Eugenio Barba is a director and theorist whose work has stimulated much international interest. He was born in the town of Brindisi in Southern Italy on 29 October 1936 and grew up in the nearby town of Gallipoli. In 1954 he emigrated to Norway and worked for a few years as a welder and sailor for the Norwegian merchant marine before going to Poland to study directing at the Warsaw Theatre School. In 1961 he left the school to join the new Opole Theatre founded by Grotowski in the town of Opole in Poland and over the next three years he worked as Grotowski's assistant. In 1964 he founded his own company in Oslo called the Odin Teatret and in 1965 he was awarded an M.A. in French and Norwegian Literature and History of Religions from Oslo University. His theatre company moved to the small town of Holstebro in Denmark in 1966 where Barba later founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in 1979. While he works intensively with Odin Teatret and accompanies the productions when they tour around the world, he also gives lectures and workshops and continues to investigate the ideas and practices of Eastern and Western performers and theorists at ISTA.
Barba writes and lectures about the work he and his company are developing but his first publication assembled and made contributions to the celebrated text Towards a Poor Theatre. This text introduced the work and ideas of Grotowski to the West and in many ways Barba's work has been strongly influenced by Grotowski's search for universal theatrical truths. As his assistant, Barba travelled with Grotowski when he visited different celebrated Asian theatre practitioners in order to discuss and study their various styles of performance. Barba's interest in finding connections between Eastern and Western performance styles and traditions has continued since then but instead of searching for universal ‘truths,' he now aims to discover and document cross-cultural commonalities between performance traditions. One of his most influential texts has been a publication he co-authored with Nicola Savarese called A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer (1991). It offers a detailed and illustrated survey of a variety of historical and cultural performance styles that Barba has studied and outlines the basic principles he believes generate the magnetic ‘presence' of accomplished actors. More of his ideas about the nature of acting and the work he directs and studies are included in his publications The Floating Islands (1984), Beyond the Floating Islands (1986) and The Paper Canoe (1994).
The Odin Teatret echoes Grotowski's original vision of a community of dedicated and disciplined international artists who train and work together on the development of performances. Barba defends and usually directs this process and has suggested that it offers performers a ‘third theatre.' This term emphasises the fact that his company's theatre is neither avant-garde nor mainstream but a space where actors are encouraged to perform as a means of self-discovery. In this sense, their community in Holstebro provides an environment where artists can share and explore their potential and their artistry without the pressures and concerns of commercial success. Performers are now increasingly encouraged to develop their own processes of training and to choose the methodologies they wish to employ in performance. While the results of such freedom often seem to be strange and often incomprehensible arrangements of images and languages, the performances are intended to communicate to audiences at more of a visceral and unconscious level. As the group allows long gestation periods to enable performers to find shared meanings, new works emerge slowly from improvisatory processes and may sometimes take years to develop. And, as new ideas and approaches are constantly being absorbed and processed during these times, each production differs dramatically from the last. However certain stylistic similarities remain and the performers consistently combine ritualistic performance styles with a high level of physical and vocal agility and precision.
Like Grotowski, Barba sees his work with Odin and ISTA as research but Barba calls his own approach ‘theatre anthropology.' Although many have questioned and challenged his use of this term as well as the methods he employs to gather evidence for his claims, he defines the work conducted at the school as the socio-cultural and biological study of human behaviour in performance situations. While this new terminology may sound more ‘scientific' it is clear that many of the ideas and practices first introduced by Grotowski have inspired the research and work being carried out by the dedicated and increasingly self-directed performing artists who have gathered together in Holstebro. However, Barba has been much more open to public discussion than his former teacher who slowly became more isolated. Although Barba has also been accused of elitism and has raised the shackles of post-colonial theorists and anthropologists, no other Western theatre worker has investigated Asian techniques, theories and practices as systematically. Moreover, his meetings with the ISTA and his productions with the Odin Teatret will most likely remain relevant to the development of contemporary theatre because they remain open to investigation and debate.