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.

O teatr przyszłości. Zapomniane źródła włoskiego myślenia performatycznego

Italian theater studies in 20th century focused on the theater as the art of staging a dramatic text and it’s analysis. Over the past decade, theater anthropology and performance studies make their way among these relics of the past century slowly but effectively, and the sources of the Italian performance studies are indicated in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, the interest of Italian researchers in restored behavior is reflected in texts published in-between the two world wars. The subject of the analysis are two texts by Corrado Pavolini who we consider to be a precursor of Italian performance studies.

"Membingkai Melayu" Perancangan Metode Akting Berbasis Tradisi Untuk Pembelajaran Makyong di Program Studi Seni Pertunjukan UNIMED

Theatrical discourse in Indonesia is still dominated by Western theater discourses, both theoretically and practically. This domination ordains theater as an art that is distant from the audience, including Makyong. As an effort to bring theater closer to the community, the development of acting methods based on ethnic traditions can be an alternative. The research method that will be used in this study is the Research and Development method developed by Thiagarajan, et al. The stages of implementing the research are as follows: Defining, Designing, Developing. The theory used as a basis in this study is the theory of postcolonial acting put forward by Asrul Sani and concept of theater anthropology from Eugenio Barba. The results of this study are Malay acting training methods arranged in the order of spiritual knowledge based on Tunjuk Ajar Melayu, pantun skills and body training based on Malay dance techniques. The development of the acting training method, which the author calls Framing Malay, aims to collect things that can help actors in creating Malay behavior.

From capture to texture: affective environments for theatre training in virtual reality (VR)

ABSTRACT The notion of ‘pre-expressivity' is central to the field of ‘theatre anthropology', explored by Eugenio Barba and his theatre group Odin Teatret. It refers to the elementary level of the energetic dynamics that render an actor's body scenically ‘alive' and 'present'. In the current study, we explore the potential of immersive technologies and bodily interaction interfaces for supporting the transmission of embodied knowledge. We begin by outlining a critical epistemological framework that calls for new accounts of knowledge distribution. We describe the process of mapping different training strands developed by Odin Teatret's actors, using motion capture technology. Further on, we approach the translation of such embodied practices into data and, consequently, into an immersive experience of archival navigation. In our study, we used audiovisual objects as environmental constraints, what we term as immersive archi-textures, and employ Laban efforts applied to motion capture data analysis as a model for qualifying movement patterns. We will base our writings on a particular experiment, which has captured Odin actress Roberta Carreri’s exercise Six States of Water within the virtual archive. In this exercise, the trainee is called to perform a specific score of actions with different qualities of energy, translated as different states of water.

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.

Action, sensory stimulation and narrative imagination: applying Odin Teatret’s training in the management of the recovery process of post-stroke patients

The aim of the experimental project we present is to study the clinical efficacy of a performing art workshop in the rehabilitation process of post-stroke patients, in the frame of the specialized Physical and Medicine Rehabilitation Units in Saint-Denis Casanova Hospital. The distinctiveness of the project lies in the multicultural and social identity of the mixed group of patients aged between 40 and 60. The goal of this specific art training with a psychotherapeutic focus is to help stroke survivors to achieve the best possible quality of life. The method consists in a systemic stimulation of cerebral plasticity through exercises based on the principles of Theatre Anthropology and practical experience acquired from Odin Teatret performers and ISTA sessions. The ‘theatrical’ work is constructed through an integrative and interactive systemic process from which sequences of physical and vocal actions are elaborated which in turn generate images and a story. The exercises involve the elementary level of organization of the ‘theatre’. They combine action, sensory stimulation and narrative imagination in a circular path of reinforcement. As for the patients that we consider as performers, the reference to the theatre is considered as a ‘free and open space’ in order to allow them to best mobilize their psychic resources.

