdad, and Basra, but returned to the desert without remaining in the marble palaces or letting themselves be tamed by the cities with their temples and bazaars. Holstebro is our tent. It holds the essential: the anonymity of the daily work whose task is to extract the difficult from the difficult. But the group is not all; it is only the systole of the heart that keeps alive the precarious and ever-threatened process of autonomy. The diastole is the spectators who need us. After 37 years they barely fill the hundred or so places at each of our performances. This is our limitation and our strength. They are there waiting for us wherever we go, whether it is New York or a village in the Andes, a European capital or a small town in Patagonia. We recently performed in Rome for five weeks: 100 spectators each evening— 3,500 in 35 days. Out of these the scorpion’s sting may only make one dance, the one who will encounter our true spectator...who is not yet born.

The Way of Refusal When I visit theatre buildings, I feel as though I am boarding motionless ships of stone that are attempting to portray movement. Inside them I have occasionally experienced the boundless adventure of travel to the night’s end or to the center of my own being. I compare the ships of stone to the floating islands, to what Stanislavsky called “ensemble,” and I call “theatre group”: a handful of men and women who, thanks to the discipline of an artistic craft, reach out beyond their individualism and carve themselves a place in history. Through a process of creative osmosis, their wounds and needs become political action, i.e., a standpoint with regard to the norms and circumstances of their polis, their community. The essence of theatre does not reside in its aesthetic quality or in its capacity to represent or criticize life. It consists rather in radiating through the rigor of scenic technique an individual and collective form of being. Theatre can be a social cell that embodies an ethos, a set of values that guide the refusals of each of its components. Form is fundamental to theatre. Through the discipline and precision that form requires, the actor absorbs and displays a nucleus of information that escapes words and contains the spirit of the ethos of refusal. From the very first exercise on the first day of apprenticeship, a form of being may be shaped from real actions that

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 17 have been performed in dissension with the commonplaces of thought and professional practice, obvious opinions, and the ease of choice. A form of being requires the invention of a personal tradition. I see my actors as the ﬁeld and at the same time the laborer who tills it. The spectators watch the ripening of unusual fruit whose ﬂavor should sharpen their thirst.

Theatre As Transcendence All the founders of 20th-century traditions have followed the way of refusal. This handful of ancestors who have marked our personal tradition and become its cardinal point, were in opposition to their time and forged the idea of a theatre that is not limited to performances, does not simply address itself to an audience, is not solely preoccupied with ﬁlling seats. For them another imperative arose: to transcend the performance as a physical and ephemeral manifestation, and attain a metaphysical dimension—political, social, didactic, therapeutic, ethical, or spiritual. Theatre is intolerable if it limits itself to spectacle alone. The rigor of the craft or the elation of invention is not enough, any more than the awareness of the pleasure or knowledge that we can induce in the spectator. Our work should be nourished by subversion that projects us beyond our professional identity, which acts as a wall, both protecting and at the same time imprisoning us. The performance sows a seed that grows in the memory of every spectator, and every spectator grows with this seed. When I started in theatre, I had fours actors with me. We were ﬁve in all. Three of us are still together today. Thirty-seven years is a long time and we have gone through all the crises, the exhaustion, the routine, and the doubts. So why do we continue? Are we perhaps interested in the present? I believe we are sustained by two tensions: the memory of the past and a longing for the future. On the one hand we have the desire to remain loyal to the dreams of our youth, and on the other we share a responsibility toward the nameless generations yet unborn. These are pompous words. And yet they are the voice of that part of us

4. Nobushige Kawamura and his son Kotaro in a Noh demonstration at the Tacit Knowledge symposium on transmission in Holste- bro, 1999. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teaterlaborato- rium)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 18 Eugenio Barba which lives in exile, that secret and very fragile core which, so often in this profession, we are unable to protect. Then we ﬁnish by losing ourselves. All theatres are archaic. But within this ancient and noble art the most anachronistic passion is the search for something permanent that outlives the performance. A thirst obliges us to reach out beyond the wall of the profession, to stand on tiptoe, stretching upward, toward the beyond. It is not a question of horizontal or vertical transcendence, but a way to protect ourselves from becoming victims or silent accomplices in this tireless tide, this pitiless race that is History. It is an inexplicable compulsion to remain on tiptoe in order to sink our roots into the heavens, while all around us the others advance toward sensible aims at a reasonable pace. Thus we imagine that we resist because we have found an ideal clod of earth that is not made up of a nation, an ethnic group, or an ideology, but of a few human beings who daily and anonymously embody the refusal that is also ours.

