"At that time," he says now, "there was no idea that theatre could be something other than a building and a text." The young Odin company had neither. "We were exiles in a foreign country. We couldn't speak the language. We had to build a relationship with our spectators from something else: sound, actions, sensuality, proximity."
Necessity bred fascination. Barba has devoted his life to studying the principles of performance "Why, when I see two actors doing the same thing, am I fascinated by one and not the other?" and the theatre's social value.
On their extensive foreign travels, Odin have sought out local cultures and communities where their huge, ritualistic outdoor events can be paid for not in cash, but in kind, with plays, songs or dances by the people who comprise their audience. Barba calls this "barter"; Peter Brook has experimented with similar practices. "There is a value to the theatre," Barba insists, "which is not connected to its objective originality." He cites Latin American examples. "The greatest of companies may not make extraordinary art. But by the simple fact of existing, they represent islands of freedom in countries whose dictatorships have their hands on all means of expression."
To Barba, a company's value lies not in what theatre it makes, but in how it makes it. "Every performance imposes a certain view of the world," he argues. "Odin is built on certain values. Not anarchist, nor any of those stereotypes or prejudices. But values which make us live much as we lived at the beginning, like peasants, because we had nothing.
"If you are poor economically, you are rich in time you can waste all the time you wish to make a performance to the best of your abilities. What is very tragic is that even young theatre-makers who are in such situations are already contaminated by the industrial way of thinking of theatre. They want very quickly to produce productions and show them and be recognised."
In a world that fetishises the 15-minute, fresh-faced famous, and in a theatre culture that is sublimated to the processes of profit, subsidy and scheduling, that's fighting talk. But Barba is a romantic; he sees theatre not as a job, but a vocation. Of rootless Odin he says, "our country is this profession. We have a pride such as used to exist in artisanship and which now seems to have been lost."
Source: The Independent. Brian Logan: Eugenio Barba - A rebel heart that doesn't miss a beat.
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