Document kept at Odin Teatret Archives, Fonds Odin Teatret, Series Perf-B, Binder 19

Theatrum Mundi: Ur-Hamlet

Erik Exe Christoffersen Odin Teatret’s multicultural performance Ur-Hamlet (2006) was based on Saxo Grammaticus’s tale Vita Amlethi, from Gesta Danorum (c. 1200). This is a raw drama of revenge and the source of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) which emphasises the barbarian basis for self-reflection in Hamlet. Ur-Hamlet is a result of Odin Teatret’s interest in both the performance as an encounter with the spectator and the cooperation between actors from different traditions as part of the development of a “professional identity”. Ninety performers of 30 different nationalities were involved in the production whose rehearsals took place in various phases. These began at sessions of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Sevilla in 2004 and Wroclaw in 2005 and continued in Holstebro, Copenhagen and Bali in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The final rehearsals took place in Ravenna, ITALY, where the production premiered in July 2006, after which it was performed in Denmark in Holstebro and at Kronborg (Hamlet’s) Castle in Elsinore in August 2006. Only in the final phase were all NINETY players involved 1, creating a global and political context. My focus in this article is the political, theatrical and cultural strategies that the process and performance express. I will consider the performance in relation to its creation as a process involving theatre as a profession and in relation to the spectators, the place of the performance, the tradition of

1 As a basis for this article, I observed the rehearsals in Ravenna and at Kronborg. In this article, I refer to the final version performed at Kronborg. Hamlet, and the local and global context. On a number of levels the staging makes use of foreignness and the “plague” as pivotal elements in a dramaturgy that creates Disorder 2 – the perceptual disorientation of the spectator, who, as it were, is thrown off balance. 3 My viewpoint is that Ur- Hamlet represents archaic theatre within modern theatre. Odin Teatret may be regarded as culturally and politically un-modern, which is not the same as being anti-modern. Odin Teatret was established in 1964 by Italian-born Eugenio Barba (1936) and some young Norwegian would-be actors. The theatre group moved from Oslo to Holstebro in 1966, and Barba later became a Danish citizen. Their performances have been of an experimental nature and have concerned foreignness as a fundamental condition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But they have also dealt with the heritage from the irony of romanticism as well as from the rhythmic and the dynamic, or what Nietzsche called the Dionysian. Eugenio Barba created ISTA in 1979 to carry out comparative research on the performer’s technique, and since then he has explored principles for dynamic scenic presence and behaviour in various theatre traditions. In continuation of this work, he created the basis for several multicultural performances with the Theatrum Mundi Ensemble. One of their common themes is trespassing: a transgression of the traditional theatrical boundary between stage and spectator. 4 The theatre’s performances are created with unfamiliar theatrical means of expression that can also be enjoyed by spectators who do not understand the language, and they can be performed all over the world without all the spectators necessarily having the same understanding of the performance. Odin Teatret is a world theatre that is neither nationally nor locally oriented, but both at the same time. At a social

2 Eugenio Barba, 2004. Barba makes use of Disorder to indicate an unexpected penetration of energy. 3 Cf. the poster from Odin Teatret’s 40th anniversary, which shows a drawing previously issued in TTT (Teatrets teori og teknikk, no. 22, 1974: Breve til min fars hus (Letters to my father’s house)). It is a drawing of a seven-year-old girl, describing Odin Teatret’s performance Min fars hus (My father’s house) (1972). 4 Cultural encounters constitute a recurrent theme for Odin Teatret, from the principle of barter to performances like Come! And the Day will be Ours (1976), Millionen (1978), Talabot (1988) and Kaosmos (1992). The encounter between cultures has also been the topic of urban site-specific performances like Vandstier (1991) in Holstebro. The conflict between cultures has had both a comic and tragic character in most cases, but criticism of the fear of foreignness and Western tendency to erase differences has probably been the most recurrent theme. Various metaphors are also used by Odin Teatret, such as the traveler, the anthropologist, the emigrant, the refugee and the foreigner. level, the themes revolve around transgression and a lack of boundaries – as in Kaosmos (1992), which describes the consequences of artificial national boundaries and especially the disintegration of these. Also the boundary between fiction and life is a central dimension in Odin Teatret, which is largely a “threshold theatre” situated at the margin. 5 A brief definition of terms is appropriate at this point, since globalization has spawned various concepts for interaction, distinguishing between the multi-, inter- and transcultural. The multicultural means that various cultures live side by side, sometimes in ghetto-like environments , without any actual interaction. In Ur-Hamlet the various theatre traditions are not integrated, but remain independent even though they interact within a common context. The intercultural designates a dialogue between cultures, the distinctiveness of each of which is respected. In Ur-Hamlet the palimpsest between Saxo’s text and Shakespeare’s is a kind of intercultural dialogue between the “dark” and self-reflective Renaissance which is placed in the perspective of globalised modernity. The transcultural designates an interaction at a particular level where original culture is abandoned in favour of a new one. As Barba describes it, his theatre has created a culture where he himself chooses his cousins, uncles and grandparents. In his view, the transcultural is the pre-expressive or the dynamic level of the performer’s presence. Ur-Hamlet thus contains aspects of all three definitions of culture.

