International School Of Theatre Anthropology Research Articles

What is ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology)?

Eugenio Barba first defined ‘theatre anthropology’ as the study of the human being in an organized performance situation in a lecture in Warsaw in May 1980. The first session of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) was held in October 1980 and the last to date in 2023. This article gives a personal account of ISTA’s history from its origins, rooted in Eugenio Barba’s interest in Asian classical theatre techniques and the founding of Odin Teatret in Denmark, to the most recent experiences, which include the intercultural production of Anastasis/Resurrection at the 2023 Theatre Olympics in Budapest. It identifies masters of given ISTA sessions and their invaluable contribution to the School’s emphasis on, and understanding of, craft, as well as the distinguishing characteristics and points of change and development of selected ISTAs.

Creating Earthquakes

Eugenio Barba has honoured NTQ by entrusting to its pages his very personal introduction to his most recent book, Le Mie vite nel terzo teatro: Diffrenza, mestiere, rivolta (My Lives in the Third Theatre: Difference, Craft, Revolt), which has here been specially translated into English by Judy Barba, the co-dedicatee, along with Julia Varley and Vera Gaeta, of his book: the ‘origins and accomplices of my journey to the archipelago of floating islands’. NTQ received this translation, here prepared by the journal’s editor, Maria Shevtsova, ahead of the book’s launch on 5 October 2023 at the Biblioteca Bernardini in Lecce in Puglia. On a grander scale, a few days later, the occasion also saw the opening in Barba’s honour of his and the Odin Teatret archives under the banner of LAFLIS (Living Archive Floating Islands), located in a wing of the three-dimensional immersive museum of the Bernardini. LAFLIS’s rich collection includes written material, film and video documentaries, recordings of performances, and such artefacts and equipment as instruments, masks, and costumes gathered during Third Theatre work. The latter is neither established-classical nor avant-garde theatre but ‘other’ – small-group, sometimes unofficial, and often self-taught theatre. LAFLIS is not exclusively intended for researchers and scholars, but is open as well to interested members of the general public. Barba’s introduction to My Lives in the Third Theatre is here published in full, clearly signposting, together with the author’s succinct commentary, the itinerary of his life’s multifarious work, which involved, and still involves, a wide range of participants and collaborators in different times, places, and languages, and in differing forms and patterns of creativity.Barba’s account begins with his departure from Italy to Norway (1954), and his apprenticeship as a welder, and then a mariner, before tracing his move to study in Poland (1961), where he meets and works with Grotowski, his return to Oslo, where he founds Odin Teatret (1964), and then his emigration to Denmark (1966), where Odin Teatret establishes its niche within the larger framework that Barba named the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. Barba’s journey continued, encompassing numerous theatre endeavours, including the development of the idea of a Third Theatre (the ‘floating islands’ alluded to above); the seminal ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology, 1979); and, although quite clearly not at journey’s end, the Fondazione Barba Varley established in 2020.

Questions of Presence and Absence: Lessons from the Pandemic

Julia Varley is a long-term artist from the Odin Teatret in Denmark as well as being one of the key actress/directors and founder members of the Magdalena Project. Julia curates numerous international festivals and workshops including Transit (in Denmark) and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). She is also a founding member of the Barba Varley Foundation, in support of global artists of Third Theatre. Here, she reflects on the impact of the pandemic on working practice.

‘An Old Man Emanating Kindness’: Dario Fo at ISTA, 1996

In 1996 the Polish theatre scholar Juliusz Tyszka was present at the gathering of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen. Here, Dario Fo – in company with his wife and theatrical partner Franca Rame, also a contributor – was among the few invited to participate in both sessions of the conference: ‘Performers’ Bios: Whispering Winds of Theatre and Dance’ and ‘Theatre in a Multicultural Society’. Though already seventy years old and still in recovery from a recent stroke, Fo was incapable of confining himself to a conventional lecture, but (against his doctor's advice) combined his talk with performing the points he was making, whether imitating the curves of a voluptuous girl or enacting a speech in his universal ‘language’ of ‘gramelot’. He was to live on for another twenty years before his death at the age of ninety on 13 October 2016, outliving Franca Rame by just three years. Juliusz Tyszka, an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal, is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

Drawing back the curtains on the actor’s ‘private place’: a personal journey into ISTA 2016

This article describes a personal journey into the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) during its fifteenth session in Albino in April 2016. It reflects upon the common elements underlying the different approaches to training in the different traditions that were represented by actors who are considered as ‘masters’ in their specific art forms. It highlights different techniques from both the West and Asia that were demonstrated and discussed. It takes a look at daily life during ISTA, as well as the training that the participants were asked to undergo.

