From: The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, by Eugenio Barba, 1995, pages 81-100

6

THE DILATED BODY
Notes on the Search for Meaning

At the theatre with my mother - I was fifteen years old when I went to the theatre for the first time, in Rome. My mother took me to see Cyrano de Bergerac. The hero was played by Gino Cervi, a very popular Italian actor. But it was neither he nor the other actors who impressed me, nor the story which I followed with interest but without amazement. What impressed me was a horse. A real horse. It appeared pulling a carriage, according to the most reasonable rules of scenic realism. Its presence suddenly exploded all the dimensions which until then had reigned on that stage. Because of this sudden interference from another world, the scene was torn asunder before my very eyes.

In later years, I searched in theatre for that disorientation which had made me feel alive, for that sudden dilation of my senses. In vain.

No more horses appeared. Until I arrived in Opole, Poland and Cheruthuruthy, India.

That horse was the first verse of a song that I did not then know I would sing.

One day you meet a little girl again - Memory is the song which we sing to ourselves, a path of hieroglyphs and perfumes with which we draw nearer to ourselves.

The horse is set free, to fly and prance, chasing its visions.

Sometimes, when you go away, you leave behind a little girl who is vivacious and graceful. Then, a few years later, you meet her again, and it is a mystery how that little girl could have disappeared into a woman who has found her destiny, with fullness and shadows, with a eros which ensnares us and unleashes our fantasy.

When I left Grotowski's theatre, in 1964, Ryszard Cieslak was a good actor. He wanted to be an intellectual. It was as if his body, full of life, was encumbered by a huge brain, as if he was trapped in a two dimensional reality.

I saw him again two years later, when he presented The Constant Prince in Oslo. From the moment the performance began, it was as if all my memories, the categories on which I depended, had been swept away and I saw another being, I saw a man who had found his fullness, his destiny, his vulnerability. That brain which before had been like a jelly blurring his actions, now imbued his entire body with phosphorescent cells.

The power of a hurricane. 'Surely he can't do any more.' And yet, a stronger, even higher wave surged out of his body and hurtled around him.

He was an actor, but I never asked myself, at any time during the performance, how he had arrived at such a peak. Only afterwards, sheltered from the fury of the elements, did I reflect. An entire horizon which up until then had circumscribed my professional borders had now been moved for miles and miles, revealing a land that was as yet difficult to scrutinize, but which existed and which could bear fruit.

Meaning and theories - The theatre can be an anthropological expedition. This is a contradiction in terms, because the anthropologist chooses a place, settles there and does research in the field.

I left Norway and went to the Warsaw Theatre School to become a director. I left the school. But I stayed in Poland, in Opole, a town of 60,000 people, with Grotowski, in his small 'Theatre of the Thirteen Rows'. There, one of my longest and most unforeseeable journeys took place. The other happened in Holstebro, Denmark.

The theatre can be a kind of anthropological expedition which leaves the obvious territories behind, abandons recognized values, the places where offering one's hand is a sign of greeting, where raising one's voice is a symptom of irritation, where a comedy is a cheerful performance, and where a tragedy is a poignant one.

In Poland in the early sixties, the authorities imposed production norms, a pre-established number of performances and openings for each season. One's work was recognized, and deemed to be socially and artistically healthy, on the basis of quantity. This frenzy of production and quantity, this illusion of numbers and statistics was called 'cultural politics', 'democratic culture', 'popular theatre'.

Grotowski did not want to make eight, seven, three new productions a year. He wanted to prepare just one, but well. To give the maximum. To present it to a limited number of spectators in order to deepen the communication. With these few spectators, he wanted to establish spatial and emotional relationships which constituted an encounter, a dialogue with themselves, a meditation on the times. In order to fulfill this personal necessity of his, he had to fight against his times. In 1961, 1962, 1963, sometimes only three or four people came to his performances. During the three years I stayed with him, I witnessed his resistance, practised for only a handful of spectators. He did his work for each of them, for their individual uniqueness, not for the public. Grotowski's 'poor theatre' was not a theory, not a technique, not a bow to make theatre. It was why he was doing theatre.