The performance

The play, which lasts a little more than an hour, is performed in the castle courtyard at Kronborg in an arena stage with six platforms (see drawing) surrounded by the architecture of the castle. The dark walls, large windows, towers and spires embrace the space of the performance. Kronborg is a Renaissance castle from the end of the sixteenth century, rebuilt several times and associated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Even though Kronborg is not

5 Jane Turner’s Eugenio Barba (Routledge 2004) provides a valuable introduction to Odin Teatret. mentioned in Hamlet, it takes place in Elsinore and the castle is thus concrete and a mental framework for Ur-Hamlet , and of course it creates a special mood amongst the spectators and background for the actual performance along with the more or less coincidental elements that play a role: the weather, cries of seagulls, the darkness that falls and the burning torches in the performance that transform the space to shadows. The tradition of Hamlet and the castle contribute to Ur-Hamlet and a stage has already been created for which the actual stage emerges as a stage within the stage. This establishes a reference to the stage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the players’ scene has a simplicity reminiscent of Ur-Hamlet ’s. The theatricality of the performance is thus already explicit and part of the performance. The empty stage has a theatrical quality and is a code that makes the spectators “see” the rooms of the court even though chairs, tables, carpets, walls and so forth are absent. The empty stage is a modern theatre convention that calls attention to the performers’ stylized movements, which at the beginning of the play are especially influenced by Balinese Gambuh, court theatre dance from the fifteenth century. In the middle are a small dais and a well. The orchestra and the choir sit on platforms. The stage is illuminated by over 50 torches placed on the ground, their light intensified by bowls filled with water. 6 Looking closely, one can see that the entire space of Theatrum Mundi is reflected in these in a reverse distorted image : the world as a theatre or the theatre’s world as a distorted reflection of the world. The play makes use of Saxo’s tale written in Latin and fragments of the text are recited in Latin by Saxo, who is the storyteller in the performance. Some of the lines are translated into English, serving to wreck the illusion, but otherwise the performance is primarily “told” through song, dance and props in the space. The eight scenes offer a brief description of the play (cf. the programme):

6The effect of the burning candles was similarly intensified in the Renaissance.

1. Saxo, the munk, digs into the dark ages and unearths the tale of Hamlet, ruler of Jutland. 2. Orvendil, Hamlet’s father, is murdered by his brother Fengi. Fengi seizes power and marries Gerutha, Orvendel’s widow and mother of Hamlet. 3. Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to conceal his plan for vengeance. 4. The castle is infiltrated by foreigners from distant lands. 5. Fengi lets Hamlet meet a girl in order to test his madness. He believes madmen are impotent. 6. The queen of the rats (the plague) arrives at the castle. 7. Fengi’s counsellor hides to listen to the conversation between Hamlet and his mother. 8. Hamlet takes his revenge and proclaims the laws of a new order.

Ur-Hamlet begins at dusk with a trumpet fanfare. The music and choir songs are composed by Frans Winther and consist of Balinese gambuh and gamelan orchestras, a solo Indian flute, candomblé drums and percussion and Western instruments (guitar, trumpet, accordion). A group of Balinese women enter the semi-darkness with a rocking movement and light torches around the scenic space. One of them sprinkles holy water as a ritual gesture. Saxo (Julia Varley, Odin Teatret) appears mid-stage, raises a blue cloth from the ground revealing a skull and bones on a mat. Saxo is introduced by two sign-bearing Pulcinellas with masks, black jackets and white trousers, like the munk who unearths and narrates the story. Sometimes he seems blind and sometimes he seems to be telling the audience about a vision whose end he knows and that he is fending off but still needs to tell. It is reminiscent of the blind Tiresias who, in a similar way, attempted to the very end to avoid telling the story of Oedipus. Saxo lifts the skull while the court comes in and performs an intense rhythmic kecak (a Balinese ritual dance). They receive Orvendil (Christina Wistari Formaggia, Balinese Gambuh), ruler of Jutland and Hamlet’s father. The slender king moves with slow, rocking steps and is followed by the singing court. Saxo introduces him in English, addressing the spectators. Orvendil welcomes his brother Fengi (I Wayan Bawa, Balinese Gambuh). They challenge each other and begin to fight with swords. Orvendil is struck by Fengi, and while supporting himself on the well, the court members strike the final blow in his back. He collapses and Saxo helps him down onto the mat among the bones, where he dies. Fengi is the new king and while the music plays he is carried around the arena on the courtiers’ shoulders. Orvendil’s wife, Gerutha (Roberta Carreri, Odin Teatret) kneels by the murder victim singing a dirge. Fengi stops her, she kisses his hand, he pulls her up and together they leave the corpse. A young Balinese girl runs in as Garuda, a mythical bird who heralds misfortune, and pokes at the dead king like a vulture. The gravedigger (Torgeir Wethal, Odin Teatret) enters with a wheelbarrow and waves her away, while his helpers, the Pulcinellas, put the body in the wheelbarrow and wheel it away. Gerutha returns and accidentally knocks over the skull which is lying among other bones on the mat; she runs away screaming. Hamlet (Augusto Omolú, Brazilian candomblé) frantically dances his way in, followed by a little girl carrying a torch in her hand, as though wishing to illuminate his dark mind. His head and body are entwined in white rope like a mask. He stops near Saxo, screams and takes the skull, which he dances with, while Saxo informs the spectators that Hamlet “plans to revenge his father and pretend that he has gone mad”. Hamlet crows like a rooster, the court laughs, but moves uncomfortably around him. Fengi shows how harmless he is by ordering the girl to place a noose around Hamlet’s neck, he is on a leash, and she runs with the “strange animal” as though it were a game. A foreign woman in modern clothes runs across the stage, others follow, crawling across the spectators’ tribune, over and under it, prowling about or hiding. They have purses, bags and suitcases like travellers or refugees. Some are elegant like tourists, others poorly dressed, afraid of being seen; they sit down or search for others. A woman removes her dark clothing and headscarf and becomes the provocative prostitute that we see at the borders of many countries. A disruptive knocking sound is now heard behind and underneath the audience’s seats. Hamlet continues playing with the girl, undisturbed. Some of the foreigners run out as though fleeing, and another group enters with a table and beer crates for chairs. Men carry in the groom, who violently resists. From the other side comes the bride accompanied by four or five women. They gather around the wedding table, which is reminiscent of da Vinci’s Last Supper. While the foreigners are invading the entire space, the court is desperately looking for Hamlet. The king has decided to test his madness by arranging an erotic meeting between Hamlet and his foster sister. The performance branches off into a series of simultaneous love scenes. The bride and groom kiss each other, a couple gets together underneath the table, Hamlet and his foster sister are covered (hidden) by Saxo and make love while being mirrored by a Balinese love dance. Fengi and Gerutha also walk around like a loving couple. The scene is interrupted by the Queen of Rats (Akira Matsui, Japanese Noh) with a mask and long black hair. It is the plague entering the castle, moving around the space to Western music. The foreign wedding guests fall down, the groom seems dazed, and the bride desperately attempts to raise herself from the table but collapses. The Queen of Rats stops and is surrounded by a choir of 35 foreigners dressed all in black, leaping rhythmically as though in ecstasy. They are riding on invisible horses, whipping them forward, stopping, as though obeying a silent command made by the Queen of Rats, and they spread out in a circle like bewitched marionettes facing the audience. They are shaking, praying, falling slowly to the ground, where they continue to tremble. The groom takes the bride in his arms and moves around. The dramatic tumult does not seem to disturb the court and the main plot. Fengi orders his counsellor (Christina Wistari Formaggia) to hide in the hay in the middle of the space to listen to Gerutha’s dialogue with her son Hamlet. Hamlet enters and embraces his mother, but only to whip her and attempt to strangle her with the rope twisted around his body. She screams, defending herself, the hidden counsellor shouts in panic. Hamlet looks in the hay, crows like a rooster and coolly strangles the counsellor. He attacks the mother with the rope, but is assailed from behind by the courtiers and Fengi. He is tied to poles (as on a cross) and carried out. The gravedigger and his two Pulcinellas enter and pick up the counsellor’s corpse (a primordial Polonius) in the wheelbarrow. Hamlet meets his foster brother (Akira Matsui), a loyal warrior, who offers him his samurai sword. The groom is still carrying his dying bride around. Fengi holds a court banquet. Hamlet intervenes and shows that the ropes (chains) are cut through. The court laughs at and ridicules him, but suddenly Hamlet strangles one of them with the rope. The foster brother bursts in and throws a net that captures all the courtiers. A fight breaks out and the foster brother kills several of the court members with his sword. Fengi attacks Hamlet with his sword, but Hamlet succeeds in strangling his uncle with his rope. Finally, he stabs the prostrate Fengi in the mouth. Gerutha kneels beside the corpse singing the same dirge that she performed for her first husband. The little girl brings a bowl with water, Hamlet washes his hands and face and leads Gerutha away from the body. She sits down at his feet while the slaughtered courtiers rise again from the dead and one after another they kneel down before the new ruler. The gravediggers cart Fengi’s body away in the wheelbarrow. The foster sister enters and embraces Hamlet; they kiss each other. He signals with his hand to two of his warriors, and they lead her to the bowl of water and drown her in it. She struggles in vain, screaming and trying to get away. As soon as Hamlet assumes power he apparently becomes callous.7 The dead woman is lying at centre stage and Saxo, with the skull in his hands, announces that Hamlet has introduced a New Order. Hamlet crows like a rooster, takes the