Jerzy Grotowski in Copenhagen: Three Encounters with the Sage

Juliusz Tyszka describes Jerzy Grotowski’s three appearances at the the Tenth Session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), which took place in Copenhagen, May 3–8, 1996. Grotowski describes various key concepts in his work. He also relates the early stages of both his life and his work with the Laboratory Theatre to the work he was doing in the 1990s at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy.

Bali and Beyond: Eugenio Barba's Ur-Hamlet

In this article Vicki Ann Cremona traces the development of the complex process of montage used by Eugenio Barba for Ur-Hamlet, based on the oral tale Amleth, which Saxo Grammaticus included in his history of the Danes (circa 1216). Besides Odin Teatret, the project involved a large number of actors and musicians from Bali, Brazil, and Japan, and other participants and trainees with whom Barba had worked at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). The author here recounts how the work was developed from different cultural perspectives, describing how the actors' physical scores were combined without their cultural specificity being modified in any way. Vicki Ann Cremona is an Associate Professor at the University of Malta, currently serving as Malta's Ambassador to Tunisia. Her co-edited texts include Costume in Malta: a History of Fabric, Form, and Fashion (1998) and Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). She updated, revised and edited Nicola Savarese's Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present, translated from the Italian by Richard Fowler (Holstebro, Malta, Wrocław: Icarus Publishing, 2010).

‘To Push the Actor-Training to its Extreme’: Training Process in Ingemar Lindh's Practice of Collective Improvisation

Swedish theatremaker Ingemar Lindh (1945–1997) is often associated with corporeal mime master Étienne Decroux, with whom he worked in the late 1960s, and with Eugenio Barba's International School of Theatre Anthropology in the early 1980s. In 1971, following exchanges with Jerzy Grotowski and the setting up of Studio II with Yves Lebreton, Lindh founded the first laboratory theatre in Sweden: the Institutet för Scenkonst (Institute for Scenic Art). Lindh's research on the fundamental principles of collective improvisation and performance conceived as process announces an important development in the twentieth-century tradition of the actor's work upon oneself. This article focuses on the training process that complemented Lindh's practice of collective improvisation. The adaptation of isometry to actor training marked a crucial point in the Institute's research on ‘mental precision’ and ‘intention’ as possible means whereby collective improvisation can be investigated. The Institute's training processes, which evolved over three decades of professional practice, combined codified work (including corporeal mime, Kung Fu, music, and calligraphy) and empirical training methods (e.g. isometric-based work). ‘Isometry’, an approach to sports training developed in the twentieth century, involves the static contraction of a muscle without any visible movement in the angle of the joint. Lindh's isometric-based processes can been viewed as a development on Decroux's active immobility. The article contextualizes the Institute's isometric-based training in terms of history, terminology, and practice.

Theatrum Mundi: Odin Teatret's Ur-Hamlet

In 2006 Odin Teatret performed its multicultural version of Ur-Hamlet, derived from its early thirteenth-century origins in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, in the castle courtyard of Kronborg – the Elsinore setting for Shakespeare's version four centuries later. But the performance here followed years of preparation, and involved a multiplicity of theatre styles and performing traditions. The production had its beginnings at sessions of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Seville in 2004 and Wroclaw in 2005, and preparations continued in Holstebro, Copenhagen, and Bali from 2004 to 2006. Erik Exe Christoffersen followed the final rehearsals in Ravenna, and here gives an account of the Kronborg performance. Erik Exe Christoffersen is Associate Professor at the Institut for Æstetiske Fag, Department for Dramaturgy, Aarhus University, Denmark. His most recent publications include The Actor's Way (Routledge, 1993) and Teaterhandlinger (Theatre Actions, 2007). He is Editor of the Danish theatre journal Peripeti:Tidskrift for Dramaturgiske Studier.

