The Odin Teatret Archives

Mirella Schino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351786454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The Odin Teatret Archives presents collections from the archives of one of the foremost reference points in global theatre.

Letters, notes, work diaries, articles, and a wealth of photographs all chart the daily activity that underpins the life of Odin Teatret, telling the adventurous, complex stories which have produced the pioneering work that defines Odin's laboratory approach to theatre.

Odin Teatret have been at the forefront of theatrical innovation for over fifty years, devising new strategies for actor training, knowledge sharing, performance making, theatrical alliances, and ways of creating and encountering audiences. Their extraordinary work has pushed boundaries between Western and Eastern theatre; between process and performance; and between different theatre networks across the world.

In this unique volume, Mirella Schino brings together a never before seen collection of source materials which reveal the social, political, and artistic questions facing not just one groundbreaking company, but everyone who tries to make a life in the theatre.

Fonds Odin Teatret

• Series Activities
  • Activities
  • Activities-B
  • Activities-C
  • Activities-D
• Series Performances
  • Perf-A
  • Perf-B
  • Perf-C
  • Perf-D
  • Perf-E
  • Perf-F
• Series ISTA
  • STA-A
  • ISTA
• Series Publications
  • Publications
  • Publications-A
  • Publications-B
  • Publications-C
• Series TTT
• Series Environment
  • Environment (Ludvigsen)
  • Environment (Nando)
  • Environment (Ana Woolf )
  • Environment (Iaiza)
  • Environment (Tina Nielsen)
  • Environment (Agnete Strøm)
• Series Letters
• Miscellaneous

This Fonds collects materials about the life and activities of the Odin Teatret as they were produced and preserved by the theatre itself. We have organized the fonds in seven “series” collecting the various binders; we have retained the internal arrangement of the binders and simply substituted the plastic pockets containing them – they were always used at the Odin Teatret and almost became its trademark – with “folders”, our unit of measurement.

In order to better understand the documents preserved at the Odin Teatret one has to take into account its peculiarities. For example, the fact that since its foundation this theatre has focused equally on two main activities: rehearsing and presenting performances with the same group of actors (who, as in everything else, change over the course of the years but only partially and slowly), and by the same director; and the organization of seminars, networks, anomalous festivals, encounters, research and pedagogic events, among which ISTA (the International School of Theatre Anthropology, founded by Barba in 1980) is the most significant.

List and brief description of the series in Fonds Odin Teatret:

1. Series Activities: it contains documents about the numerous activities of the Odin Teatret different from performances (training, seminars, conferences, daily life at the theatre), or the weekly meetings gathering together the complete theatre staff or, for example, a journey to Italy by members of the Holstebro City Council. One of the theatre’s activities, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, ISTA, is so important that we decided to make a separate series for it. This choice was indeed discretionary as some of the materials about ISTA can still be found among the “Activities” documents. The series were further arranged in four subseries: Activities; Activities-B; Activities-C; Activities-D.
2. Series Performances: materials about the performances and performance-related events, such as work demonstrations, a typical Odin activity. It contains internal Odin materials (such as texts or preparatory materials for a performance), as well as press clippings and spectators’ letters. It is arranged in six subseries: Perf-A; Perf-B; Perf-C; Perf-D; Perf-E and Perf-F.
3. Series ISTA: materials about the organization, the participants, the performances, the guest masters at various sessions of the ISTA. As mentioned above, it should belong to the series Activities, but for years ISTA sessions were, besides the performances, one of the most important activities organized by the Odin Teatret. It is arranged in two subseries, ISTA-A and ISTA. About ISTA, see also the Barba Fonds.
4. Series Publications: original or photocopied typescripts of the published and unreleased texts by the Odin Teatret people; typescripts or photocopies of articles about the Odin Teatret and its activities by specific scholars connected to the theatre over many years; binders with documents about books written or published by the Odin Teatret, or about copyrights. It contains four subseries: Publications; Publications-A; Publications-B; Publications-C.
5. Series TTT: the magazine Teatrets Teori og Teknikk (Theatre Theory and Technique), abbreviated to TTT, was created in Oslo in 1965 by Barba. The publication ended in 1974 after twenty-three issues, including five books. The binders of the series TTT are collected in eighteen boxes containing articles, photographs, lead clichés for printing photographs, off-set films, etc.
6. Series Environment: materials given to the Odin Teatret by friends, collaborators, former Odin members, or about friends, collaborators, and former Odin members. It is arranged in six subseries: Environment (Ludvigsen); Environment (Nando); Environment (Woolf); Environment (Iaiza); Environment (Nielsen); Environment (Strøm).
7. Series Letters: binders with correspondence by Barba and other people who deal with the running of the theatre. These mixed binders are typical of the first years of the theatre (see also the two series Letters in Barba Fonds).
8. Series Miscellaneous: different types of materials, for which no other arrangement could be found.

