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 䉷 2002

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

12
 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
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 Garcı́a 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
 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. 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
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 be-
comes 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 “supersti-
tion” 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 with-
out 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 dif-
ficult.
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 cre-
ative 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
 The Essence of Theatre 17
have been performed in dissension with the commonplaces of thought and pro-
fessional 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 perfor-
mance 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)
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 perfor-
mance. 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’être, 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 out-
side 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
 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)
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 discov-
ered 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 them-
selves 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 in-
tentions, 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’être 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 reform-
ers: 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 enter-
tainment, make it assume risks and responsibilities, jeopardize its ambiguous con-
dition 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.
 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 Übermarionette”
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 con-
dition 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
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 apprentice-
ship 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 point-
ing 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)
 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)
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 ca-
pable 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 pro-
fession 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 devel-
opment, 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
 The Essence of Theatre 25

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 tran-

scendence 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
26 Eugenio Barba

10. Julia Varley (Odin Tea-

tret), Sanjukta Panigrahi
(Odissi dance), and Au-
gusto Omolú (Orixá 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,
 The Essence of Theatre 27

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
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 ex-
istence, 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
 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 disfig-
ured, 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 the-
ories 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)
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’évolution du décor.” 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 biomécanique.” 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).