In 1960, when I was twenty-four years old, I arrived in that town of Opole, by accident, and there I met Grotowski, a young man a couple of years older than myself who looked at me with smiling eyes (were they ironic or understanding?) when I spoke to him of theatre for the people, of political theatre, of theatre's social function. His theatre consisted of a room eighty metres square, only six or seven actors, and about as many loyal and motivated spectators.

He had been one of the leaders of the rebellious, anti-Stalinist youth. In 1956, the workers of Poznan revolted and the university students took a stand for Gomulka, who then came to power and began the famous Polish October. For the first time, there was a feeling that change was possible in a socialist country. But in 1957 and 1958 began what the Poles called 'sausage politics': the cutting away, slice by slice, of what had been conceded. Grotowski was no longer on the political scene. He had disappeared into a tiny theatre in Opole.

I talked to him about Brecht and his theories. He listened, smiling in a way that invited me to keep on talking.

My first meeting with Brecht happened right about that time, five years after his death and five years after the Polish October.

I had arrived in Poland in 1960, my head full of Brechtian theories, and began to study directing at the Warsaw Theatre School. There I met Tadeusz I Kulisiewicz, a graphic artist who had worked with Brecht. He had designed the poster for The Life of Galileo in which the delicately drawn figure of Galileo is shown stooping, as if shut up in his own world, ready to explode, like a steel spring. Kuliesiewicz gave me a letter of introduction to Helene Weigel, Brecht's wife, and with this letter in my pocket, I left for Berlin.

It was hard to arrive in Berlin (West Berlin), from Warsaw. Warsaw still bore the scars of the war. Polish reconstruction was proceeding slowly, but in certain circles, at night, there were outbursts of joie-de-vivre. After their performances, actors went to the Spatif Club, open until two in the morning. Vodka, food, and that special post-performance exhilaration made them exuberant. Often they wanted to keep going all night long and so made their way to the Bristol, the only place in Warsaw open until dawn. An old woman sat on a step at the entrance, selling paper flowers. The actors willingly gave her a little of their change and offered artificial flowers to their companions.

At night, the streetlights were outshone by hundreds and hundreds of little lamps lit by women amid the bombed-out ruins of the city. In the glow of these tiny flames one could read on the walls the names of the Poles shot by the Germans during the Occupation.

Warsaw was gloomy, with long queues outside the food shops. Bulldozers clearing away the ruins uncovered human bones. Trucks carried them away, load after load.

From this Warsaw I travelled to West Berlin. When I saw all its neon, its shops overflowing with flowers and fruit, with chocolate and coloured plastic, I had a sudden urge to vomit. And with this feeling of nausea, I crossed the Wall, which had just been built, and entered East Berlin.

At the end of the performance by the Berliner Ensemble, I realized that I was crying. I was at The Mother. If it is true that at the end of one's fife the images that have touched one's soul pass before one's eyes, I believe that for me among those images will be Helene Weigel with her red flag, in the last scene of The Mother.

I returned to Warsaw confused: how could I have let myself be drawn into sentimentality? After all, Poland was a good school of cynicism. If I had been ingenuous enough to cry, what was it, either in the performance or in me, the spectator, that had not worked? What had happened to the 'effect' sought by Brecht and which was so scientifically described in his writings?

I was not merely confused, but shaken. My theatrical theories became blurred. And others as well.

Poland acted like a corrosive acid. My student hostel faced the Ghetto Heroes' Square. The ruins here had not been cleared away, just levelled out. There was a monument in the centre. Every day big buses arrived from East Germany. Germans - good, socialist Germans, these - got out, and the guide showed them around. They were nearly all the right age to have fought in the war.

