Dancing with "Faust": A Semiotician's Reflections on Barba's Intercultural Mise-en-Scene

Abstract

The first week of the I987 International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in the Salento region of Italy took place under the sign of Faust. Eugenio Barba brought together Eastern performers (Japanese and Indian dancers1 and musicians) and (Western) spectator-participants in a collective response to Faust-especially Goethe's Faust, but also Marlowe's as well as the whole Western tradition of the popular character and myth. The work, which lasted five mornings from 6 to Io A.M., was not supposed to lead to a finished performance nor was it to be presented to an audience outside the group. Was it then an exercise meant to explore a Western director's engagement with Indian and Japanese dancers? Or was it a Western production, however unfinished, which exhibited the characteristics of a miseen-scene? I tend toward the second hypothesis, although Barba carefully sustained the ambiguity of his and claimed rather to present a work in progress trying out the possibility of a Eurasian theatre. In what follows, one of the participants-simultaneously judging and taking part and hence forever contaminated by ISTA and deprived of his cherished neutrality-offered the Bari roundtable2 not so much a description of the B.A. BA of BA(r)BA method as a way of imagining how his on Faust might be described with semiotic tools. The anecdotal circumstance of this relazione was once again the challenge to semioticsissued by theatre anthropology-to give an account of the activity of the performers and the mise-en-scene. The (tactical) response to this kind of challenge consists in saying yet again: semiotics has no particular use; it is the artist who makes use of semiotics: let us merely describe this use by examining the reelaboration of Japanese and Indian gestural traditions through Barba's mise-en-scene. If, as I have suggested elsewhere, every (especially linguistic) translation is an appropriation of the source culture by the target culture (Pavis forthcoming), we might say, by analogy, that Barba appropriates oriental performance traditions by transforming and rewriting them on the stage for a Western audience. We could then identify a series of appropriations: (i) semiotic, (2) ideological, (3) narratological (in the broad sense). Nonetheless, the term appropriation opens the way to an unfortunate misreading