Looking up ‘secrets’: definitions, narrative and pragmatism in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: the Secret Art of the Performer

Eugenio Barba's particular brand of ‘theatre anthropology’ has attracted a sustained and often impassioned criticism. Yet his and Nicola Savarese's seminal book, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: the Secret Art of the Performer, is a bestseller. This key text has recently been published in a second edition, which adds more illustrations, three new chapters and an index and bibliography to the book. In this article, I extend my consideration of the International School of Theatre Anthropology in Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25: 2, to consider the criticism of Barba's work, and assess its dissemination, authorship and meaning as exemplified in the new edition of the Dictionary, before reflecting on the practical uses of the new publication.

Announcement: International School of Theatre Anthropology, Improvisation, Wroclaw, Poland 1–15 April 2005

Announcement: International School of Theatre Anthropology, Improvisation, Wroclaw, Poland 1–15 April 2005

‘A spider web moved by the wind’: a response to the Symposium of the thirteenth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology

This article records and responds to the work demonstrated at the Symposium of the thirteenth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), explores a personal response to the implications of ISTA s work, and draws on Eugenio Barba's key writing on theatre anthropology.

Jacques Copeau, Etienne Decroux, and the ‘Flower of Noh’

Many of Copeau's students and colleagues in the first half of the twentieth century used a specific vocabulary to describe successful performance. The performer was ‘in a trance’, or ‘possessed’, or in an ‘altered state of being’. Decroux spoke of ‘evicting the tenant from the apartment so that God could come to live there’. For Copeau and others, the mask was an important tool in the discovery of this optimum state. In this article, Thomas Leabhart suggests that the ideas of the American theatre theoretician David Cole might help us to explore what this language means in terms of shamanic voyages. Thomas Leabhart is Resident Artist and Professor of Theatre at Pomona College in California, editor of Mime Journal, and author of Modern and Post-Modern Mime (Macmillan, 1999). He is also a member of the artistic staff of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and teaches workshops and performs internationally. Leabhart studied with Etienne Decroux from 1968 to 1972, and served as his teaching assistant and translator.

The Mud and the Wind: an Inquiry into Dramaturgy

The twelfth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) held in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2000, set out to explore, under the title ‘Action, Structure, Coherence’, the relationship between the actor and text – and specifically between actors trained in the Odin and other physically-rooted traditions and texts of the supposedly ‘classical’, text-based theatre of western Europe. David Korish here reports on three encounters between different pairs of actors and their texts, and their several means of developing a dynamic physical score appropriate to the text concerned. The co-founder and director of Teatro Abya Yala, an independent theatre company based in San José, Costa Rica, David Korish is also a member of the faculty of the School of Dramatic Arts of the National University of Costa Rica.

Tacit Knowledge: Heritage and Waste

Eugenio Barba is founder and director of Odin Teatret, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. A longstanding Advisory Editor of NTQ, he is also a prolific writer on the nature of acting and the actor, with a special concern for what is shared by and what divides the traditions and styles of East and West. In the following article he explores the fundamental differences in approaches to the training of the aspirant actor, distinguishing between ‘acculturation’ as the usual point of departure in eastern traditions, and ‘inculturation’ as the dominant western mode. He explores the differing natures of the young actor's apprenticeship which have historically derived from these traditions, and the consequences of new emphases and social movements in the twentieth century which threaten the future of the ‘accultured’ approach, while requiring a new range of responses from the ‘incultured’. This article was first presented at the international symposium ‘Tacit Knowledge – Heritage and Waste’ which was held in Holstebro from 22 to 26 September 1999, on the occasion of Odin Teatret's thirty-fifth anniversary. Eugenio Barba's most recent publications are Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, including a long correspondence from Jerzy Grotowski, and Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, both from Black Mountain Press.

