The Paper Canoe

A Guide to Theatre Anthropology

Eugenio Barba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134818198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

An enormously exciting, beautifully written and very moving work. The Paper Canoe comprises a fascinating dialogue with such masters of theatre as Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Craig, Copeau, Brecht, Artand and Decroux.

1
THE GENESIS OF THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY

It is often said that life is a journey, an individual voyage which does not necessarily involve change of place. One is changed by events and by the passage of time.

In all cultures, there are certain fixed events which mark the transition from one stage of this journey to another. In all cultures, there are ceremonies which accompany birth, establish the entry of the adolescent into adulthood, mark the union of man and woman. Only one stage is not sanctioned by a ceremony, the onset of old age. There is a ceremony for death, but none to celebrate the passage from maturity to old age.

This journey and these transitions are lived with lacerations, rejections, indifference, fervour. They take place, however, within the framework of the same cultural values.

This much is known. But what is it that I know? What would I say if I had to talk about my journey, about the stages and transitions in the contrasting landscapes of collective order and disorder, of experiences, of relationships: from childhood to adolescence, from adulthood to maturity, to this annual countdown where every birthday, fifty, fifty-one, fifty-five, is celebrated by recalling my past achievements?

If memory is knowledge, then I know that my journey has crossed through various cultures.

The first of these is the culture of faith. There is a boy in a warm place full of people singing, fragrant odours, vivid colours. In front of him, high up, is a statue wrapped in a purple cloth. Suddenly, while bells ring, the smell of incense becomes more pungent and the singing swells, the purple cloth is pulled down revealing a risen Christ.

This is how Easter was celebrated in Gallipoli, the village in southern Italy where I spent my childhood. I was deeply religious. It was a pleasure to the senses to go to church, to find myself in an atmosphere of darkness and candlelight, shadows and gilt stucco, perfumes, flowers and people engrossed in prayer.

I waited for moments of intensity: the elevation of the Host, Holy Communion, processions. Being with other people, feeling a bond with them, sharing something, filled me with a sensation which even now resonates in my senses and in their subconscious.

So I can still feel the pain I felt in my knees when I saw a friend’s mother one Good Friday in Gallipoli. The procession of Christ with the cross on His shoulders, accompanied only by men, wound through the narrow streets of the old town. The procession of the Virgin, calling after Her Son, followed, half a kilometre behind. This distance between Mother and Son was poignant, announcing the final separation and emphasizing it through a vocal contact: the ‘lament’ of the Mother of Christ, accompanied only by women. Those whose prayers had been answered followed Her on their knees. Among them was my friend’s mother. I was not expecting to see her, and at first reacted with the embarrassment typical of children who see their parents, or those of their friends, behaving in an unusual way. But immediately afterwards I was struck by the stabbing pain one feels when one walks hundreds of metres on one’s knees.

I lived with an elderly woman for a number of years. She must have been about seventy. In the eyes of a ten-or eleven-year old boy, she was very old. I slept in her room. She was my grandmother. Every morning, at five o’clock, she got up and made very strong coffee. She would wake me and give me a little. I enjoyed the sweet warmth of the bed, in the cold room in that southern village with no heating in the winter. I was warm, and my grandmother, wearing a long, white, embroidered nightdress, would go over to the mirror, let loose her hair, and comb it. She had very long hair. I watched her from behind; she looked like a slender adolescent. I could just make out the withered body of an old woman, wrapped in a nightdress, and at the same time I saw a young girl dressed as a bride. Then there was her hair, very long and beautiful, yet white, dead.

These images, and others as well, which I recall from the culture of faith, all contain a ‘moment of truth’, when opposites embrace each other. The most transparent is the image of the old woman who, to my eyes, is both woman and child, her hair flowing sensuously, but white. A portrait of coquettishness, vanity, grace. And yet, I had only to look from another angle and the mirror reflected back a face worn and etched by the years.

All these images are brought together by physical memory: the pain I felt in my knees on seeing my friend’s mother, the sensation of warmth while I watched my grandmother combing her hair. Revisiting this culture of faith, the senses are the first to remember.

My journey through this culture was happy, yet it was punctuated by profound sorrows. I lived through a harrowing experience which, at that time, did not take place in the anonymity of a hospital but in the intimacy of the family. I stood by my father’s deathbed, witnessing his long agony. As it dragged on into the night, I felt bewilderment, which became certainty and dismay. Nothing was said explicitly, and yet I realized from the faces and behaviour of those present, from their silences and their glances, that something irreparable was happening. As the hours passed, dismay gave way to impatience, unease, tiredness. I began to pray that my father’s agony would end soon, so that I wouldn’t have to remain standing any longer.