MANDIEK ANAK AS PERFORMANCE AT SALAREH AIA

Mandiek anak is rituals as part of baralek gadang. Although baralek gadang is a marriage ritual known in the West Sumatra region or Minangkabau, but mandiek anak is only known in the Nagari Salareh Aia region. This ritual aims to show society the social status of the organizer of the mandiek anak. Theatre anthropology shows how mandiek anak can be seen as a performance. In this approach, mandiek anak is treated as a performance that can be analyzed the forming elements. The method used to conduct research is purposive sampling. The resulting description is analytical to the phenomenon found. With a comprehensive description, it can be seen that the elements of mandiek anak as a performance can be identified. The performance elements in scripts, players, audiences and places look real. Mandiek anak scripts are all rules that ensure the passage of mandiek anak in an orderly and smooth manner. Players and spectators have intense interactions and a real-looking performance venue. The results of this study expect to show how mandiek anak as performance has a particular form that makes it can be passed down to the supporting community. Keywords: mandiek anak, teater antropology, performance

Why Do We Need Memory?

Abstract A fundamental question for the study of everything, including of the scenic movement in theatre. A necessary question in any artistic endeavour and nonetheless, continuously endangered by the pressure of information, of the speed of technology, of the necessity of the NOW, the god of the time of globalization and consumer age. What we are aiming at in our applied studies of theatre anthropology, would be the discovery of a line of personal expression distinguishable in the art of theatre representation, which could be subsequently returned to and cultivated by the actor at various levels of artistic maturity. Memory, training and attention allow us to eliminate samples of stage movement and thinking. Memory helps us in the appropriation of skills and knowledge in our work. It helps us change at any time the manner of thinking, in order to become more aware. At the end of the day, in the absence of subjective memory, it becomes impossible to move being aware in the time and space of our own lives...

‘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.

Antropologia teatrale e performance studies. Assonanze e tracce della ri(n)voluzione performativa postmoderna.

Starting from the finding of the performative drift that marked the theatrical research through the Seventies and Eighties, this essay aims to show how two of the main protagonists of the period – Theatre Anthropology and Performance Studies – have contributed in their affinities and specificities to marginalizing of the theatre as a cultural phenomenon and devaluating of the artistic work, inaugurated (and not yet rectified) by Postmodernity.

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.

The influence of Meyerhold's biomechanics on 20th century theatre: The principle of equivalence

Meyerhold's biomechanics (Mejerhol'd E. V.), as an acting technique in preparation for a role and performance in front of the audience, originated in the 1920s. It represents a genuine way of work, as it derived from Meyerhold's authentic personality. The need to research the importance and influence of Meyerhold's biomechanics on the 20th century theatre stems from the importance of the opus that Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold produced, as well as from the assumption that the output of the 20th century directors Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook was largely founded on the principles of biomechanics, which Meyerhold had based his work on with theatrical actors for years. The principle of equivalence is one of the principles in the book A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese. It provides help with the interpretation of the influence that Meyerhold's biomechanics had on the 20th century theatre and the authors such as Grotowski, Barba and Brook.

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.

Masters of their Conditions III: Clinical applications of theater anthropology in cultural psychiatry

Body learning gives actors basic structures and references that enable them to codify their actions in a script or score. With this score, acquired through training, performing and transmitting, actors who work with theater anthropology methodology offer strategies and tools that healers can use with their patients. This actor’s score has inspired a mode of working with patients both to understand the case history and guide the course of therapy. In this approach, patients are like authors who want to act out their dramaturgy, but who need a director-healer to organize the story and help them build their healing process. Together, patient and therapist work on stage to advance the treatment, at the same time enhancing their strategies and methods for collaboration.

To sing and to dance, to think and to fight: an actor's second nervous system

This two-part essay is on the erotics of pedagogy or education of the senses through learning how to learn from images and sounds of cinema as manifestations of rhythm. Part one creates a conceptual framework derived from the archives on Neurological Modernity and Theatre Anthropology, so as to develop the concept of a “Second Nervous System” which animates performers in the great Asian and European civilizational traditions of performance. Their relevance to early twentieth century European avant-garde performance and cinema and to contemporary transcultural work in performance provides a mobile, flexible, conceptual framework for thinking with film. Part two activates this network of rhythmic connections so as to explore, observe, analyse and learn from the film Khayal Gatha by Kumar Shahani, which is, among other things, about the conditions of transmissibility of cultural traditions after colonialism and political independence. A question drives this essay in memory of Paul Willemen. In the emerging “Asian Century” will we, the peoples of the Asia-Pacific zones of contact, be able to take cues from the anthropology of theatre to create “a thousand and one” transversal story lines on “a thousand plateaus” across the globe and beyond, with cinema/film as our mentor?

Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival (review)

Reviewed by: Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival Dennis Barnett Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival. DAH Theatre, Belgrade. 18–2506 2011. DAH Theatre has produced politically driven, movement-oriented works for twenty years. Founded by Jadranka Anđelić and Dijana Milošević, the original group of young people performed on the streets of Belgrade to protest their government’s acts of aggression. Today, it has grown into one of the world’s most revered performance groups. Armed with the belief that the world can be changed through its performances, DAH’s commitment to social justice, healing the wounds of war, and fighting the nationalist agenda in Serbia has energized it throughout its history. Under the leadership of Milošević, DAH has performed on every continent and trained hundreds of performers from around the world in its International School for Actors and Directors, recently renamed The DAH Theatre Institute. To celebrate this history, DAH held a weeklong festival it called Passing the Flame. On the program [End Page 264]were twenty-three performances by nineteen companies and solo performers from nine countries. The festival was ostensibly to celebrate DAH’s twentieth anniversary, but, as the name implied, it was as much about DAH’s place in the culture of performance, its lineage and legacy, as it was about the group itself. Three generations of teachers and students were present, all of whom advocate for social justice through performance and are guided by somatic principles, similar to those of DAH. The programming included workshops, round-table discussions, and daily interviews with a collection of “masters”—teachers and practitioners who had contributed to the development of DAH or whose accomplishments DAH wished to recognize. They included Rena Mirecka, an original member of the Polish Lab Theatre; Gennady Bogdanov, who studied with Nikolai Kustov, one of Meyerhold’s actors; Jill Greenhalgh, founder of the Magdalena Project; Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theatre; and Serbian activist/actor/teacher Mirjana Karanović. The most significant master, however, was Eugenio Barba. His presence, along with that of his company Odin Teatret, where Milošević once worked and where many of her ideas took form, further highlighted the festival’s theme. One of her mentors, in fact, was Torgeir Wethal, a member of Odin who passed away in 2010 and to whom the festival was dedicated. Barba is credited with creating the field of Theatre Anthropology, which puts the diversity of world performance under one rubric by identifying common principles and techniques that Barba defines as a culture unto itself. It is a conceit that frames the identification of culture by physical boundaries as an arbitrary act of taxonomy. As recent events in Africa and the Middle East (or in the former Yugoslavia over the last two decades) have shown, nationalism and xenophobia threaten our common humanity at every turn. The reimagining of culture that Barba promotes, the reorientation required to call oneself a “performer” instead of an American or a Serb, potentially diminishes the power of a nationalist agenda, thus framing the culture of the performer as one within which the most divisive of conflicts can be healed. It may be an idealistic “charge of the Light Brigade” at best, but within this context, DAH’s festival seemed like a journey into the homeland; and occurring in Belgrade where there is a long history of internecine conflict and nationalist ideologies, the outlines of this alternative homeland created a stark contrast. Although most of the performances occurred in the evening, one morning was reserved for DAH’s newly revised In/Visible City. Originally performed in 2005 in Belgrade, In/Visible Cityis essentially a street performance staged on a working city bus. The earlier version of it involved three musicians (violin, accordion, percussion) and six other performers. The difference in the 2010 revision was minimal and consisted mostly of incorporating performers from Macedonia, the UK, and Denmark, countries DAH was preparing to tour. This swelled the troupe by three: a parkour artist, a trombonist, and a kanun player. To witness In/Visible Cityis to watch citizens of Belgrade, literally squeezed into their daily commute, surprised and...