One of my friends was a promising young Communist Party official. 'Trying to change something in this country', he said to me, 'is like sticking your prick in a block of ice. You end up castrated and you don't make anything melt.' He accepted the rules of the game. What hurt me the most was that he did so in spite of his intelligence.

Brecht and the theatre were no longer real problems. The real problem was bewilderment.

Groping, I arrived in Opole, where I met Grotowski.

In 1978, 1 returned to East Berlin for the celebration of the anniversary of Brecht's birth. He would have been eighty years old. The international cream of the Brechtian intelligentsia was there, professors who had built careers writing about Brecht and who for years had been imposing his theories as a new orthodoxy. Now they were saying that the Berliner Ensemble was the museum of another age.

A new production had just opened at the Berliner, the first version of The Life of Galileo, which shows how an intellectual can make his voice heard in spite of a regime which is trying to muzzle it.

Once again, I was overwhelmed with emotion. But even stronger was my astonishment: how had they dared to present this production here? The last scene was glacial and terrible. Galileo is blind and is being spied upon by his daughter. Believing that no-one is watching him, he reaches under his stool, and, with the rapid gestures of a conspirator, with the greedy hands of a thief, he pulls out some paper. He writes, writes furiously, then immediately hides what he has just written.

I felt rage towards all those intellectuals from the 'free' countries seated around me, whispering, as if they didn't understand what the performance was crying out to them: 'How boring! The Berliner is dying! We've seen this already. They are repeating themselves! It doesn't mean anything anymore!'

Today, the Wall has fallen. Freedom, Penury and Supermarket dance tog-2ther. Many still ask themselves: 'What is the meaning, today, of making theatre?'

An empty and ineffective ritual - One of the most moving and ambiguous myths of Western civilization tells the story of a man who is searching for his origins. On the path towards his identity he kills his father, sires sonsbrothers with his mother, brings the plague upon an entire population. He goes into exile, alone. But a young girl follows him. Years later, when she goes back to her city, Thebans are fighting Thebans. Brothers take delight in torturing brothers. Children carry arms and have learned to slaughter. Violence and horror, Thebes is the heart of darkness.

Confronted with the civil war in which her brothers have killed each other, Antigone takes a stand. She does not defend her uncle Creon and the law of the state which he represents. Neither does she take to the hills to join her brother's army in the war against the state. She knows the role she has chosen. And she acts in a way that is loyal to this role. She leaves the city by night and goes to the battlefield, takes a handful of dust and scatters it over her brother's corpse, to which Creon has refused burial. A symbolic ritual, empty and ineffective against horror. But she carries it out through personal necessity. And pays with her life.

This is the theatre: an empty and ineffective ritual which we fill with our 'why', with our personal necessity. Which in some countries on our planet is celebrated with general indifference. And in others can cost the lives of those who do it.

The sleeping spectators - Cheruthuruthy, India, September 1963; at nightfall, incessant drums announce a katbakali performance. The spectators arrive and sit on the ground. Two young performers, without costume or makeup, dance for Shiva Nataraja. The performance can begin. Two boys unfurl a brightly coloured silk curtain. Two hands grasp it from behind and shake it: the hidden performer is making his presence known. One of the hands is deformed by long silver nails. The drum rolls increase. Beneath the little curtain, one sees the performer's feet dancing frenetically on the spot. One hears his voice, elaborate yells, hoarse and sharp tones. For a split second, the actor abruptly pulls down the curtain. The spectators see a face whose human aspect has been obliterated by makeup. This first lightning contact is repeated. Then the curtain is folded up and the performer appears in all of his majesty.

Children cry and run between the men and women crouched on mats, while vendors hawking tea, coffee, betel and spicy fritters pass by me. While the drums pound ceaselessly, one after another the singers take up the verses of the story and the katbakali performers seem to float in the air, with the same vigour as the oil lamp in the centre of the stage. The hundreds of silver paillettes hanging from their impressive headpieces flash in the light of the flame, lighting up the performer's green-painted faces. Huge white eyes, injected with red dye. Stiff beards, like collars. Faces glittering with sweat and the oil of the make-up. The Konorak statues are dancing. You want to touch them, caress them, lick them. it is impossible to discern, behind these monumental beings, those boys I saw this morning, their loins wrapped in white cloth, their torsos frail, like urchins who never get enough to eat, their stick-like legs that seemed unable to withstand the exertion.