The Odin Teatret during one of its tours for its first performance, Ornitofilene, 1965. From the left: Eugenio Barba, Torgeir Wethal, Anne Trine Grimnes, Tor Sannum, Else Marie Laukvik. Photographic Fonds, Paper Series, Subseries People, b. 4.

The Odin Teatret

The Odin Teatret was founded on 1 October 1964 in Oslo by Eugenio Barba with Else Marie Laukvik (who to this day still works at the Odin Teatret), Torgeir Wethal (who worked at the Odin Teatret until his death in 2010) and two other young Norwegian actors; one of them, Tor Sannum, left the Odin Teatret before they moved to Denmark, the other one, Anne Trine Grimnes, stayed until they began to work for Ferai in 1969. They were all young aspiring actors who were not admitted (in Wethal’s case, just for reasons of age) to the theatre school in Oslo.

The foundation date is symbolic. For a few months Barba had been working with a group of young people whose number gradually dwindled down to five and then to four participants. He had previously spent three years working with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, at the Teatr 13 Rzedów (later Teatr-Laboratorium) in Opole where he spent his entire Polish apprenticeship. With his young actors he not only worked on a “training”, a disconcerting and physically taxing novelty for them, but from the very beginning he also built with them small “études”, and they rehearsed for their future debut performance.

During the time in Oslo, the Odin Teatret was a non-funded theatre (proclaiming itself as amateur); it used various rented rooms to hold workshops in, among which the most important would be an air raid shelter.

The financing of the group was ensured by money from its members who worked part-time to pay for their theatre. Besides its artistic work, the Odin Teatret started editing Teatrets Teori og Teknikk, a journal publishing monographic issues and books (the publications would continue until 1974). In February 1966, the Odin Teatret organized the Scandinavian tour of Grotowski’s The Constant Prince, the first tour of Teatr-Laboratorium outside of Poland. In Italy, Barba’s first book was published (Barba, 1965). The Odin Teatret’s first performance and Eugenio Barba’s debut direction was Ornitofilene (1964), adapted from a pilot text of a play by Jens Bjørneboe, still unpublished at the time. The performance was taken to Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It was presented to an audience fifty-one times over a period of six months: less than the time the rehearsals had lasted.

In June of 1966, the Odin Teatret left Oslo and moved to Denmark, to Holstebro where it still resides. The Municipality of Holstebro had decided to start a cultural policy in order to relieve the greyness of the province. They bought a statue by Giacometti and placed it in the centre of a square, the effect being somewhat incongruous considering the slenderness of Giacometti’s elongated figures; the municipality also decided to create a music school, a theatre and a museum. Someone recommended to the mayor the talents of this young Norwegian group who had recently taken their first performance to Copenhagen. Based on the recommendation and also on Kruuse’s review, the mayor accepted the proposal; and the Odin Teatret moved to Holstebro. At first they worked in the rooms of a school, later the theatre was offered the renovated buildings of a pig-breeding farm outside the town.

In Denmark, the Odin Teatret started its new life as a partially funded theatre (the first funding was granted for activities for the promotion of culture) and had space to organize its activities. In 1966 the first Danish actress, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, joined the group.