7 Barba diverges from Saxo here and anticipates Ophelia’s drunken scene and perhaps Desdemona’s death at the hand of Othello. little girl on his back and dances around with her. Then he dresses her in a Balinese baris (warrior) costume with a sword. Hamlet takes the skull from Saxo, the little girl puts her hand on it and swears allegiance to it. Next to the dead foster sister she dances a Balinese warrior dance on the well cover. Saxo comments: “Tomorrow, we will be awakened by dogs instead of birds”. Fengi and Orvendil appear, repeat their fight in slow motion, strike each other and fall down as they embrace. Saxo covers them with the blue cloth that hid the skull and bones at the beginning. The groom continues carrying the lifeless bride around, whispering to her, attempting to comfort and encourage her. The dying foreigners are lying all over the space, and the Pulcinellas cover them with white sheets. Some of the corpses, as well as the dying, are laid on pallets and driven out by a fork truck. The gravediggers sweep the bodies together in piles. A family of foreigners with a pram come into the courtyard, sit down at the well with shopping bags, eat lunch and talk. Meanwhile, the actors have gathered and formed a long line facing the audience, they bow and leave while the bodies remain lying on the ground. The family keeps on eating and chatting. They may be tourists who have come to see Kronborg Castle, refugees, or foreigners driven into exile. They are in a borderland only defined by their humanity: naked life as a contrasting image to the power struggles of the castle and its self-preservation.

Dramaturgies Ur-Hamlet is theatre as a staged event. All the theatrical elements of the performance create a “performance text”. The lines that are delivered in Balinese, Latin and English do not play a dominant narrative role in the performance, although they do create an important structure of sound. It is obvious that the actors belong to different traditions interacting in a new context. The performance text may be described as informations situated at many different levels: some of it is theatrical or musical signs, symbols, metaphors, narrative codes and referential conventions; other information consists in the energy that emerges by virtue of the stage actions, the use of the space and the presence and concentration of the actors in relation to the spectators. The directing of the performance has various dramaturgies. 8 The actor’s dramaturgy, the organic level, is a formalization of presence by virtue of technique. The montage of various formal traditions and sequences creates heterogeneity, and the fragments cannot be immediately understood as anything but dynamics unless the spectator happens to be familiar with Balinese or Japanese performance. The narrative dramaturgy is shaped by the text and characters, costumes and scenic space. The musical (music, song, choir) composition supports the action, sometimes dissonantly, and creates a fiction (in the past) which is at the same time created (in the present) and told by Saxo, who unearths, assembles and studies a skeleton that could be conceived as Hamlet’s. Distinct features and repetitions contribute to creating the composition. These are for instance the gravediggers repeated tidying-up activities, Gerutha’s dirge, Hamlet’s crowing like a rooster and the skull, which is a recurrent death icon that points forward toward Shakespeare and modern- day finds of mass graves. The dramaturgy of turbulence is related to the interference of the “foreigners” and the plague. It creates a new layer of fiction, or reality, in the performance. This “leap” in the performance creates a Disorder in respect to the imminent peripety of the narrative, which is Hamlet’s killing of the king’s murderer and the establishment of a New Order. The “foreigners” become the heart of the performance – both because they disturb the narrative but also because they turn the performance in a new direction. They create a contemporary context and associations to a metaphorical “plague”. They can in particular be interpreted as the perceived threat posed against the West by

