Eugenio Barba to Phillip Zarrilli: About the Visible and the Invisible in the Theatre and about ISTA in Particular

Abstract

Here are my reactions to your article Whom Is the 'Invisible' Not Visible? (TDR 32, no. I:95-Io6) concerning the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) Congress on The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures, Holstebro, Denmark, 17-22 September 1986. In our culture, knowledge of the actor has often been blocked by the presumption of knowledge. Critics, theatrologists, theoreticians, and even philosophers such as Hegel and Sartre have interpreted the cultural and aesthetic value of the actor's art by starting from the presumption that they knew what they were talking about. In reality, they did not know. They based their writings on conjecture, on vague testimony, on their own impressions as spectators. They tried to make science out of something of which they had no experience. This form of ignorance, which resembles that of professors who prefer to quote from books rather than to risk looking through Galileo's crude telescope, is also manifest in an indirect and oblique way: the way in which we delegate all authority to science. It consists in the illusion that one is able to understand theatrical behavior with greater precision if one superimposes upon it paradigms which have shown their utility in other fields of research. For Sainte-Albine and Diderot, it was the mechanics of passion. During the Brechtian period, it was the opposition between rationalism and political irrationalism. Yesterday it was psychoanalysis and sociology, today semiology or cultural anthropology. This scientific power of attorney is based on a mental attitude which is profoundly irrational. It causes one to believe that a theoretical paradigm is valid unto itself and therefore is a precise instrument even when it is used out of context.