Although the Scandinavian countries form a kind of union, even regarding funding to the arts, and to some degree there are similarities in the language, the move to Denmark however caused language problems for a group that we should imagine in some way to be much more conventional, and yet much more “different”, from what its equivalent might be today. From that moment on, the Odin Teatret mostly used a mixture of different idioms for its performances, sometimes partially translated to the language of the place where the performance was being presented. But this choice was not easy, nor without its problems.

In 1968, Eugenio Barba edited the publication of Towards a Poor Theatre by Jerzy Grotowski (issue no. 7 of Teatrets Teori og Teknikk [TTT]). Since their arrival in Denmark, they began the practice of organizing “Inter-Scandinavian Seminars” dedicated to theatre professionals, these would be held every year until 1976. They were partially determined or at least favoured by the existence of specific funding for Inter-Scandinavian activities.

Among others, some of the masters who ran the seminars were: Jerzy Grotowski, Ryszard Cieślak, Étienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques Lecoq, the Colombaioni brothers, Charles Marowitz, Otomar Krejča, the masters of Balinese theatre I Made Djimat, Sardono and I Made Pasek Tempo, the masters of Indian classical dance and theatre forms Shanta Rao, Krishna Nambudiri, Sanjukta Panigrahi, Raghunath Panigrahi, Uma Sharma (later, Sanjukta Panigrahi would become one of the co-founders of ISTA). These seminars attracted a group of regular participants, as we mentioned about Kruuse, these included scholars, journalists, intellectuals and theatre-makers from all over the world, among which were very diverse international personalities, from Jens Kruuse to Dario Fo, from Harry Carlson to Stanley Rosenberg to Marc Fumaroli. These meetings were and still are considered by all to be of great importance, and habitual participants make sure to plan time for them in their schedules.

At the beginning of 1969, when the work for their third performance, Ferai, was about to be completed, the sudden cut of funding for the “Inter-Scandinavian cultural fund” precipitated the Odin Teatret into an economic crisis that seemed possible to solve only with termination. Numerous Danish artists and intellectuals took a stand in their favour.

Ferai (1969, from a text written for the Odin Teatret by Peter Seeberg) brought international fame to the Odin Teatret and its director. But Odin is not a repertoire theatre, it too has the problem of making a living besides the funding contributions. The crisis of 1969 showed all the potential instability of this situation. During the preparations for the performance following Ferai, the group discussed in their weekly meetings the possibility of living in an agricultural commune. The final decision was against the idea.

The following performance, Min Fars Hus (1972), confirmed the group’s prestige and at the same time established contact between them and (especially in Italy and France) young, innovative theatre groups as well as the “avant-garde theatre”. Alternative cultural associations and theatre groups created in small towns and universities invited the Odin Teatret not only for their performances but also for conferences, work demonstrations and two- or three-day workshops. Step by step, the character of the tours changed. The Odin Teatret started presenting performances as well as the range of its very well-informed cultural policy as a “theatre enclave”. Starting from 1971, they produced didactic films on the work of the actor, directed by Torgeir Wethal.

In 1974, after a period of time in Sardinia, having been invited by the young Sardinian director Pierfranco Zappareddu for a very unusual tour, the Odin Teatret decided to go and work for some time in a village in Southern Italy, in Carpignano Salentino, where they would stay for five months, from spring to autumn. The following year, they repeated the experience in Carpignano and then moved to Ollolai in Sardinia. The Odin Teatret had previously been to both Sardinia and Puglia to present their performance Min Fars Hus in an environment “far away from the theatre”. Those tours were anomalous and were filled with consequences.

After these parentheses, the Odin Teatret began what could be called parallel performances. Besides indoor performances – for a limited number of spectators, usually created by starting from the actors’ “improvisations” and later reworked by Barba – new performances came to life – for a grea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• The country of sleep and passion
• Seven years: A preface to the inventories
• Fonds Odin Teatret
• Fonds Eugenio Barba
• Fonds Roberta Carreri
• Fonds Iben Nagel Rasmussen
• Fonds Torgeir Wethal
• Bibliography
• Index of names