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 ques- tion at the beginning of the 20th century, and his reply was: “Probably the es- sential,” 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 “the- atre” 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 instru- ments. 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 12 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 13 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 limi- tations, 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 Garcı´a 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 perfor- mances, 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 perfor- mance. 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351459 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Essence of Theatre 15 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 con- tact 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 spec- tators 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.