The Essential Can Only Be Mute What then remains of theatre? The essential can only be mute. It is action but it cannot be communicated. A theatre group is the organization of this incommu- 5. Iben Nagel Rasmussen nicability or of this web of personal necessity—or self- and her mother, Ester Na- ishness—as a social organism. gel, demonstrate the “gener- Working with one’s own ghosts, one’s own obsessions and illusions means ational transmission of lending one’s ear to bodiless voices that guide us. It is like listening to an uproar. experience” at the Tacit Personal tradition is an echo that comes from afar. At times we are able to dis- Knowledge symposium in tinguish a voice and we tell ourselves that an ancestor is helping us to find our Holstebro, 1999. (Photo path. At other times the echo is diffuse, confused, and we cannot discern where courtesy of Nordisk Teater- it comes from, who is talking to us. Even so we must decipher the direction it is laboratorium) pointing out to us. Odin Teatret is a group of emigrants, people who, through individual necessity or by chance, have left their place of origin and have ended up in the Danish town of Holstebro. The task of inventing the earth on which we place our feet every single day is part of the emigrant’s lot. That earth is not a geographical entity, a people, or a faith. It is our raison d’eˆtre, our self-justification, the axis that constantly redefines our equilibrium, our presence, in relation to others. This common condition of rootlessness contributes to the cementing together of the Odin, in spite of our profound differences and often diverging aspirations. At the origin of a creative path there is often a wound. It indicates the sepa- ration from something vital, revealing a part of us that remains in exile deep within us. Sometimes time transforms our wound into a scar that no longer hurts. During the course of our career we continually have returned to this intimate lesion, to reject it or remain faithful to it. All this has nothing to do with aesthetics, theory, or the urgency to communicate with others. It is rather the desire to rediscover a sensation of intensity, a lost wholeness: In order to meet myself, I must measure myself against the other—the other within me and the other outside me. I move in an ageless landscape, no bigger than a small O as Shakespeare said. Inside it I glimpse what seem to be thousand-year-old trees: trunks like motionless

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 19 men, men like trees that move. On one side there is an old man and a girl. On the opposite side two men are walking almost blindly as though they are lost. I recognize them. They are Oedipus and Antigone, Vladimir and Estragon. All around them, invisible, the damned of the world dance and sing. From some- where I can hear the crying of a newborn baby. I know that the time has come for me to gather together all that I have received and sown, handing it over to an unknown heir who will revive the tradition of revolt and birth, the tradition of the decipherable purpose and of the secret meaning of my “doing theatre.”

The European Tradition and the Big Bang Historically, European theatre was not born from Greek ritual but in the mar- kets of Italy around 1545 when the first contract was signed by men and women intending to live by the craft of performer. The actors were outcasts, people who were hungry for adventure or were fleeing their own social condition: vagabonds, prostitutes, soldiers who had deserted, libertines—the free thinkers of that era— 6. Mythos, the most recent peasants escaping from poverty, the younger sons of the aristocracy whose fortune Odin Teatret production, and coat of arms were destined for the firstborn. directed by Eugenio Barba, The professional theatre was a financial enterprise producing performances. 1998. Actors featured are The possibility of earning one’s daily bread was dependent upon the ability to Torgeir Wethal, Frans fill seats, shorten the period of rehearsal, and multiply the choices of performances Winther, Roberta Carreri, by rapidly adapting them from place to place. The actors did not think of them- Jan Ferslev, Tage Larsen, selves as creating culture, nor did they define themselves as artists. The traveling Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Ju- companies were characterized by the laws of commerce, the demand to entertain lia Varley, and Kai Bred- and amuse, and by indecency and eroticism. In the eyes of those who lived by holt. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 20 Eugenio Barba the dominant moral norms, actors were people who exhibited themselves and even went as far as selling themselves for money: corruption and prostitution among actresses were proof of this. Hence the lack of respect shown them and the discrimination they were subject to from society. With its exceptions and variations, this was the world of theatre up until the end of the 19th century when Friedrich Nietzsche and Ivan Karamazov discovered the eclipse of God. While science appeared to have an explanation for all questions, new doubts were being raised concerning the human condition, the organization of society, and the role of the artist in it. A few actors threw themselves into the vortex that was sweeping through all the arts and that marked the beginnings of modernity: the avantgarde, the “isms,” the break with the canons and criteria of a shared and accepted tradition. All the recognized and practiced models exploded. It was the big bang, the liberation of innumerable diverging energies and intentions, the creation of new paradigms, the blossoming of a theatre ecology never seen before, or simply the intoxicating realization that this disparaged profession could be an art with a dignity, a purpose, and a speciﬁc identity. Theatre became “theatrical,” emancipated itself from literature, and aimed to be a practice with a raison d’eˆtre beyond the ﬁction of the stage. How could a performer’s acting be transformed into real action, authentic experience, social awareness, the shaping of a “new human being,” and a magic operation recreating the reality that is life’s double? Never before during the course of history had actors posed themselves such questions.

