Theatre Anthropology Research Articles

The Crystal of Acting

‘An actor is seen as if through crystals’, wrote Artaud in 1925, and Janne Risum here uses the analogy of the prism within which to discuss the range of inter-reflecting and interpenetrating analogies the theatre has borrowed from the other arts and from life in its attempts to define itself – analyzing also why it seems impelled to do so through the use of metaphor. Drawing upon the work of major theatre practitioners including Decroux, Stanislavsky, Craig, Meyerhold, Lecoq, Mnouchkine, and Barba, she explores terms which have sometimes been sharply redefined, sometimes allowed to remain indeterminate but allusive. She concludes that ‘in acting, many crystals are possible. There is an infinite number of ways to cut your own crystal, and some pieces of basic advice. There is only one condition: you have to cut one.’ Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also an active participant in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published widely in the fields of acting, theatre history, and women in theatre, and contributed ‘The Voice of Ophelia’, a study of the performance of Julia Varley inThe Castle of Holstebro, to NTQ38 (May 1994).

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.

Theatre Anthropology

Theatre Anthropology

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.

‘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 Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. By Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, trans, by Richard Fowler. London and New York: Routledge, 1991; pp. 272. $24.95 paperback.

A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. By Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, trans, by Richard Fowler. London and New York: Routledge, 1991; pp. 272. $24.95 paperback. - Volume 35 Issue 2

The Genesis of Theatre Anthropology

This article – a chapter from The Paper Canoe: a Treatise on Theatre Anthropology, forthcoming from Routledge – was dedicated to NTQ's co-editor, Clive Barker, on his recent sixtieth birthday. In some senses, therefore, a reflection on the rite of passage into old age, it is more importantly a recognition of the quality and nature of experience understood – as applied to life and, in this case, to the profession of theatre. Eugenio Barba is the founder both of Odin Teatret and of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, and here he links the impulses behind the two in highly personal experiences with universal implications – childhood epiphanies of feeling with the perception of theatrical genius, even the fending-off of boredom triggering an understanding of an actor's body movement shared across cultures and continents. Theatre, he concludes, ‘allows me to belong to no place, not to be anchored only to one perspective, to remain in transition’.

The Voice of Ophelia

In earlier issues, New Theatre Quarterly has followed through several lines of enquiry into the processes of acting and the construction of critical methods appropriate to the analysis of contemporary performance. Articles on the work of Tilda Swinton (NTQ23) and Harriet Walters (NTQ34) for example, focused on the consciousness and techniques of those actresses. But the work of Odin Teatret, complemented (as in this issue) by the theoretical writings of its director, Eugenio Barba, has been a recurrent concern – most recently in the exploration in NTQ26 by Roberta Carreri of the technical means through which her role in Judith was articulated. Here, Janne Risum pulls together several related lines of enquiry by considering the performance of Julia Varley in the Castle of Holstebro, her vocal demonstration workshop The Echo of Silence, and her written piece, A Candle Lit amongst the Pages of Books, as related aspects of perception through which the female spectator engages with the actress and her fictive personae. Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also active in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published books and essays on acting, theatre history, and women in the theatre. A version of the present paper has also appeared, in Danish, in Nordic Theatre Studies, VI, No. 3 (1993).

The Secret of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology

The Secret of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology

Talking About Pornography, Talking About Theatre: Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and the Production of ‘Educated’ Audiences ofEtta Jenksin Madison

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production ofEtta Jenksat the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses toEtta Jenksin my analysis of their reception.

Foreword

On stage, in the wings, in the audience and outside: these are the spaces ethnologists and anthropologists traverse in the practice of fieldwork and writing—metaphorically, as participant-observers within a given community, or literally, if they study theatre forms.Immersion in another community or society (with the consequent blurring of exoticism), purposeful distancing in time and space (rivalling with empathy generated by field presence), systematic investigation of selected themes, and constant striving to have theory inform data and perceptions of the objects of study—all these aspects of the anthropological method can be applied, in a given society, just as effectively to theatre as to those institutions (matrimonial, political, economic or religious, among others) usually studied by ethnologists. A circumscribed object, but one with complex implications for individuals and groups, theatre is a sophisticated, often useful means of access to understanding society, or at least a key to reading the combinatory diversity of a community's functioning, its history, its material production and technology, its cognitive orientations. Building on the necessary contextual analyses revealing the social, political and economic underpinnings of theatre forms, developing the concept of an expressive or aesthetic system in which theatre is but one element interacting with other artistic productions or practices within a given society, and testing the concept through intercultural comparison, the horizons for theatre anthropology are broad enough.Attempting a more modest beginning, this special issue seeks to portray a special moment, a meeting between anthropology and theatre in a fertile, though underdeveloped field of study, with contributions from both anthropologists and theatre scholars.

Actor as Refusenik: Semiotics, Theatre Anthropology, and the Work of the Body

‘Theatre’, Eugenio Barba has said, ‘is a possibility of shaping revolt’. Barba touched upon this belief in NTQ16 (1988), and he professed it again with considerable passion at the conclusion of the seventh public session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in April 1992. Directed by Barba and hosted by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR), the ‘Brecon ISTA’ was held in two parts – Working on Performances East and West, a practical exploration at Christ College, Brecon, from 4 to 10 April, being followed by a conference on 10 and 11 April at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, on Fictive Bodies, Dilated Minds, Hidden Dances. In the following exploration of the particular possibilities which theatre anthropology creates for revolt, Nigel Stewart, Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, considers Barba's direction of work in progress at the Brecon ISTA in terms of Derrida's and Kristeva's theories of the sign. Integral to this is an analysis of the relation between bios and logos – the ‘pre-expressive’ work of the body and the meanings which that work can produce – which is relevant to body-based performance theory and practice in general.