The butterflies skimming around the flames are indifferent to the crying children, to the men and women chatting, to the sound of the peasants who now, the night well advanced, are stretching out to rest and sleep. And, after five or six hours, I feel empty, dazed by the indifference of the spectators, by the increasing obstinacy of the performers, by this night I have become accustomed to and during which every charm of the exotic has been pulverized.

And yet, at certain moments, something occurs which awakens my senses once again. Ile spectators fall silent and lean forwards, toward the performers. Something happens, an action, which all the preceding monotony has been leading up to: now, Bhima and Dushasana, Nala and Damayanti ... In the sudden silence, the spectators' satisfaction can be heard. Then it all begins again, the singing, the performers fighting battles, confronting demons, crossing mountains, people stretching out and sleeping on the ground, children whimpering, and women, gathering their saris around them, chatting away.

Humility and power of the performer who accepts that he is not the omphalos of the people around him.

The body-mind - There is a physical aspect to thought: its way of moving, of changing direction, of leaping, its 'behaviour'. The dilation does not belong to the physical but to the body-mind. The thought must tangibly cross through matter, not only manifest itself through the body in action, but pass through the obvious, the inertia, that which first presents itself when we imagine, reflect, act.

One of the clearest descriptions of this mental behaviour is contained in the book by Arthur Koestler(1) which is dedicated to'the history of the changes in man's vision of the universe'. Koestler shows how every creative act - in science, in art or in religion - is accomplished through a preliminary regression to a more primitive level, a reculer pour miexx sauter, a process of negation or disintegration which prepares the leap towards the result. Koestler calls this moment a creative 'pre-condition'.

It is a moment which seems to negate all that which characterizes the search for results. It does not determine a new orientation, but is rather a voluntary disorientation which demands that all the energy of the researcher be put in motion, sharpening his senses, like when one advances in the dark. This dilation of one's potentialities has a high price: one loses control of the meaning of one's own action. It is a negation which has not yet discovered the new entity which it affirms.

The performer, the director, the researcher, the artist, all often ask themselves: 'what is the meaning of what I am doing?' But at the moment of the negation of the action, or of the creative 'pre-condition', this is not a fruitful question. At this point it is not yet the meaning of what one is doing that is essential, but rather the precision of the action which prepares the void in which an unexpected meaning can be captured.

Theatre artists, obliged to create in a way which nearly always involves the collaboration of many individuals, are often impeded by a fetishism for meanings, by the need to agree at the outset on the results to be achieved.

A performer, for example, executes a certain action which is the result of an improvisation or of a personal interpretation of a character. It is natural that s/he gives this action a very precise value, that s/he associates it with specific images, intentions, objectives. If, however, the context into which the action is introduced makes the original meaning which it had for the performer inappropriate, then s/he thinks that it should be dropped and forgotten. S/he believes, in short, that the marriage between the action and the meaning associated to it is indissoluble.

In general, if one says to a performer that her/his action can remain intact while its context (and therefore its meaning) is completely changed, then s/he thinks that s/he is being treated as inert matter, manipulated by the directon As if it was the sense that made the action real and not the quality of the action's energy.

Many directors have the same preconception. They tend to believe that a specific image or sequence of images can only transmit a particular meaning.

In the course of work on a production, a performer's actions sometimes begin to come alive, even if one doesn't understand why s/he is acting in that way. It can happen that the director, who is the performer's first spectator, does not know how, on the basis of their common interpretation of the performance, to explain rationally the meaning of what the performer is doing. The director can fall into the trap, show the difficulty s/he has in accepting this spark of unknown life, ask for explanations and demand coherence from the performer. The collaboration is thereby jeopardized as the director seeks to eliminate the distance which separates her/him from the performer. The director demands too much, and in reality, too little. S/he demands a consensus, an agreement about intentions, a meeting on the surface.