Small Traditions It was no coincidence that an outsider was the first to raise this sort of question. Stanislavsky was an amateur, the son of a rich textile factory owner. He had at his disposal a theatre built especially for him, where for months he could prepare a production at his ease. Although others preceded him, it was with him that an original theatrical culture flourished, breaking with past models. The big bang of 20th-century theatre was marked by his indefatigable activity as an innovative director, an ever-questioning actor, the inventor of a consistent pedagogical ap- proach, a stimulator of rebels, founder of laboratories, protector of other reformers: Gordon Craig, for whom he made it possible to produce Hamlet; and Meyerhold, whom he welcomed into his Studio. He was not the only one. Other actors and directors also adjusted their art to their personal visions and to an era that was shaken by industrialization, technological changes, the first “world” war, and by the devastation of the fascist ideology and of the communist social utopia. There no longer exists one single theatre tradition, a central model to act as a means of orientation. The big bang generated small nomadic traditions whose gen- esis was the work of a totem, a reforming artist who combined a visionary power with technical solutions that put it into practice. All the reformers revitalized and reshaped their art, aware that theatre was an “empty ritual” in search of a lost meaning. They had to awaken this ceremony in lethargy, this formalized entertainment, make it assume risks and responsibilities, jeopardize its ambiguous condition in a torn society. Compared to other forms of spectacle—sport or cinema—theatre proves to be anachronistic, answering the needs of another age, out of tune with the very flow of civilization and its other means of communication. The objective of this “modern” civilization is to reach the greatest number of people in the shortest time and as economically as possible. Theatre is quite the opposite: it involves vast expense, a waste of resources, both human and material, not to mention the time needed to prepare a performance that will only be seen by a limited number of spectators.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 21 If we study the reformers dispassionately, we discover that the source of their strength did not stem from their craft. They passed through theatre as though it were an ideal country, driven by a personal longing: ethics, religion, the time of the “new human being,” revolution, individual revolt, esoteric discipline. They all had needs that collided with the spirit of their time. They all abandoned or were forced to abandon the guarantees and criteria that made their activity com- prehensible and acceptable. Solitary and vulnerable, they left behind current prac- tices and replaced them with new ones. Sometimes their endeavors were recognized only after their deaths. And even if they were accepted by their con- temporaries, their results were accompanied by the evident or hidden sarcasm of the critics, the indifference of other theatre artists, and desertion by the spectators. Sufﬁce it to think of Brecht, even when he was being presented as the pride of the nation in East Berlin, or Stanislavsky whose convictions concerning his own “system” were regarded as bizarre, even unhealthy, to the point that his actors and his partner, Nemirovitch Dantchenko, ﬁnally turned their backs on him.

