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Eugenio Barba (born 29 October 1936) is an Italian author and theatre director based in Denmark. He is the founder of the Odin Theatre and the International School of Theatre Anthropology, both located in Holstebro, Denmark.
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Eugenio Barba (born 29 October 1936) is an Italian author and theatre director based in Denmark. He is the founder of the Odin Theatre and the International School of Theatre Anthropology, both located in Holstebro, Denmark.
Barba was born in Brindisi and grew up in Gallipoli, Lecce Province, Italy. After leaving the Nunziatella military academy of Naples in 1954, he emigrated to Norway to work as a welder and sailor. He also took degrees in French, Norwegian literature, and history of religion at Oslo University. In 1961 he went to Warsaw in Poland to study theatre direction at the State Theatre School, but left one year later to join Jerzy Grotowski, who at that time was the leader of Teatr 13 Rzedow in Opole. Barba stayed with Grotowski for three years. [1]
In 1963 he traveled to India where he had his first encounter with Kathakali. He wrote an essay on the form which was published in Italy, France, the U. S. and Denmark. His first book, In Search of a Lost Theatre, was published in Italy and Hungary in 1965.
When Barba returned to Oslo in 1964, he wanted to become a professional theatre director, but as a foreigner he faced opposition. He and Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe gathered a group of people who had not passed their admission test to Oslo's State Theatre School and created the Odin Teatret on 1 October 1964. [2] The group trained and rehearsed in an air raid shelter. Their first production, Ornitofilene, by Bjørneboe, was performed in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. They were subsequently offered an old farm and a small sum of money by the Danish municipality of Holstebro, which became their base.
Over forty-two years, Barba has directed sixty-five productions for the Odin Teatret and the Theatrum Mundi Ensemble. Some of the more recent productions are Salt (2002), Great Cities Under the Moon (2003), Andersen's Dream (2005), Ur-Hamlet (2006) and Don Giovanni all'Inferno (2006) in collaboration with Ensemble Midtvest. [3]
In 1979 Barba founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). He is on the advisory boards of scholarly journals such as The Drama Review , Performance Research , New Theatre Quarterly, Teatro e Storia and Teatrología. Among his most recent publications, translated into several different languages, are The Paper Canoe (Routledge), Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt (Black Mountain Press), Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, 26 letters from Jerzy Grotowski to Barba (Black Mountain Press) and, in collaboration with Nicola Savarese, The Secret Art of the Performer and the revised and updated version of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (Centre for Performance Research/Routledge). In 2021 he has founded the open-access Journal of Theatre Anthropology.
In common with other European countries, the most frequent and most popular form of theatre in Poland is dramatic theatre, based on the existence of stable artistic companies. It is above all a theatre of directors, who decide on the form of its productions and the appearance of individual scenes. There is no strict division in Poland between theatre and film directors and actors, therefore many stage artists are known to theatre goers from films of Andrzej Wajda, for example: Wojciech Pszoniak, Daniel Olbrychski, Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, and from films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, actors such as Jerzy Stuhr, Janusz Gajos and others.
Jerzy Marian Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He is considered one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century as well as one of the founders of experimental theatre.
Holstebro Municipality is a municipality in Region Midtjylland on the Jutland peninsula in west Denmark. The municipality covers an area of 801.55 km2 (309.48 sq mi), and has a population of 58,978. Its mayor is H. C. Østerby, a member of the Social Democratic party.
Physical theatre is a genre of theatrical performance that encompasses storytelling primarily through physical movement. Although several performance theatre disciplines are often described as "physical theatre", the genre's characteristic aspect is a reliance on the performers' physical motion rather than, or combined with, text to convey storytelling. Performers can communicate through various body gestures.
The International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) is an international and multi-cultural network of performers, directors, scholars and academics of the theatre. Based in the Odin Teatret, Denmark, the organization has the nature of an itinerant university whose central field of study and research is theatre anthropology, the multi-cultural study of acting techniques.