Again a ‘moment of truth’, opposites embracing each other. I observed simultaneously the elusiveness of life and the materiality of the corpse. I was about to lose forever one of the people I loved most and yet was discovering in myself impulses, reactions and thoughts which impatiently invoked the end.

At fourteen I went to a military school. Here, obedience demanded physical submission, and obliged us mechanically to carry out martial ceremonies which engaged only the body. A part of myself was cut off. We were not permitted to show emotion, doubt, hesitation, any outburst of tenderness or need for protection. My presence was shaped by stereotyped conduct. The highest value was placed on appearances: the officer who demanded respect and believed that he received it; the cadet who cursed or silently mouthed obscenities, concealing anger or scorn behind the impassive façade of standing to attention. Our behaviour was tamed through codified poses which conveyed acquiescence and acceptance.

I have an image of myself in the culture of faith: singing, or not singing, but involved with my whole being, on my own but nevertheless in unison with a group, amid singing women, lights, incense, colours. In the new culture, the image is of an impassive and immobile me, lined up geometrically with dozens of my peers, supervised by officers who do not permit us the slightest reaction. This time the group has swallowed me up; it is Leviathan, in whose belly my thinking and my sense of being whole within myself crumble. I was in the culture of corrosion.

Before, feeling and doing were the two simultaneous phases of a single intention; now, there was a split between thought and action; cunning, insolence, and cynical indifference were presumed to be determined self-assurance.

There is the immobility of the believer at prayer. There is the immobility of the soldier at attention. Prayer is the projection of the whole of oneself, a tension towards something that is at one and the same time within and outside oneself, an outpouring of inner energy, the intention-action taking flight. Attention on parade is the display of a stage set, the façade which exhibits its mechanical surface while the substance, the spirit, the mind, may be elsewhere. There is the immobility which transports you and gives you wings. There is the immobility which imprisons you and makes your feet sink into the earth.

Thus, my senses recall my passage through these two cultures, where immobility acquired such diverse charges of energy and meaning.

Like an acid, the culture of corrosion ate into faith, ingenuousness and vulnerability. It made me lose my virginity, in all ways, physically and mentally. It generated in me a need to feel free and, as happens when one is seventeen, to dissent from and deny all geographical, cultural and social constraints. So I set off into the culture of revolt.

I rejected all the values, aspirations, demands and ambitions of the culture of corrosion. I longed not to integrate, not to put down roots, not to drop anchor in any port, but to escape, to discover the world outside and to remain a stranger. This longing became my destiny when, not yet eighteen, I left Italy and emigrated to Norway.

If one of our senses is mutilated, the others become sharpened: the hearing of a blind man is particularly acute, and for the deaf, the slightest visual details are vivid and indelible. Abroad, I had lost my mother tongue and grappled with incomprehensibility. I tried to get by as an apprentice welder among Norwegian workers who, because of my Mediterranean ‘exoticism’, treated me sometimes like a teddy bear and sometimes like a simpleton. I was plunged into the constant effort of scrutinizing behaviour which was not immediately decipherable.

I concentrated my attention on intercepting movements, frowns, smiles (benevolent? condescending? sympathetic? sad? scornful? conniving? ironic? affectionate? hostile? wise? resigned? But above all, was the smile for me or against me?).

I tried to orient myself in this labyrinth of recognizable yet unknown physicality and sounds, in order to explain to myself the attitudes of others with respect to me, what their behaviour towards me meant, what intentions lurked behind compliments, conventions, banal or serious discussions.

For years, as an immigrant, I experienced every single day the wearing see-saw of being accepted or rejected on the basis of ‘pre-expressive’ communication. When I boarded a tram, I certainly did not ‘express’ anything, yet some people withdrew to make room for me, while others withdrew to keep me at a distance. People simply reacted to my presence, which communicated neither aggression nor sympathy, neither desire for fraternization nor challenge.

The need to decipher other people’s attitudes towards me was a daily necessity which kept all my senses alert and made me quick to perceive the slightest impulse, any unwitting reaction, the ‘life’ which flowed through the smallest tensions, and which took on for me, attentive observer that I was, special meanings and purposes.

During my journey as an immigrant, I forged the tools for my future profession as a theatre director, someone who alertly scrutinizes the performer’s every action. With these tools I learned to see, I learned to locate where an impulse starts in the body, how it moves, according to what dynamic and along which trajectory. For many years I worked with the actors of Odin Teatret as a maître du regard searching out the ‘life’ which was revealed, sometimes unconsciously, by chance, by mistake, and identifying the many meanings that it could take on.