Anthropological Mutation The forces that in the beginning of the 20th century tore apart the central and unitary model of unquestioned theatre, tracing a multiplicity of paths, were nur- tured by opposing tensions. There was the disgust that a minority of actors felt toward the wretchedness and servitude of their profession. Eleonora Duse com- plained that “in order to save theatre, theatre must be destroyed. The actors and actresses must die of the plague. They make art impossible” (in Craig 1957:54). Gordon Craig, an actor turned director, quotes the great Italian actress’s apoca- lyptic words as an epigraph to his essay “The Actor and the U¨ bermarionette” and proposes closing all theatres to concentrate on the training of a new “race of athletic workers” for the stage (1957:1). There was an obsession to legitimize the scenic craft as an artistic discipline that reaches beyond the aesthetic domain to a social, political, or educational vocation for the masses. More than anything else there was an urgent need to fight the sensation of loss—a loss of existence. The word “existence” has to be taken literally: a capacity to be, to feel alive and present, and to pass this essential quality on to the spectator. It is as though theatre had been attacked by a form of AIDS, a decline in its vigor. Hence the dogged search for a remedy for its loss of cultural and public presence, for elaborate methods to develop an immune system, to engender a vital condition that permeates every level of a performance starting with the basic one: the art of the actor. “We must give life back to the theatre,” exclaimed Artaud in his first article after leaving his master Charles Dullin ([1924] 1961). He spoke explicitly of “life.” Before him, Stanislavsky had spoken of organicity and Mey- erhold of biomechanics. The reformers’ efforts toward renewal revealed their contradictory desire to destroy the very abilities that defined them as actors in the eyes of others. They wanted to annihilate in themselves what they embodied: an age-old tradition, a proven know-how. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse, they bestrode an ex- treme idea: absolute creativity. Each new production should start from scratch, grow from nothing, should be a cosmogony similar to that of the Christian God who created ex nihilo, as opposed to the demiurges of other religions, which remodel something already existent. They were asking burning questions: How do you give life to an actor who will not be conditioned by a predetermined technique, but each time opens up a new path disclosing an inner depth? How do you trigger an improvisation that until now was intended to intertwine and vary known elements, and turn them into an original creation? How do you reach an authenticity, a dynamis, a personal

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 22 Eugenio Barba force that materializes the poetic essence of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov’s plays, and engages the spectator in the experience of this essence? What process does the actor have to follow in order to evoke this feeling of life, this “effect of organicity” in the spectator? It is from the perspective of these questions that we examine the introduction of actor training based on exercises, a practice that was absent in the apprenticeship of the European actor.

The Paradox of Exercises A true anthropological mutation shook the European actors’ universe during the first decades of the 20th century. Theatre was no longer a continent, but had become an archipelago composed of islands, each of which was busy building or knocking down a tradition, following new customs and beliefs, inventing its own dialect. There was no longer one history and one culture, and the ghosts that revealed the multiple facets of each of these cultures were numerous. The voracious interest with respect to neglected traditions (commedia dell’arte, circus, cabaret, and other popular forms of entertainment) on the one hand, and on the other the discovery of distant cultures (classical Asian performances, Af- rican dances, ceremonies, and rituals), blended with effervescent reckless exper- imentation and a fervor to break the chains, habits, and rigid structures. Hence the importance of founding theatre schools in which individual talent could flour- ish and the consciousness of an artistic dignity ripen. Some actors-turned- directors opened studios, privileged places that offered continuous learning—the utopia of the “eternal beginning.” This is the origin of Stanislavsky’s and Mey- erhold’s laboratories where the practice of exercises was invented and applied. Through the exercises, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and their collaborators devised a “pedagogical fiction.” Their exercises gave the impression that they were pointing out something of importance; they had nothing in common with the courses at theatre schools in which students learned singing, diction, fencing, ballet, and play interpretation. All these were abilities that could be exploited in their future careers, but were not taught by the exercises. Today we acknowledge that the