Sanjukta Panigrahi: Dancer for the Gods

The great classical Indian dancer and co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Sanjukta Panigrahi, died in June 1997. An outstanding exponent – and virtually the rediscoverer – of Odissi dance, Sanjukta Panigrahi was born in Orissa into a Brahmin family, and defied the prejudice of her caste as the first girl to pursue Odissi dance as a career. With the support of her family, she began studying at the age of five under the guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, with whom she worked for many years, and also trained in Bharata Natyam for six years with the master Rukmini Devi. Julia Varley, an Odin Teatret actress since 1977, knew and worked with Sanjukta for twenty years, and in the following article offers her memories and reconstruction of the experiences of apprenticeship, performance, technique, cultural exchange, teaching, and family and work relationships, both in India and within the multicultural context of ISTA. Sanjukta's own descriptions of her life and work, drawn from a wide variety of sources, are interspersed throughout the article, in an attempt to keep alive this remarkable actress/dancer's way of thinking and being, coloured by her particular female strength. Julia Varley was born in London in 1954, spent her childhood in Milan, joined Odin in 1976, and has been a participant in the ISTA sessions since their conception in 1980.

Prospero's Floating Island: ISTA 1995

Eugenio Barba's International School of Theatre Anthropology, which has generated previous ATJ reports (see Mirella Schino's piece in 13/1), is the inspiration for Jane Turner's summation of the 1995 session, held in Sweden. Gathering there were teachers ofJapanese dance, Decroux mime, odissi, orixa, and topeng, as well as theatre practitioners and academics. Barba's theatre was explored and rehearsals of his work Theatrum Mundi undertaken. A highlight was a presentation by Balinese artist I Made Djimat of an excerpt from a gambuh piece. Among other subjects, Professor Turner offers some critical comments on theatre anthropology as now practiced by Barba.

Shakuntala among the Olive Trees

Mirella Schino reports on a 1993 project run by European director Eugenio Barba, head of Denmark's Odin Teatret, in which thirty Western scholars, actors, and directors worked with Barba and Sanjukta Panigrahi, Indian Odissi dance artist, in a transcultural, communally oriented collaboration designed to explore ways of expressing the Sanskrit classical drama Shakuntala in performance. The work was done in three stages at Fara Sabina, Italy, and Holstebro, Denmark, under the auspices of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded by Barba. Through ISTA, Barba is able to work on methods that differ from but cast light on his work at Odin Teatret.

‘Subscore’: a Word that is Useful – but Wrong

In 1992, during the session of ISTA (the International School of Theatre Anthropology) in Brecon, the word ‘subtext’ was replaced by ‘subscore’ – a term felt to be more appropriate for the not necessarily literary theatre, in which actors build their scenic presence with a vocal and physical form of behaviour called ‘score’. Yet, as Odin actress Julia Varley here argues, the actor's body remembers and his or her actions contain a far greater quantity of information than consciousness can ever master – while, more practically, each actor has to go through various phases of utilizing such ‘information’ if work is to be kept alive and interesting, for herself as much as for her audience. Here, Julia Varley argues for an approach to ‘precision’ in acting which is less concerned with the analysis of what is internal or external, but closer to the contemporary scientific perception – that ‘all is matter in communication without borders, a continuous flow and interchange’.

A Theatre of Ice and Warmth: on the Thirtieth Anniversary of Odin

From Eugenio Barba's article in the inaugural edition of New Theatre Quarterly to Julia Varley's in the current issue, we have traced the progress of Odin Teatret both through the thinking of its members and – as in the following article – through the commentary of its friends and observers. Odin remains one of the most influential of contemporary experimental companies, as does Eugenio Barba one of the most widely-respected directors – having more recently extended his activities into the foundation and continuing work of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. But Odin is also one of the longest-surviving of post-war companies, recently completing thirty years of work, largely at its home base of Hoistebro in Denmark. In the following article Ferdinando Taviani celebrates the occasion with a view of Odin which attempts to capture the essence of its style and approach, and to define the paradox of the image of the ‘empty ritual’ which Barba has himself recently used to describe it. Ferdinando Taviani, a specialist in commedia dell'arte and the craft of the actor, is a professor at Aquila University in Italy. He published The Book of Odin in 1972.