Eugenio Barba, Odin Teatret (Denmark)
The Italian theatre director and educator, one of the most influential theorists of contemporary theatre art, Barba was born in 1936. He graduated fr om the Military Academy in Naples (1954), but abruptly changed his life by moving to Norway. There, he received a degree in French, Norwegian literature and the History of religions. In 1961 he moved to Warsaw and started his studies at the State Theatre School. In 1962 he started working with Jerzy Grotowski and the "Theatre of 13 Rows" in Opole, where he worked for three years, wrote several books about his theatrical search, compiled a collection of theoretical articles, speeches, and notes of Grotowski - that made a book “Towards a poor theatre”. In 1963, he visited India and met in the province of Kerala with the traditional theatre Kathakali. Barba published a study about it, which was translated into several languages. Returning to Oslo in 1964, he decided to devote himself entirely to directing. Together with Jens Bjørneboe created an independent theatre company and founded the Odin Theatre (1964) in Holstebro in northwestern Danmark. In 1979 he created the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). Author of several monographs on theatre art, translated into different languages. Like Eisenstein, Barba professes the idea of general laws that underlie different theatre systems, primarily eastern and western. In his famous book "A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology" he explores the switching of an actor fr om ordinary to "pre-expressive" level, wh ere there is a stylised, expressive body.
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"Mythos" has the subtitle "Ritual of Remembrance of the short age”. As the author explains, it is about the historical period from 1917 to 1989. the colorful company of Ancient Greek characters (Oedipus, Medea, Orpheus, Cassandra, etc.) reanimates the mummy of some communard. The communard picks up a harmonica and sings revolutionary songs. Heroes, in exotic robes, with horns on their heads, rushing on a pebble-strewn stage, intricate a maze on it and using the unique acting technique narrate about their sufferings. In the final, the communard is symbolically torn apart as the new Orpheus (thus entering the circle of the immortals); Harmonica itself continues to play something from the international revolutionary repertoire.
To discuss what it is all about is awkward. In the programme, Barba himself puts rhetorical questions: "Is the Revolution a myth? What can be a myth for us? Hope without faith? Wh ere is it today?" and so on.
Perhaps, a theatre “cabinet of curiosities” should be like that. The radical scenic discoveries of the 60s are preserved here in the most accessible form - so you can tour with them all over the world and explain in simple terms the great heritage of Jerzy Grotowski. The spectators of the Moscow Olympiad had, incidentally, the opportunity to compare the creativity of the teacher and a pupil. A week before the performance of Odin Theater in the "School of Dramatic Arts" of Anatoly Vasilyev were shown films with fragments of performances of "Theatre-laboratory" directed by Grotowsky, which were impressive despite an awful quality of video projection.
After those films, the “Mythos" of Eugenio Barba seems to be even more educational: the avant-garde theatre mummification is not less successful than, for example, the mummification of the Stanislavsky system.
Oleg Zintsov, Vedomosti