7. Gennadi Bogdanov dem- onstrates Meyerhold’s bio- mechanic exercises during the tenth Ista session in Copenhagen, 1996. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teater- laboratorium)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 23 exercises constitute one of the most daring adventures of the golden age that was the 20th century. At ﬁrst the exercises appeared to be an aberration from the point of view of tradition and common sense because it was not easy to see their utility for the actor. What was the point in repeating dynamic patterns that had no direct re- lationship to the rehearsals, which focused on character interpretation and the immediate effect of the production on the spectator? Why waste so much time learning and incorporating an exercise? What are the concealed merits perceived by Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and all the others who followed this way of teaching? There are several categories of exercises, each with different objectives: over- coming obstacles and inhibitions; specializing in certain skills; freeing oneself of conditioning, of “spontaneity,” or of mannerisms; the acquisition of a particular way of using the brain and the nervous system. All the different types of exercises involve the development of a scenic bios, which reveals itself onstage through a behavior guided by a “second nature,” as Stanilavski and Copeau said. The exercises do not aim at teaching how to act. Often they do not even aspire to any obvious dexterity. Rather they are models of dramaturgy and composition on an organic, not a narrative level. They are pure form, a linking together of dynamic peripeteias, without a plot, but infused with information which, once embodied by the actor, constitutes “the essence of scenic movement” (1993:67), as Meyerhold used to say about biomechanics. Decroux considered the exercises to be the foundation of a “presence ready to represent” ([1963] 1985:28). Through action the exercises allow the assimilation of a paradoxical way of thinking; they challenge daily automatisms and become rooted in the extra-daily behavior of the stage. Even the simplest exercises presuppose a host of variations, tensions, sudden or progressive changes in intensity, an acceleration of rhythm, and a breaking up of space in different directions and levels. What kind of information is imparted by the ﬁxed form of an exercise? It obliges the student to think with the global bodymind and make this thinking perceptible through a real action (not necessarily realistic); to respect the design of the form; to indicate the beginning and the end of this design; to be aware of the different phases—changes, variations, and dynamic peripeteias—that make it up. The exercises are not about work on a text, but on oneself. They ignore

8. The living tradition of Decroux corporal mime in the performance of A Little Thing by Tom Leabheart, 1996. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 24 Eugenio Barba the stereotypes or the male/female conditioning of the students, testing them by confronting them with a series of obstacles, deviations, resistances, which develop self-knowledge as they force students to encounter their own limits—and to surpass them. The exercises result in self-discipline, which is at the same time autonomy with respect to the expectations and customs of the profession. Ap- prenticeship becomes the practice of an initiation, the growth of an individuality that is preparing to take a stand. It is a second birth, that of a scenic bodymind, independent of the demands of the performance but ready to execute them. In this consists the original and audacious perspective of “the actor’s work on himself” expounded by Stanislavsky, of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, of Vakhtan- gov’s and Michael Chekhov’s exercises, and Decroux’s series of ﬁgures et attitudes. These pioneers opened up a path that has been followed by all the founders of small nomadic traditions. Each time a reformer has searched for a deeper personal meaning, s/he has pursued it unremittingly through the actor’s scenic presence and form of being. They founded presence and perfected the technical means capable of making their theatre take a stand with respect to their time and society.

Exercises to Forget the Moon and the Finger Askeo, in Greek, means to exercise. An ascetic is someone who does exercises, and asceticism is the way in which they are executed. The term is usually asso- ciated with rigor, submission, sacrifice, penance, even pain, and makes one think of saints in deserts and mystics lost in a dialogue with the Self. I immediately think of young ballet dancers. While studying the principles of Theatre Anthropology, I spent some time observing the teaching at the Royal Theatre ballet school in Copenhagen. The pupils start dancing when they are seven or eight years old and the most striking thing about them is the physical stereotype: little blond girls who are slender and graceful, with smiles glued to their lips during lessons. During their break they slip off the delicate little pink shoes and, with a grim- ace, hold their feet under the cold tap in the bathroom. One of their teachers, herself a dancer, showed me her own deformed toes and feet: “It is hard dancing on points. The capacity to resist pain decides the career of a dancer.” Asceticism always characterizes apprenticeship to artistic, athletic, or spiritual disciplines. Self-discipline accompanies the endeavors of all individuals intent on moving beyond their own limits. An actor’s training is the initiation into a profession in which endurance, in all its senses, is a fundamental requirement: physical and psychic control; persistence in adversity, in the absence of success, and in periods of “winter” that yield no fruit; rejection of self-indulgence and obvious solutions; obstinacy when faced with obstacles; perseverance in extracting the difficult from the difficult; and tenacity, to resist adapting to the constraints of a situation. Every artistic vocation, every impulse to fight against one’s binding destiny or the need to free oneself from the chains of a tradition or a routine, goes hand in hand with an asceticism of rigorous action and self-control. Theatre activity has a double effect: on the person who carries it out and on the person for whom the work is intended—the spectator. The introduction of the exercises has made it possible to define and delve deeper into the zone of “the actor’s work with himself.” The exercises are not aimed at muscular development, but at mental and somatic concentration on a modest but complicated task that sometimes may be paradoxical. The necessity for precision and repetition determines a specific way of thinking with the entire body by means of a con- catenation and simultaneity of tension, contrast, and dynamic immobility. It is learning to be as an actor, to grow roots through a scenic presence, but it is also a process of individualization and personal growth. It is no coincidence that the