The Secret Art of the Performer. A Dictionary of Theater Anthropology. By Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese

The Secret Art of the Performer. A Dictionary of Theater Anthropology. By Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese

The Healing Space in Psychotherapy and Theatre

This article is a comparative examination of the relationship of audience and actors on the one hand, and of a client and his psychotherapist on the other. Peter Elsass argues that in order to describe both relationships as of a healing nature, one also has to identify a ‘healing space’ beyond the consulting room, instead of focusing on the healing relationship itself. Employing an analogy with shamanism, he describes this ‘healing space’ as a ‘pinta’, or vision from an extra-contextual frame. The history of psychoanalysis shows this need for a ‘pinta’ as a driving, rebellious force, and he suggests that without a ‘pinta’ of its own, the theatre also dies. Peter Elsass is a Professor of Health Psychology in the Medical Faculty of Aarhus University, Denmark, and chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aarhus. In addition to writing a large number of articles within the medical and psychological fields, he has also worked in the field of cultural anthropology, and in Strategies for Survival: the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities (New York University Press, 1992), he describes his many periods of residence with Indian tribes in Colombia. Peter Elsass has been an associate of Odin Theatre, and has taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, directed by Eugenio Barba.

The Third Theatre: a Legacy from Us to Ourselves

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology has always been substantiated by a body of written theory. In earlier issues of NTQ he has developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual – most recently, in NTQ20 (1989), discussing the way in which the actor's body is falsely perceived as an ‘instrument’, somehow separate from himself, and exploring the processes which give the actor a true ‘second nature’, distinguishing his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’. In the present article, he looks rather at the company or the lone practitioner pursuing a vision of theatre beyond the safe confines of institutional theatre. Such ‘Third Theatre’ may be short-lived – sometimes to be revered in retrospect, sometimes almost lost to history, sometimes confined to a theory never realized in practice. Eugenio Barba looks at the elements which these disparate kinds of ‘Third Theatre’ have in common, including a shared concern with the search for meaning, necessarily combined with a ‘personal discovery of the craft’ – that ‘patient building up of our own physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional relationship with texts and spectators, without conforming to those balanced and proved relationships current at the centre of theatre’.

A dictionary of theatre anthropology: the secret art of the performer

PREFACE INTRODUCTION A-Z: Anatomy Apprenticeship Balance Dilation Dramaturgy Energy Equivalence Eurasian Theatre (NEW CHAPTER) Exercises (NEW CHAPTER) Face and Eyes Feet Hands Historiography Montage Nostalgia Omission Opposition Organicity (NEW CHAPTER) Pre-Expressivity Restoration of Behaviour Rhythm Set and Costume Design Technique Text and Stage Training Views BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES INDEX

A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer

A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer

Report from Holstebro: Odin Teatret's ‘Talabot’

In previous issues, NTQ has paid close attention to the theoretical work of Odin Teatret founder and director Eugenio Barba, publishing several of his articles relating to the actor's scenic presence and the manipulation of his or her performing energies. Indeed, as a result of his work with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Barba is perhaps better known today as a theatre scholar than as a director: but he insists that virtually all of his research originates in his work with the actors of Odin Teatret. Here, David Shoemaker, who is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the relationship between Barba's work as theoretician and practitioner, describes his encounter with the Odin's most recent performance piece, entitledTalabot.

Towards a Biological Theory of the Body in Performance

In previous issues of NTQ. we have begun to explore the complex questions raised by the interaction of the study of theatrical performance with other disciplines – notably, in the various interpretations of ‘theatre anthropology’, in the widely divergent approaches to ‘theatre sociology’, and even in terms of its application to quantum theory. Many of these studies have made necessary assumptions in the area of human biology without, however, fully following through their implications. Jean-Marie Pradier. who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Paris 8, here looks at theatre and other modes of performance as ‘biological events’, exploring their importance in the manifestation (and correction) of the way the human body works – in the process touching on areas as diverse as the bio-dramatic function of dreams, the significance of neo-natal rhythms, and olfactory stimulation as one of the influences upon crowd behaviour. Acknowledging the need for further research in the field. Pradier argues for the importance of the ‘body in performance’ being perceived in its biological context.

Chilean Theatre in the Days and Nights of Pinochet: An Interview with Hector Noguera

Hector Noguera is a professor in the theatre department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as one of Chile's leading directors and actors. He is a director of the university's professional theatre company, the School of Communication Arts' Theatre, and is a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act. Noguera is also president of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) in Chile and has represented Chile at many international conferences, including the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre in Lima, Peru, in 1987, and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) congress in Salento, Italy, the same year. In 1988 he was invited to direct his first English-language production at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, a translation of Chilean Antonio Skarmeta's Burning Patience (Ardiente Paciencia), a play about Pablo Neruda which Noguera had directed in Santiago the previous year.