8 Barba (TDR 44, no. 4, 2000) writes about three different dramaturgies: an organic or dynamic dramaturgy, a narrative dramaturgy and a turbulent dramaturgy of the changing state of mind. The last one refers to the “leaps” that a performance can make when what is shown suddenly changes and evokes an entirely different emotional or mental state in the spectator. immigrants and, in this way, the performance acquires a topical political dimension. The four Pulcinellas are in their own reality. The gravediggers stem from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but they are also part of the dual development of the performance. They are the stage hands who carry the actors and the bodies out, both the court members who are killed and the foreigners who die of the plague. They thus move between fiction and reality in the performance. The plague (the rats) which intervenes in the castle and in the staging of Hamlet’s story is a historical element and a metaphorical concept linked to the foreigners who are considered a plague and are also wiped out by it, thus shifting between layers of reality and fiction. Finally, it may be added that the representation in itself is an action and a dramaturgy, a means of presentation that stages the relation between the sender and receiver in the communicative action that the performance constitutes. This dramaturgy makes use of a number of deictic markers to indicate the stage and thus frame the event as “theatre”. Ushers wearing Ur- Hamlet t-shirts show the way and guide the spectators to their seats; the programme and posters also contribute to fixing the event in time and space; the trumpet fanfare signals that it is beginning here and now; the lighting designates the stage, and the sign bearers (the Pulcinellas) point out the action. The concluding bow from the players signals the “end”, followed by their exit. A number of markers thus frame the stage and the relation to the spectators; some markers are however ambiguous – for instance, the small group of “foreigners” who keeps talking, and also the bodies which remain lying on the floor despite the end. This provokes a sense of uncertainty among the spectators, as does the very diverse ways of acting and the sometimes highly complex stage and many simultaneous actions. This dramaturgy helps produce a constant sense of doubt among the spectators. Certainly, everyone sees the same thing, but in contrast to many major shows where applause breaks are incorporated, which of course establish a sense of interdependence and a positive shared experience, the effect here is of a striking individualization. We have no sense of what the person sitting next to us has experienced, not even the final applause gives a shared experience of whether the performance was good, very good or boring. The entire dramaturgy of the representation does not induce a collective spectator experience; rather, the spectator is individualized, and this can seem frightening and frustrating, intensifying the spectator’s doubts as regards the aims of the performance. At the level of content and form, the spectator experiences heterogenization. The spectators are an integral part of the performance space toward which the performance as a whole is oriented. The spectators encircle the stage, so that the performers must constantly change their direction and distance from them in order for everyone to be able to see, even though they do not see the same thing. For instance, some see an actor’s back, while others see the same actor’s face illuminated by a torch. The actors must therefore vary their positions and the direction of their gaze out of regard for the spectator. During the rehearsals, the spectator is a partner who is taken into account: don’t stand there, the spectator can’t see, move so that you don’t hide one another, remember that you must be seen by all the spectators, also those behind your back, and so on. “The spectator” thus becomes part of the actor’s score, whether this be an imaginary mass or a single concrete person in the actor’s mind. The actor’s appeal to the spectator is part of the score and of the network of conventions and agreements in the staging. The concrete performance will respect these agreements more or less independently of the weather, the actual spectators, omissions, variations and so forth. The concrete experience belongs to the individual spectator, and this is the actual aim of the performance. This can only be subjectively described by the spectator, but we can reflect on the imaginary spectator of the staging. The spectator will always attempt to create an understanding of the directing and its signification, and at the same time be a creative element and part of the mood and energy of the performance. The spectator attempts to sort the information, reduce the complexity, distinguish figure from background, and otherwise create his or her own questions and answers, especially by making concrete the indeterminacies that every performance contains and by choosing frameworks of associations by virtue of personal competencies. Barba (1988) distinguishes between four virtual spectators, each of whom is the object of the directing at their respective levels. One is the spectator who does not understand the text and action of the performance and who solely experiences the rhythmic and organic aspects, as though the performance were pure dance. Another is the spectator who, like a child, experiences the performance as literal action without being able to abstract from it or worry about the meaning of the performance as art. The third is the spectator who understands the text, narration, inter-text and theatrical signs and symbols of the performance and who can therefore read the director’s multiple and contradictory aims. Finally, the fourth is the spectator who is not limited by the “fiction” of the performance, but sees “through” it as a kind of reality. Furthermore, Barba (2006) adds the deaf spectator, who hears the performance through her eyes; the blind spectator, who sees it through her ears, and the “wild” spectator from New Guinea, who sees the actions as part of a sacred ceremony. Yet one more category could be the “strong” spectator, to borrow a concept developed by Ferdinando Taviani (1994). It refers to the (relatively few) spectators who see Odin Teatret’s performances several times and consider themselves as part of this theatre’s history because it reflects their own biography. The “strong” spectators contribute fundamentally towards the awareness of Odin Teatret’s identity. The various kinds of spectator are representatives of various layers in the directing as an act of communication. The actual spectators will be more or less receptive to the ways of perceiving or structuring the experience that these layers make possible simultaneously. This means that the spectator’s experience of the performance can go from perceiving concrete actions to sensing the rhythmic organic element, the music and the formalized presence of the body; or from analyzing the narrative, where figures, actions, costumes and props acquire specific significations, to perceiving the various traditions, forms of representation and the concrete life these represent. As Barba has put it, the spectator can “dance” between various ways of experiencing the performance and in this way create a variety of significations on both a sensory and a conceptual level. Thus it becomes possible for the spectator to perceive him/herself dancing between these heteronymous “voices”. The staging is an orchestration of a series of independent theatrical signs by virtue of the composition, the narrative element, the roles, the costumes, the music and so forth. But the performance is also autonomous; it is its own real event and has an effect on the spectator, just as the spectator affects the performance. There is no clear separation between subject and object, and the sensual and sensory experience that the event creates is more important than the interpretation. It creates a double experience of orientation, disorientation (con-fusion) and a mixture of various ways of seeing; the familiar becomes remarkable – or foreign. It is a duality that has characterized modern theatre since in particular Meyerhold and Artaud. This approach is rediscovered in the theatre of the 1960s and, for instance, in Susan Sontag’s much discussed essay Against Interpretation from 1964. I mention this essay not only because it happens to be dated the same year Odin Teatret was founded, but also because it contains one of the theories underlying much of the art of the 1960s, in which result and process are more or less dissolved, just like the separation between stage and spectator. Rather than merely interpreting, the spectator participates bodily and mentally in the space and in the work in a new way.