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9. Actors Zbigniew Cynku- tis and Ryszard Cieslak in Dr. Faust, directed by Jerzy Grotowski, 1963. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teater- laboratorium)

term “exercise” is to be found in all paths of psychic, mental, or spiritual transcendence which make use of somatic processes: a particular way of breathing, fixing one’s gaze, moving, dancing, or halting the flow of thought. We can nowadays appreciate the unknown prospects revealed by some of the reformers and the surprising niches which they carved at the very center of theatre’s ecosystem. At the same time we can reflect on the paradox that appears to accompany them: the more they distance themselves from production, the more they are engrossed in the practice of the exercises. This was the case with Copeau who chose teaching rather than performing when he fled Paris. His students played in Bourgogne, but their daily activity was above all based on a process of uninterrupted apprenticeship, on that hidden aspect of the craft which distils the actor’s ethos. Grotowski left the theatre in 1970. But from the mid-’80s up until his death in 1999 at his Italian retreat in Pontedera, he applied all the knowledge acquired through the exercises to his “art as a vehicle.” He defined as a “performer” the person who worked with physical actions that do not aim at representation. This meticulous and patience-craving process, which also involves the vibratory quality of the voice, is not intended for the spectator, but for the “doer,” a term used by Grotowski instead of the word “actor.” Occasionally, as an exception, a few chosen witnesses are allowed to be present. It was at the school of Copeau’s Vieux Colombier that Etienne Decroux began his training. His life is strewn with the continual invention of exercises aimed at revitalizing the performer’s scenic efficacy. His modest house in the suburbs of Paris was a stronghold of freedom—independent of trends, fashions, and mar- kets—where he prepared many generations of determined and loyal rebels, with a conspicuous sense of humor. The most surprising experience—because it was the first of its kind—was Stanislavsky’s First Studio, directed by that extraordinary personality,Sulerzhitski, with the young Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, and Richard Boleslavsky. Its members were immersed in the creation and execution of hundreds of exercises, with no worries of an imminent performance. They left Moscow to establish a

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10. Julia Varley (Odin Tea- tret), Sanjukta Panigrahi (Odissi dance), and Au- gusto Omolu´ (Orixa´ dance) improvising in Holstebro, 1993. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium)

theatrical phalanstery in the Caucasus, cultivated the land, and organized evenings for the peasants, while still concentrating on the exercises. An obscure tension, which cannot be explained solely in terms of artistic orig- inality, drove these individuals to take a stand against society and the theatre of their time. It was perhaps Artaud who formulated this tension in a more explicit form: theatre should not imitate life, but recreate it. In this way, the craft—a technique which is pervaded by an inexorable necessity—becomes a bundle of energy to be discovered and laid bare in order to re-form human beings and their social and spiritual dimension. The quantity and variety of exercises devised by the reformers are truly a “pedagogical fiction.” They neither teach nor explain the rules of acting for the actor. They plunge the students into an often unintelligible stream of physical and mental obstacles and limitations in order to liberate them from the functional and utilitarian categories of daily life. It is a lengthy apprenticeship that allows the growth of a scenic presence embodying the values assimilated in the course of years of training. The exercises conceal their heart in an activity that appears to be one of self-obliteration, but which leads to autonomy. Training and exercises were rediscovered and circulated after the 1960s, mainly in the world of “third theatre,” the floating islands, the auto-didactic groups, and those excluded from or opposing the mainstream culture. The exercises, never- theless, contain an ambiguity with respect to their usefulness. This ambiguity can be summarized in the story of the master who pointed at the moon, and the student who fixed his gaze on the pointing finger, blind to the distant astral body. The exercises may impress by their suggestiveness, by the gratification they bestow on those who execute them, by the physical adroitness that they develop, by the sensation of overstepping limits, by the magic value attributed to the person who teaches them, and because they were invented and practiced by masters whose performances are still an inspiration. There is no harm in this; it is reminiscent of the attitude that drives one to swallow pills in the belief that they will have a slimming effect. The exercises elaborated by the reformers contained a nucleus of essential information in symbiosis with the vision and the goals of the only form of theatre to which each of them wanted to give life. Their actors transformed and breathed life into the stereotyped patterns of the exercises with endless personal energy,