Creative thought is actually distinguished by the fact that it proceeds by leaps, by means of a sudden disorientation which obliges it to reorganize itself in new ways, abandoning its well-ordered shell. It is tbought-in-life, not rectilinear, not univocal.

The growth of unexpected meanings is made possible by a disposition of all of our energies, both physical and mental: perching on the edge of a cliff just before taking off in flight - a sats. A disposition which one can distil through training.

The physical training exercises make it possible for the performer to develop a new behaviour, a different way of moving, of acting and reacting, a specific skill. But this skill stagnates into a one-dimensional reality if it does not reach down into the depths of the individual.

The physical exercises are always spiritual exercises.

In the course of my experience as a director, I have observed an analogous process occurring in me and in some of my companions: the long daily work of training, transformed over the years, slowly distilled internal patterns of energy which could be applied to the way of conceiving and composing a dramatic action, of speaking in public, of writing.

Thought and thoughts -John Blacking, during the seminar'Theatre, Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology', organized by the Centre for Performance Research in Leicester, in the autumn of 1988, speaks about a thought which does not become a concept. A world-famous anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, Blacking explains how the circular system mindhand-storie-mind of a 'primitive' man who is splintering a piece of flint to make an arrowhead 'tbinks'with detailed precision. He describes as'thought' the actions of the hands which are rotating a stick to start a fire, or playing a drum. He speaks of the body which 'thinks' when dancing. At first, Blacking's formulas seem to be only suggestive ways of speaking. But then the idea that they are something more takes hold. A way of speaking 'literally'.

Blacking concludes by proposing a thinking in motion-tbinking in concepts polarity.

I ask myself whether thinking in motion might not be the best way to define the teaching of 'physical actions' which Stanislavski tried to pass on to the actor, the teaching of which Grotowski is now the true master.

But conceptual and analytical thought can also contain polarities, tensions, positions and oppositions which oblige it to be in motion, outside its orbit.

During the years of my work with Grotowski, I spoke about the wishful tbinking-concrete thinking polarity. Wishful thinking indicates a particular phase in the process of planning a production: giving free rein to the vision which obsesses us, dreaming with open eyes, believing in and letting oneself be magnetized by the suggestivity of the theme of the performance, letting the mythos triumph. Concrete thinking implies: profaning the fascination of the theme with cold analysis, vivisecting it with scepticism and a caustic attitude, transfixing it with our experience of reality, not what is known, but what I know.

At the second session of ISTA, in Volterra in 1981, we worked on Edward Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North. For pedagogical reasons, I divided the process into two phases. I did the first part on the text itself: cuts, reconstruction and interpretation. The second part was a mise en sc&ne. I had difficulty making it understood why the work on the stage consisted of a continuous polemic with the work which I myself had done seated at a table. Thinking in concepts-thinking in motion; wishful thinking-concrete thinking.

The word 'concrete' comes from con-, together, and crescere, to grow, that is, to let oneself change. But this is never agreeable, either for our way of thinking or for our intellectual identity.

The Flying Dutchman - Leaps of thought can be defined as peripeteias. A peripeteia is an interweaving of events which causes an action to develop in an unforeseeable way, or causes it to conclude in a way opposite to how it began.

A peripeteia. acts through negation: this has been known since at least the time of Aristotle.

The behaviour of thought is visible in the peripeteias of stories, in their unexpected changes as they pass from person to person, from one mind to another. just as happens in the theatrical creative process, so in this case the unexpected changes do not take place in the mind of a solitary artist, but are the work of various interacting individuals sharing the same point of departure.