The process and foreignness

A long process of maturation and rehearsal is not unusual for Eugenio Barba, aiming to create a deliberate Disorder: the sudden irruption of unexpected energy. The Disorder (with a capital D) is also emphasized by the performance’s multicultural condition, demonstrated for one thing by the fact that the director used seven-eight languages while working with the actors. As an art form, theatre is old-fashioned, and many theatre environments only survive by virtue of their own necessity and their ability to establish dynamic meetings and relations. The entire Ur-Hamlet project results in a performance for a considerable number of spectators, but it is also an occasion for many more than the 90 actors to cooperate, meet and exchange techniques on a professional level. So this is an active form of cultural politics, and quite simply the project may be said to contribute to the survival of particularly threatened genres such as Japanese Noh and Balinese Gambuh, both of which stem respectively from the fourteenth and fifteenth century and are contemporary with Saxo. The same is true for Brazilian candomblé dance and the tradition of Odin Teatret, which has its roots in the twentieth-century theatre reformers like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht and Grotowski. The method of working involves several obstacles or disruptive elements. The first version of the performance was made in Bali during two periods: December 2004 and March 2006 (at the same time as the so-called cartoon scandal). 9 Here, Saxo’s entire story was staged by European, Japanese, Balinese and Brasilian actors who must all be described as extremely professional. They all possessed a scenic technique enabling them to precisely repeat established scores in respect to one another and the music, and were able to work in a disciplined manner and according to the agreements with the director. They were artists Barba had known for a long time and had worked with in ISTA sessions. They were familiar with his way of working even though there are plenty of opportunities for linguistic misunderstandings in such a process, especially in respect to the Balinese and the Japanese Akira Matsui, with whom the director only communicated through an interpreter. At the end of this first phase, which was followed by several intermittent series of

9 The scandal was caused by one of Denmark’s major newspapers, Jyllands-Posten, which printed twelve satirical cartoons of Mohammed on 30 September 2005. For example, Mohammed was depicted as a suicide bomber with a bomb in his turban. Due to protests and demonstrations, the Danish Foreign Ministry warned Danes not to travel to countries like Indonesia, which Odin Teatret defied because they viewed theatre as opening up a possibility for a “different” dialogue. rehearsals both in Bali and in Europe, was a 40-day seminar (training, rehearsal and performances). This began on 9 July 2006 in Ravenna for 43 actors, directors or theatre students in order to invent a completely new layer in the performance: the invasion of the foreigners. Many participants had some knowledge of Odin Teatret and Eugenio Barba and were selected among several hundred applicants. But the “foreigners’” group was also characterized by being extremely heterogeneous with its 25 nationalities, range of backgrounds and experiences, lack of a common theatrical language or common working language with the director. These conditions were to be established in the course of a ten-day training phase which occurred at the same time as the rehearsals for the performance. The introduction of the “foreigners” at this stage of rehearsals was a deliberate “disturbing”, disorganizing element that sent the performance off course and caused it to change direction. In the creative process, this unpredictable group was an unknown factor that caused Disorder – upsetting and obliterating the results that were achieved in the earlier rehearsal phases which had lasted for two years. For Barba, this “nightmare” is not unusual; it is a methodological feature in the attempt to conceive a working process with built-in unpredictability that contributes to the performance’s own autonomy, which is intended to surprise and disturb both the director and the spectator. The “foreigners” brought about the crucial reversal and the major dramatic peripety of the process and the performance. Concurrently, the seminar also had its own artistic and political function as the initiation of a group into the ethos of the theatre both through training (the process) and the encounter with the spectator (result). The project thus contains a cultural political dimension that serves as a response to multiculturalism. It may be said that globalization as such develops in the direction of unification and homogenization on a cultural level. Everywhere on the globe people watch the same films, eat the same food and wear the same clothing. The difference is solely a question of economic capacity. As a reaction to this unification, various national, ideological and political currents are developing that seek to preserve so-called absolute national values and an identity of one’s own, reproducing a distinction between “us and them”, sometimes so violent that we can speak of a clash of civilizations. Ur-Hamlet contains a different strategy and does not create a global – local opposition. On the whole, Odin Teatret and, as an example, Balinese theatre, are both locally and globally oriented without this being an inconsistency. Eugenio Barba sees theatre as a professional “country”, a voluntary “exile” that is distinct from societal culture. It is an autonomous artistic space that cultivates special laws, rules and principles to compensate for cultural marginalization and by creating its own autonomous shared space. Just as dentists or cardiologists meet to discuss, develop and improve their craft, which requires precision and special knowledge, theatre people meet to learn from one another’s different techniques and unifying principles through concrete work. Barba’s decisive principle of directing is to make use of traditional forms without changing them, but only to compare or contrast these in a new context through the use of montage. The directing therefore requires each actor to have a codified way of acting, walking, seeing. This is especially clear in respect to the three “foreign” theatre forms (Gambuh, Candomblé and Noh) and to Odin Teatret’s own actors. The problem was to present the new “foreigners” with a special dramaturgical way of thinking. This means being able to preserve a rhythmic flow as action and reaction in respect to what is happening on the stage and intensify the dynamics of the performance through contrasts, thus challenging the balance and firmness of purpose. To borrow Odin Teatret’s expression, this means that the actors are constantly in an intentional ( sats ) position of readiness from which they can react. Odin Teatret distinguishes itself from most globalization strategies by virtue of the idea that cultural fragmentation can be united in a dialogical encounter that preserves the original culture and simultaneously sees it in a new context. 10 Barba says, “We use dramaturgy whose basic principle is the intertwinement of mutually independent styles” (programme for Ego Faust, 2000). The Ur-Hamlet seminar explored the basis for the actor’s encounter with the spectator. Through training and improvisation material was developed for “the foreigners’” representation of themselves. The seminar was in itself a kind of renegotiation of the participants’ professional identity, where they encountered themselves and are initiated into a particular professional tradition of physical actions through a training sequence, rehearsals and performances. But it was also a way of thinking both dramaturgically and politically as well as of exploring the basis for the actor’s encounter with the spectator. It created a number of comprehension and practical problems because the “foreigners”, in contrast to the trained actors, did not have incorporated knowledge of the action. It needed to be learned first, and this does not happen in ten days. Therefore, the crux of the matter may have been the more fundamental dramaturgical knowledge – the necessity of defining and specifying one’s action mentally and physically in relation to the spectator. The concrete work consisted in exercises with Augusto Omulú based on candomblé’s codified dance positions. Powerful rhythmic exercises reminiscent of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Some of these exercises are based on recognizable images. The participant is supposed to be riding on a horse, his legs show the horse’s legs, while his right arm swings a whip to drive the horse forward. Another exercise resembles various praying positions. The work consisted furthermore in developing the participants’ improvisations, which were developed, elaborated and inserted in the structure of the performance. I shall briefly describe the work done on a group improvisation around a wedding table. It was used as an autonomous scene in the middle of the space