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11. Sanjuta Panigrahi and Kazu Ohno improvise at without letting themselves be devoured by their gymnastic aspects. On the con- Odin Teatret on the occa- trary, they involuntarily extracted from them a quality of lightness and radiance sion of its 30th Anniversary, capable of evoking resonance and associations in observers. 1994. (Photo courtesy of When the exercises are repeated outside the original context, there is a risk of Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium) emptying them of their hidden heart and only reproducing the external shell. In the absence of a rigorous and competent guide and an environment that is con- ducive to maintaining awareness of the existence of a far-off aim—the shim- mering moon that conceals a dark and inaccessible side—the exercises teach only how to look at a pointing finger. The secret heart helps to see the master’s finger close by, to be conscious of the distant moon at which the finger is pointing, and to forget both of these along the path that should lead each of us to an encounter with ourselves.

Tradition Does Not Exist For me theatre is immediate experience. For historians theatre is a question of facts. I enjoy wandering through “the subterranean history” of my craft where the reformers come toward me like ﬂayed heretics crying out their solitude and revolt, displaying their wounds and stuttering inarticulately, opening up within me an abyss of questions. I am hypnotized by their biographies; I study incred- ulously the audacity of their productions and am moved by their choices. Mine is both a search for a professional identity and a journey within myself. I discover my culture, my ancestors, the heritage they have bestowed upon me: my roots and my wings. I experience a very strong sensation that I call “superstition”: a

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 28 Eugenio Barba presence that is above me, perhaps beside me. It is a vulnerable and pensive face that I do not recognize, a depositary of a plus-value that surpasses all the values, meanings, alibis, and longings I project into my profession. “Superstition” is the opposite of fetishism, of a belief in technical systems, political justifications, and aesthetic categories. I invent a tradition in order to discover my heritage and confront myself with it, struggling to capture something that is a part of my integrity, to which I belong and which belongs to me. I feel the need to give it life, to decide how and where to invest it, how and to whom to pass it on. My ancestors—their destinies, their coherence, and their illusions, the words and the forms they convey to me from the past—whisper a secret to me alone. I decipher this secret through action. More or less consciously, my actions set ablaze their forms and words. I watch their ashes being swept away by the winds of oblivion, of derision, and the cruelty of the times. In the smoke of the fire that I have lit I glimpse the mysterious meaning that drives me through theatre like a blind horse galloping on the edge of a frozen precipice. Tradition does not exist. I am the tradition, a tradition-in-life that materializes and transcends my experience and that of the ancestors, whom I have turned to ashes. It condenses the encounters, tensions, enlightenments, and shadowy sides, the wounds and the invisible tracks on which I never cease to get lost and be led. It is a tradition that leaves traces like an astute and elated trickster, full of traps that mingle precious instruments for orientation together with a mass of inap- plicable knowledge. When I am gone, this tradition-in-life will no longer exist. Perhaps one day, compelled by mute necessity, somebody will shake this heritage in hibernation and make it their own, burning it with the heat of their actions. Thus, in an act that presupposes much love, the involuntary heir will uproot the secret of my inheritance and distil it into his or her own personal meaning. To make something one’s own means to know how to nurture oneself, to choose the sources of one’s own knowledge. The Brasilian poet Osvaldo de Andrade claimed that every artist should be anthropophagous (1928). Anthropophagy is not cannibalism according to him. A cannibal devours another human being out of voracity, whereas anthropophagy implies feeding on those selected parts of another which are imbued with qualities, properties, and virtues that nurture our own strength. De Andrade concluded that we have to be anthropophagous—not cannibalistic—when approaching another culture. The same applies to the past and to our ancestors. It appears to be an accidental and harmless encounter that does not demand total commitment. In reality it is a dangerous operation full of unknown pitfalls since at that precise moment we make contact with the very source of our existence, of our being. The relationships between human beings and those who surround them—the living, those who preceded them, and those who will follow after them—are strewn with occult signs and messages that are decipherable only if we transpierce the transient. To question ourselves about tradition means to reflect on the instinct of revolt that guided our first steps toward a horizon which today shuts us in, or which perhaps still incites us to keep on going as it grows ever more distant. It also means asking ourselves how to escape the voracity of the present, while holding on to this splinter of the past for which we alone represent the future.

