Transforming the Past into Presence: In Dialogue with Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley

Abstract

In this dialogical article, PatrickCampbell and Adriana La Selva of international research platform CrossPollination interview Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley of Odin Teatret, with afocus on the activities of the recently inaugurated NGO Fondazione BarbaVarley. Having left their institutional base, Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, inDecember 2022 after 56 years of being rooted to a concrete theatrical space,Odin Teatret now work nomadically, developing new projects both within Denmarkand beyond. The Fondazione Barba Varley extends and builds on the legacy ofOdin Teatret, with a specific agenda to support and promote the “nameless” –theatre groups and independent artists working silently on the borders betweentheatre and activism. Derrida’s writings around the politics of friendship(Derrida 2005) serve as a loose critical framework for articulating thepotential dialogical avenues available once one abandons the appropriativedrive of institutionalisation. The conversation follows an organic flow, with afocus on dialogue and communication, the embodied dialogical tactics of thetheatre laboratory practitioner, and the current activities of the Fondazione,such as the Constellation of the Nameless, ISTA New Generation, The Journal ofTheatre Anthropology (JTA) and the Living Archive: Floating Islands. Theatricallegacy and its transmission are articulated as relational and interpersonal,grounded on a deeply personal process of “creating signs”: the generation ofpoetic forms that translate a pragmatic know-how forged over a lifetimededicated to art as activism.