10 Globalization refers to the expansion of capitalism and the market, the revolution in technology and communication and the spread of modernity, i.e. the disintegration of tradition, norm, clan, kinship and historical contexts in favour of discontinuity and individual autonomy. The theatre serves as an archaic medium tied to time and space. Globalisation has a homogenizing tendency, but also a heterogenizing tendency as a reaction or countermovement in which the theatre is a possibility. and, at the same time, was not supposed to remove the focus from the main plot. The scene is composed as a precise network of actions and the reaction between the bridal couple and guests, as well as in relation to the spectators. Each of the actors carries out a continuous score that consists of reactions in relation to the others and they constantly vary the direction of their gaze and dynamics. In this way an organic reality emerges in which each detail is in the form of action, not in a mimetic sense, but so that the everyday economy of movement is replaced by a series of sats ,11 impulses that are dilated so that the action is connected with a kind of inner necessity that prevents a mechanical performance. The director directs the spectator’s awareness through the actors’ actions, and therefore it is important that the flow is preserved. The scene is elaborated in various ways. For example, the actors invent tableaus and gestures inspired by da Vinci’s Last Supper. The bride is given the task of crawling and falling on the table in ten different ways by her changing tempo, direction in the space, by surprising herself by suddenly using negations and oppositions. She must find equivalents for actions, minimize or maximize them, execute them as if against various materials that offer different types of resistance – fire, water, sand, earth, rock. The actions include offering a piece of bread, kissing, drinking, telling a story, tying shoelaces together, seducing someone, cutting off a piece of the groom’s tie. The actors must at once develop their own material and react to the whole, both at the table and in the entire space, fill out the table scene and create an individual rhythm that is adjusted to a collective one.

Verfremdung The “foreigners” and the unfamiliar are the central theme in both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ur-Hamlet . Saxo’s story is in itself foreign to most

11 Position of readiness, or intention, is familiar in particular from the sports world, where jumping or throwing requires a carefully executed action in the opposite direction of the final action. In order to jump high, one has to make a downward movement first; in order to throw a ball, pull back one’s arm; to sprint, contract one’s body. In various sports, a feint consists in getting the opponent to react to an intention that is turned in a different direction at the last moment, causing the opponent to lose balance. and it is represented and presented through a number of remote forms of dance from Bali and Japan and by way of Odin Teatret’s actors, who also make use of stylized and unfamiliar expressions which are different from conventions of realism and everyday expressions. In many ways Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung is applicable. In respect to traditional dramaturgy, Barba’s directing style is also alien because it makes use of rhythm and musical and disruptive elements as key concepts – what Barba (2004) calls the dramaturgy of Disorder . Finally, the unfamiliar is also a central metaphor for the actor’s work. Barba speaks of the actors’ dialogue with the part of themselves that lives in exile within them – in other words, the unknown or foreign side – the shadow, the double or “the other”. The entire performance process leads to what we could metaphorically designate as the black spot of the gaze. It should not be interpreted as the unconscious, rather as a category of experience. On a dramaturgical level as well, the “foreigners” play a significant role. They do not get directly involved in Hamlet’s game, but their actions are parallel to his story. There are thus two spheres of reality: Saxo’s story and the foreigners’. They only interact indirectly, in that many of the foreigners die of the plague and the corpses lie spread about in the courtyard. The foreigners seek one another out, a group gathers around a wedding table and two get married, but most of them die after having performed a kind of self-flagellating dance. 12 They whip themselves forward as though riding on horses, but are stopped by the plague and fall down praying in heaps of corpses. They are foreigners, but also foreigners who dance”, as Ferdinando Taviani has described Odin Teatret, or as the acting troupe from Hamlet or martyrs who, in Antonin Artaud’s words, make signs while burning at the stake. The performance opens up a vacuum for another order and its heterophony gives