Earthbound: Strindberg’s Dream Play Reimagined for the Era of Digital Media Convergence

I AM A THEATER DIRECTOR, and my research is prompted by my obsession with August Strindberg's Ett dromspel (A Dream Play). Here I will discuss Earthbound, an original adaptation of Ett dromspel that I am currently working on, one in which I employ digital technologies to provide a new solution to Strindberg's own vision for the play as evidenced in his stage directions. Earthbound is a hyperserial, which is to say it merges an episodic video structure with the Internet as a venue. I am a director, not a scholar, and what I have to say mainly concerns process and structure (though towards the end I will also discuss outcomes). So in order to talk about Ett dromspel and Earthbound, I need to back up and talk about dreams and experiments and the relationship between the two. I am what you might call an experimental theater director--though experimental is one of those unfortunate words that is more confusing than revealing, but that theater is stuck with. Much of what passes as experimental theater today is actually quite conventional, in that it is not really experimental at all but would have been cutting-edge say seventy years ago. There is now a generalized idea of what experimental work is supposed to look like, an idea that hearkens back to the heyday of twentieth century modernism. This is regrettable since it tends to close off the search for what is genuinely experimental in theater. Russian-American director and actor Michael Chekov, a disciple of Konstantin Stanislavski, promoted a concern for something he called Theater of the Future, which never arrives; it's something we continually strive for. The people from whom I draw great inspiration are the likes of directors Anne Bogart, especially her Viewpoints technique; Scandinavia-based Eugenio Barba's laboratory approach and interest in theater anthropology; the Wooster Group's continuous exploration of ensemble acting potential; and Robert Wilson's mixed-media creative reappropriation tableau-approach, evident not least in his 1998 production of Ett dromspel at Stockholm City Theater. These people are not afraid to make something that might not look like theater as we've come to expect it. I believe Strindberg belongs in this category. As long as audiences believe they know what they are going to see when they enter the theater--as they do now--we are in a bad state. The moment that people become unsure about this and feel that they can't anticipate what they are going to see, then experimental theater is alive and well. In this particular project, I am trying to create this uncertainty in the audience by redefining the relationship between the spoken text of the actors and the images to which they are anchored, both psychically (as actors) and in terms of the environment in which they find themselves and to which they must respond. CONCEPTS A dream: I am sitting on a tall stool facing a wall. The stool is on the mezzanine level of a large open space overlooking the playing area of a theater dedicated to the production of experimental theater. I am in the process of staging a new work here, and a lighting instrument has just been hung to illuminate me as I sit on the stool with the idea of incorporating my presence as the director into the actual performance. It is late and the actors are tired. My wife encourages me to let them go, confident that she can do all the work that still needs to be done without us--I too have been dismissed. And now I am outside looking down on the building from an elevated location across the street. The world of the dream is dark, but I can see the actors as a group making their way to a vampire-themed party they have been invited to by Cornel West, the prominent African-American author and activist. I hurry to catch up so I can ask them to wait for me because of one last errand I need to attend to in the theater. These little errands are the make-and-break of all theatricals. I am a little anxious about whether I will be able to reach the actors before they disappear into the night, and about whether they will agree to wait for me, and finally I am anxious about whether I can complete my errand quickly. …

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).

On the shoulders of tradition from East and West: a conversation between Paul Allain and Frances Barbe

Paul Allain and Frances Barbe teach together on two modules at Kent that incorporate aspects of intercultural practice: Physical Theatre and Intercultural Performance. Intercultural Performance, the focus of this dialogue, explores issues relating to the history and theory of intercultural practices. It begins with five case studies, which are Butoh, Tadashi Suzuki, barter and cultural exchange in Barba and Gardzienice's work, Grotowski and Barba's ISTA and theatre anthropology with reference to universals and Gomez Pena's intercultural performance art. Each week a lecture/seminar with screenings is followed by a practical workshop. In the latter part of the course, students devise their own ‘performance barter’ as part of a cultural exchange with another community. In the past, this has included refugees in Margate, but more recently it has involved Japanese students from Chaucer College. The college is on the Kent campus at Canterbury, but the Japanese students live very separately from Kent students, for example operating under a 10 o'clock curfew. The performance barter challenges the drama students to prepare their own performance work as a basis for entering into a cultural exchange. The challenge is not just to perform for the other group, but to invite an exchange, using skills which may range from song and dance, to storytelling or building something together. At the end of the course, the students prepare a lecture demonstration on a topic of their choice that investigates intercultural theories, which is followed by an essay where they can take the ideas further. This year Professor Patrice Pavis joined the teaching team. Here, Allain and Barbe discuss what and how non-Western practices inform their work at Kent, and some of the issues this raises for them.