But still another scar marks my physical memory: the period from 1961 to 1964 that I spent in Opole, Poland, following the work of Jerzy Grotowski and his actors. I shared the experience that few in our profession are privileged to have, an authentic moment of transition.

Those few we call rebels, heretics or reformers of the theatre (Stanislavski and Meyerhold, Craig, Copeau, Artaud, Brecht and Grotowski) are the creators of a theatre of transition. Their productions have shattered the ways of seeing and doing theatre and have obliged us to reflect on the past and present with an entirely different awareness. The simple fact that they existed removes all legitimacy from the usual justification, often made in our profession, which maintains that nothing can be changed. For this reason, their successors can only emulate them if they themselves live in transition.

Transition is itself a culture. Every culture must have three aspects: material production by means of particular techniques, biological reproduction making possible the transmission of experience from generation to generation, and the production of meanings. It is essential for a culture to produce meanings. If it does not, it is not a culture.

When we look at photographs of productions by the ‘rebels’, it may be difficult to understand what, on a technical level, is novel about them. But the novelty of the meaning that they gave to their theatre in the context of their times is undeniable. Artaud is a good example. His productions left no traces. Yet he is still with us because he distilled new meanings for that social relationship which is theatre.

The importance of the reformers resides in their having breathed new values into the empty shell of the theatre. These values have their roots in transition, they are the rejection of the spirit of the time and cannot be possessed by future generations. The reformers can only teach us to be men and women of transition who invent the personal value of our own theatre.

At first, Grotowski and his actors were part of the traditional system and the professional categories of their time. Then, slowly, the gestation of new meaning began, through technical procedures. Day after day, for three years, my senses absorbed, detail by detail, the tangible fulfilment of this historic adventure.

I believed that I was in search of a lost theatre,¹ but instead I was learning to be in transition. Today I know that this is not a search for knowledge, but for the unknown.

After the founding of Odin Teatret in 1964, my work frequently took me to Asia: to Bali, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Japan. I witnessed much theatre and dance. For a spectator from the West, there is nothing more suggestive than a traditional Asian performance seen in its context, often in the open tropical air, with a large and reactive audience, with a constant musical accompaniment which captivates the nervous system, with sumptuous costumes which delight the eye, and with performers who embody the unity of actor-dancer-singer-storyteller.

At the same time, there is nothing more monotonous, lacking action and development, than the seemingly interminable recitations of text, which the performers speak or sing in their (to us) unknown languages, melodiously yet implacably repetitive.

In these monotonous moments, my attention developed a tactic to avoid giving up on the performance. I attempted to concentrate tenaciously on and follow just one detail of a performer: the fingers of one hand, a foot, a shoulder, an eye. This tactic against monotony made me aware of a strange coincidence: Asian performers performed with their knees bent, exactly like the Odin Teatret actors.

In fact, at Odin Teatret, after some years of training, the actors tend to assume a position in which the knees, very slightly bent, contain the sats, the impulse towards an action which is as yet unknown and which can go in any direction: to jump or crouch, step back or to one side, to lift a weight. The sats is the basic posture found in sports—in tennis, badminton, boxing, fencing—when you need to be ready to react.

My familiarity with my actors’ sats, a characteristic common to their individual techniques, helped me see beyond the opulence of the costumes and the seductive stylization of the Asian performers, and to see bent knees. This was how one of the first principles of Theatre Anthropology, the change of balance, was revealed to me.

Just as the Odin Teatret actors’ sats made me see the bent knees of the Asian performers, their stubborness provided the opportunity for new conjecture and speculation, this time far from Asia.

In 1978, the actors all left Holstebro in search of stimuli which might help them shatter the crystallization of behaviour which tends to form in every individual or group. For three months, they dispersed in all directions: to Bali, India, Brazil, Haiti and Struer, a small town about fifteen kilometres from Holstebro. The pair who had gone to Struer to a school of ballroom dancing learned the tango, Viennese waltz, foxtrot and quickstep. Those who had gone to Bali studied baris and legong; the one who had been in India, kathakali; the two who had visited Brazil, capoera and candomble dances. They had all stubbornly insisted on doing what, in my view, ought absolutely to be avoided: they had learned styles—that is, the results of other people’s techniques.

Bewildered and sceptical, I watched these flashes of exotic skills, hurriedly acquired. I began to notice t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: The Genesis of Theatre Anthropology
• 2: Definition
• 3: Recurring Principles
• 4: Notes for the Perplexed (And for Myself)
• 5: Energy, or Rather, the Thought
• 6: The Dilated Body: Notes On the Search for Meaning
• 7: A Theatre Not Made of Stones and Bricks
• 8: Canoes, Butterflies and a Horse
• Notes