A Fortress with Walls of Wind Our ancestors gave the example. They approached theatre as one enters the desert: to encounter themselves, but also to found a place different from all others, a fortress with walls of wind where new rules of life could be established. An

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 29 island of freedom. Behind these metaphors hides reality: every day you must enter the rehearsal space, face a group of people, be able to stimulate them in order to be stimulated in return, hesitantly feeling your way forward in the hope that the work will show the way. It is this attitude that prevents your floating island from sinking. In 1994 when Odin Teatret celebrated its 30th anniversary, I told myself that I had to make a radical decision and once again brandish the hammer, shattering the certainties that had become my limits. I thought about telling my actors that it was time for me to retire, that I had fulfilled my task. But I no longer belong to myself. I belong to a small tradition whose ancestors remain alive through the coherence and continuity of my actions. This small tradition has proved that theatre is an ensemble, a group of individualists who cultivate a plot of land, build a fortress, who are both peasants and caliphs. Since Stanislavsky this tradition has been inhabited by the longing for the discipline of a craft that is an island of freedom, a refuge from the spirit of the times, and a search for the essential. In the rooms of the Olmec culture at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, there are some gigantic statues on display. They have been horribly disfigured, to the point that it is impossible to see whether they represent people or animals. They were discovered buried under several meters of red earth and surrounded by offerings. The archaeologists believe that a change of religious sensibility drove the Olmecs to deface the statues and hide them. They realized they were committing a dangerous act, and so they also buried gifts to placate the wrath of the forsaken divinities. It is as though theatre has lost its effigy, as though the erosion and the frenzy of time, or the same human beings, had mutilated its face. It no longer has a profile. Offerings are made to this disfigured theatre and it is adorned with theories and significances. But the only features that can restore its life and wholeness stem from that part of ourselves in which a stammering voice sings and bleeds: our vulnerable identity of wolf and child.

12. Guests of Odin Tea- tret’s 30th Anniversary in 1994, stand in front of the entrance to the theatre in Holstebro. In the center can be seen Sanjukta Panigrahi, Kazu Ohno, Eugenio Barba, Mario Delgado, Ju- dith Malina, Hanon Rez- nikov, Ingemar Lindh, and Clive Barker. Third from the left, standing, is Thomas Richards. Gro- towski, who attended the anniversary celebration, is not in the photo. (Photo courtesy of Nordisk Teater- laboratorium)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 30 Eugenio Barba Note 1. “Sats” refers to a Norwegian term which in theatre anthropology refers to the impulse, the state of readiness before executing an action (see Barba 1995:55–61).

References

de Andrade, Osvaldo 1928 “Antopofagia: Manifesto” (San Paulo). Revista de Antropofagia 1. Artaud, Antonin 1961 [1924] “L’e´volution du de´cor.” In A. Artaud, Oeuvres completes, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard. Barba, Eugenio 1995 The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. Translated by Richard Fowler. New York: Routledge. Craig, Edward Gordon 1957 On the Art of the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books. Decroux, Etienne 1985 [1963] “Words on Mime” (Pomona College). Mime Journal. Meyerhold, Vsevolod 1993 “L’acteur du future et la biome´canique.” In Ecrits sur le theatre, vol. 2.

Eugenio Barba is the founder and director of Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, as well as a TDR Contributing Editor. His most recent book is Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt (Black Mountain Press, 1999).

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