Matt Mitler is an American actor. He is also founding director (1997) of Dzieci Theatre, which balances its work on performance with work of service, through creative and therapeutic interaction in hospitals and a variety of institutional settings. The company is firmly dedicated to process and includes in its repertory the critically acclaimed Fools Mass, which was presented at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona in 2004 and has been a staple since 1999 at The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Mr. Mitler and Dzieci Theatre are profiled in Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors by Retta Blaney, and are included, under Performance Theatre, in the current edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion.
Twentieth-century theatre describes a period of great change within the theatrical culture of the 20th century, mainly in Europe and North America. There was a widespread challenge to long-established rules surrounding theatrical representation; resulting in the development of many new forms of theatre, including modernism, expressionism, impressionism, political theatre and other forms of Experimental theatre, as well as the continuing development of already established theatrical forms like naturalism and realism.
Odin Teatret is an avant-garde theatre group based in Holstebro, Denmark. It was founded by Italian theatre director and investigator Eugenio Barba in 1964. Odin Teatret is a part of NTL, Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, which also includes the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded in 1979, and the Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies (CTLS), founded in 2002
A theatre practitioner is someone who creates theatrical performances and/or produces a theoretical discourse that informs their practical work. A theatre practitioner may be a director, dramatist, actor, designer or a combination of these traditionally separate roles. Theatre practice describes the collective work that various theatre practitioners do.
Ingemar Lindh is a theatre director and pedagogue.
Devised theatre – frequently called collective creation – is a method of theatre-making in which the script or performance score originates from collaborative, often improvisatory work by a performing ensemble. The ensemble is typically made up of actors, but other categories of theatre practitioners may also be central to this process of generative collaboration, such as visual artists, composers, and choreographers; indeed, in many instances, the contributions of collaborating artists may transcend professional specialization. This process is similar to that of commedia dell'arte and street theatre. It also shares some common principles with improvisational theatre; however, in devising, improvisation is typically confined to the creation process: by the time a devised piece is presented to the public, it usually has a fixed, or partly fixed form. Historically, devised theatre is also strongly aligned with physical theatre, due at least in part to the fact that training in such physical performance forms as commedia, mime, and clown tends to produce an actor-creator with much to contribute to the creation of original work.
Slobodan Beštić is a Serbian actor. A prolific stage actor, he is perhaps best known for his critically acclaimed and versatile repertoire as a drama champion at the National Theatre in Belgrade.
Jake Harders is an English actor and educator.
Cristina Wistari Formaggia was an Italian actress, performer and artist who came to be a key participant in the preservation and dissemination of Balinese dance – particularly the Topeng and Gambuh traditions; she was also a student of the Indian Kathakali school of sacred performance art. She was heavily involved in contemporary trans-cultural theatre being both an active participant in the ISTA in collaboration with Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret and with the Magdalena Project.
Per Gjersøe was a Norwegian actor, stage instructor and film director.
Joseph Novoa is a Venezuelan-Uruguayan film director and executive producer. He is married to the director and scriptwriter Elia K. Schneider and fathered the film director Joel Novoa.
Kirsten Blinkenberg Hastrup is a Danish anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has taken a special interest in the conjunction between the history and culture of both Iceland and Greenland, publishing widely on both, while also examining the relationship between the theatre and anthropology. Hastrup was president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from 2008 to 2016.
Nina Király (1940-2018) was a Mari Jászai award-winning theater historian, dramaturg, an expert on Polish and Eastern-European theater, who lived and worked in Budapest, Hungary. From 1993 to 1999 she was the Director of The Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute and later became the advisor on international theaters and festivals for the Hungarian National Theater and the co-creator of the International MITEM festival. During her years as the Director of the Hungarian Theater Institute she published many theater books that were previously not translated or available for the Hungarian public, introducing the works of such international luminaries as Jan Kott, Anatoly Vasiliev, Eugenio Barba, Tadeusz Kantor. She spoke 4 languages.
Ludwik Flaszen was a Polish theatre director and writer. He collaborated with Jerzy Grotowski, with whom he cofounded the Teatr 13 Rzędów in Opole, as well as the Teatr Laboratorium. He lived in Paris from 1984 until his death.
Kjell Kjær is a Norwegian film actor, puppeteer, director, and program host. He has also performed as a stage actor, including at the National Theater in Oslo.
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