12 Processions of self-flagellators went through Europe around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially during plague epidemics , and performed their rituals and penances in public. In Muslim and Catholic processions in certain parts of the world, voluntary whipping of the body is still practiced. sound to several different voices, each of which tell their story about death and darkness and rebirth. Looking at the relationship between the actor and the role, the problematic s of representation and an interesting reflexivity arise. At the beginning of the performance it is largely the Balinese performers who dominate the scenic space. They perform with a striking foreignness, especially by virtue of their stylized hand movements, their way of walking and speaking and their luxurious costumes. The spectators regard it as a sophisticated representation of the court. Hamlet’s father is played by a woman as a particularly soft character, while the uncle is presented as a hard, roguish character. The spectators must accept that this is a presentation of a ruling Viking family from Jutland and that foreignness is justified because it is a different time and society than modern-day Denmark. This is not a mimetic or realistic portrayal, but a stylized equivalent to the world of the court. The spectator eventually becomes familiar with this portrayal, however foreign it might be. Hamlet breaks with this familiarity, behaving in a completely different way because he represents “madness” or “otherness” in respect to the court. Hamlet is played by an afro-Brazilian dancer, but does not necessarily represent African or Brazilian culture, to which the spectator has become accustomed. The same applies to the portrayal of Hamlet’s foster brother, who is played in the style of a warrior role in Noh theatre. A radical break occurs at this point. The foreigners invade the castle, but they are represented by actors wearing normal clothing and carrying bags and suite cases; they move about familiarly and are basically recognizable as the actors they are in present day life. What characterizes them is the disorientation we notice in people wanting to adjust to new surroundings. The court’s stylistic foreignness and the foreigners’ familiarity create a kind of reflexivity: the foreigners are not only those who look different; they are also us carrying a familiar shopping bag. Thus the performance does not establish a tension between Asian or African foreignness and the familiarity of the West. It creates a reflexivity in “the formation of otherness”, since anyone can be “foreign” in the social context. This means that instead of rejecting the odd and the diverse, an act of reflection is initiated over what is foreign, perhaps giving access to what is foreign in ourselves. It is an aesthetic strategy that distinguishes itself from both global unification in the shape of products of mass culture, and the national cultural project which aims at reinforcing “Danishness” and national identity. It is a point that foreignness is a reflexive and variable perspective and that we can speak here of Verfremdung on various levels: the Balinese hand movements, which are accepted as a kind of dance, are strange, and an ordinary fork truck that drives onto the stage (by an American actor who was also trained as a truck driver and who could have worked at the port of Elsinore) is a foreign element in this performance. The effect of Verfremdung and the social gesture are emphasized when the guy with the truck removes a pallet of corpses. Likewise, Verfremdung is achieved when the gravediggers attempt to sweep the corpses into piles with their brooms. The point of this alternation between various forms of Verfremdung is that the foreign element clearly emerges as an outlook and that the foreigner is not essentially foreign.

The performance as a cultural strategy Ur-Hamlet demonstrates strangeness and in so doing also calls attention to the political situation and cultural struggles in Denmark, where xenophobia has been on the increase in recent years. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, writes in his book Fra socialstat til minimalstat (From welfare state to minimal state) (Samlerens Forlag, 1993) that the task of art is to ensure that “Danishness” survives in the confrontation with “foreign cultures” by “creating, developing and maintaining national identity”. This occurred, for example, in 2005 through the establishment of the national cultural canon, which according to the Minister of Culture, Brian Mikkelsen, should be a weapon against Islamic fundamentalism and tendencies to curtail freedom of speech and Danish culture out of fear of this fundamentalism.

“There are still many battles to wage. One of the most important of these concerns the confrontation we experience when immigrants from Muslim countries refuse to recognize Danish culture and European norms. In the middle of our country – our own country – parallel societies are developing where minorities practice their medieval norms and undemocratic modes of thought. We cannot accept this. This is the new frontline of the culture war.” (Brian Mikkelsen, Politiken, 27 September 2005).

The cultural canon should be a “gift” to those who are not quite as developed [as Danes] and a weapon against not just terror inspired by Islam, but Islamic culture as such. It was the same fighting spirit that motivated Jyllands-Posten to print the twelve satirical Mohammed drawings in September 2005 – precisely as a provocation and to underline a distinct difference and a specifically Danish culture.

“Modern secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They make demands for an exceptional position when they insist on particular consideration for religious feelings. It is incompatible with a secular democracy and freedom of speech, in which one must be prepared to put up with scorn, mockery and ridicule.” (Jyllands-Posten, 30 September 2005)

Mikkelsen’s ideological position is based on the idea of social community as a “blood community” distinct from a social contract community. This then implies unbridgeable ethnic differences and a conflict or struggle between civilizations. The connection between the Mohammed cartoons and Mikkelsen’s canon led to one of the biggest crises in Danish foreign policy in the post-war period, including burned embassies, boycotts of Danish products, and protests in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The debate over the cultural canon and the Mohammed cartoons has shown that the culture war does not follow political party alignments. Simplifying somewhat, it is the contradictions between an absolute and a dynamic conception of democracy, and representatives of a wing that sees globalization as a challenge and a reality that makes multiculturalism a condition we must learn to live with. The reconstruction of a single national culture has led to the stigmatization of foreigners as “deviations”. In this light, it is significant that foreigners serve a primary dramaturgical function in Ur-Hamlet . In the performance, they represent immigrants, tourists, refugees or the homeless. They are the foreigners whom we are afraid of because they take over our country, are a burden on us or undermine our identity. At the same time, they are a metaphor. As mentioned above, Odin Teatret has been defined as “foreigners who dance” on several occasions. On the whole, since its establishment in Oslo in 1964, the theatre has emphasized its foreignness. At the time, the theatre was exotic, not merely because there were no theatres in this part of Jutland, but because they practiced a new kind of theatre based on training and a dynamic that changed the relationship between stage and spectator. When Odin Teatret arrived in Holstebro in 1966, it was largely due to a local and unusual cultural policy. The local authorities focused on importing modern culture to a part of the country that had little tradition of this. In Holstebro, Giacometti’s Woman on a Cart was erected in the town square, which aroused quite a stir; as did Odin Teatret after a TV programme in 1967 on the theatre’s training activities. Few were able to associate these exercises with theatre. Odin Teatret has nonetheless succeeded in becoming an integral part of the cultural scene in Holstebro. They are still “foreigners who dance” even though the theatre has deep roots in Holstebro now after 40 years with a panoply of activities. At the same time, it is a “migrant” theatre that endeavours to shake itself and the spectator wherever it travels. Odin Teatret is part of its time, but rejects the tendencies of its time, just as it refuses to surrender to pressure due to the cultural marginalization of theatre. This is its anti-modern characteristic. The theatre has preserved its otherness and in this way marked a multi- cultural cultural politics that has been called the “Holstebro model”, and which differs substantially from the nationalistic monocultural tendencies of today. In connection with Odin Teatret’s 40 th anniversary in October 2004, the theatre entered into a formal “marriage” with Holstebro. With a ritual ceremony in the beautiful round, whitewashed, church-like town council hall, Trickster (Iben Nagel Rasmussen) and Odin Teatret got married to the municipality of Holstebro, represented by the mayor, Arne Laegaard. Eugenio Barba has always praised the city for accepting the alien theatre, which did not have any kind of status at the time. The marriage is unique in the Danish theatre world and testifies to “the necessity of the superfluous”, as it is put in Barba’s wedding speech:

“A theatre and a city can only get married if both seek their proper identity. What is a marriage if not a meeting with the foreigner that one loves? The aim of art is to generate that light which enables people to see life anew. It is the superfluous that lights a spark in our lives, that gives it meaning and transcends barriers.”

This is reminiscent of H.C. Andersen’s Klods-Hans, in which improvisational talents, incidental finds, and misunderstandings lead to an unexpected marriage. The wedding ceremony in Holstebro casts a new perspective on unimaginable possibilities for alliances between politics and art, where both parts legitimize their specific character and mutual foreignness.

The distinguishing approach As the title implies, the content of Ur-Hamlet resembles that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet . A number of the plot elements, such as the fratricide and Hamlet’s madness, and the characters – Ophelia, Polonius and Gertrude – also appear in Saxo’s narrative as a model for Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The latter marks a turning point in the dramatic tradition of dramas of revenge, and the act of revenge turns out to be problematic as a driving force both in the drama and for Hamlet, whose action consists of reflection and postponement. Ur- Hamlet is rather characterized by direct action. Whereas Hamlet has often been interpreted in a psychological existential framework in the light of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Saxo’s plot seems to correspond to a greater degree with Aeschylus’s drama of revenge The Oresteia. After the fall of Troy, Agamemnon returns home, but his wife, Clytemnestra, has betrayed him with Aegisthus. When Agamemnon arrives home, the two kill him. A faithful old servant brings their son, Orestes, to Phocis where he grows up. Several years later Orestes returns and meets his sister, Electra, who longs to avenge her father’s murder. She convinces Orestes to carry out the deed and he kills Aegisthus and his mother, Clytemnestra. By returning to the blood feud, is Barba suggesting that modern society is driven by dark forces? Is the drama of revenge an expression of the forces present in the wars and culture conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Is it merely raw revenge that prevails? Is the culture war a drama of revenge characterized by “pay back time”, where we rediscover the archaic as a driving force in modernity? In both versions, Hamlet uses madness as a strategy; in Shakespeare, however, he approaches the role of jester, characterized by black humour and melancholy and philosophical wit, while in Saxo we see a madman: Hamlet is the idiot who crows like a rooster, rides backwards on a horse or thrashes about in mud as though possessed. When Hamlet concludes by dictating the laws of the New Order, for which the cranium is the decisive symbol, it is a sign of the order of death, just as it is in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , but it is also the dis-order of the jester: the reverse world order (like the ritual cultivation of death as the basis of reincarnation): Death and the jester’s (the theatre’s) order are two sides of the same coin. In the performance, the cranium forms a number of additional associations: after the mass graves from the Second World War to Cambodia and former Yugoslavia, the cranium has become a symbol of the twentieth century’s endless massacres. In Hamlet, the first line goes, “Who’s there?” In Ur-Hamlet disruptive knocking sounds are repeatedly heard behind and underneath the spectators ’ seats , and they must ask themselves, “Who’s there?” It is the “foreigners” sneaking into the castle. Are they enemies or friends? As in Hamlet, the outside threat is unclear and ambiguous. From the beginning of Hamlet , this outside threat is implied in the shape of the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras, who assumes power in the end. Something similar happens in Ur-Hamlet , where a defenceless little family with a pram remains sitting in the castle courtyard among the corpses. In the performance, the foreigners create a parallel story just as Fortinbras does in Hamlet. Michel de Montaigne (1532-92) authored a number of essays that Shakespeare was said to have read. Especially Hamlet is a kind of echo of Montaigne, who in Les Essais describes himself with disorder, error and confusion: Distingo is the only universal logic. Distingo (I distinguish) is about a new historical understanding of the concept of “action”. We can distinguish between inner and outer action, a resolute and an irresolute one, an exaggerated and an understated one; an action in accordance with oneself and one’s name or a false and feigned action. Hamlet’s assumed madness (in Shakespeare and Ur-Hamlet ) enhances the necessity of a distinguishing attitude in the spectators. The reflection, which is the modern form of melancholy, is left to the individual, and neither church, nor the authorities, nor art can take over this process. Readiness is all , as Hamlet says. A thought that reaches far into modernity – to Kirkegaard, Blixen, Bohr and Barba. The spectator is confronted with a non-absolute way of thinking, in which the ineffable plays a primary role. Perhaps it is precisely this way of thinking that the current global culture wars are supplanting in favour of a more unequivocal power struggle between the cultures. The method of madness (as Polonius calls Hamlet’s strategy) and Barba’s dramaturgical Disorder are necessary to the modern form of enlightenment that Ur-Hamlet is a result of. This is a threatened method in the modern culture struggle, as are other cultures and theatre traditions that deviate from the path of homogenized culture.

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