The Flying Dutchman was Captain Van der Decken. In his attempt to round the Cape of Good Hope, Captain Van der Decken cursed God and Hell: he would not yield to the forces of storms and destiny, but would continue in his attempt until his last day. Thus it was that he heard a voice from the heavens repeating his own words, but now they had become a condemnation: 'until the last day ... the last day'.

And so the seed of a story is sown: a Captain who remains at sea and never dies. A ship which sails on and on. Now, this seed abandons its original context and 'leaps' into other contexts.

Popular imagination superimposes the image of the Captain and his eternal peregrination on that of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who never found peace. Thus the story of Van der Decken changes; it is told that he was damned because he led such an immoral, atheistic life, that he had given the order to weigh anchor on Good Friday, the day on which the Saviour was killed.

Or, the image of the Captain fades away and in its place in the imagination his ship becomes the protagonist. The Ghost Ship suddenly appears to the sailors, black, and with sails the colour of blood, or Yellow, or iridescent, bewitching, changing colour many times an hour.

Time passes and the theme of the Captain and his curse becomes associated with that of a woman who rescues him. This mutation takes place during the sameyears as the story of two otherproverbial adepts of Hell -Don Giovanni and Faust - also changes, and they are saved by the love of a woman.

It was probably Heine who first wove this new motif into the saga of the Flying Dutchman and his Ghost Ship. From time to time Van der Decken docks at a port where he looks for love. He will be rescued from his fate when he finds a woman who will be faithful to him unto death.

In the summer of 1839, Richard Wagner was en route from Riga to London. His wife Minna was with him. Wagner knew the story of the Flying Dutchman, but he understood it only when the boat on which he was travelling was caught in a storm off the Norwegian reefs. The sailors then told the story of the Ghost Ship which always appeared before a shipwreck. They finally managed to anchor between the high cliffs of a fjord at Sandvik, a few miles from Arendal.

When the voyage was over and Wagner reached London and then made his way to Paris, he talked about the storm along the Norwegian coast. He said that the wind was sinister and demonic as it howled in the stays. He told of having seen a sail emerge from the darkness and of believing that he could make out the Dutchman's ship.

It probably occurred - according to lovers of anecdote - that while in Sandvik, Wagner, a guest in the house of a Norwegian captain, became interested in the young girl who was serving at table. He heard the host call her 'j enta' ('girl, servant', in Norwegian) and believed that this was her name.

Later, he changed her name to Senta, a name which is not found in Nor-way, or only in the Norway imagined by Wagner for Der Fliegende Holldnder.

Wagner takes the theme of the love which redeemed the Dutchman but turns it around. He accepts Heine's version and at the same time negates its meaning. Senta does in fact love the Dutchman and swears to be faithful to him unto death. But the Dutchman has overheard a conversation between Senta and Erik, Senta had also once sworn to be faithful to Erik unto death. Now, caught by her destiny, irrevocably bound to the Dutchman, she must renege on her promise to Erik. The Dutchman decides to return to sea; salvation seems impossible, impossible that anyone will be faithful to him unto death. He will save Senta, not the other way around; he fears that Senta will betray him just as she has betrayed Erik. And women who betray him are condemned for eternity. The theme of a curse which a woman can redeem turns into one of a new destiny of condemnation which now falls upon women in love.

The Dutchman, then, flees in order to save the woman who should have saved him. He flees, imagining a false love, which is in fact faithful unto death. When the ship sas, Senta throws herself into the sea and, by dying, remains faithful to her promise. The ship then stops sailing, slowly sinks, and as the sun rises, Senta and the Dutchman ascend to Heaven.

And so now a new metamorphosis. The story, as it had been transformed by Heine and developed by Wagner through a series of oppositions, is taken up by Strindberg. He releases all the potential energy contained in the final variations introduced by Wagner. And as this potential energy is revealed, it inverts the meaning of the story. Now the central theme is one of infidelity, of the pain which a woman inflicts on the man who loves her. it is a theme to which Strindberg returns continuously in his work and which he confronts here using the plot he inherits from Wagner. He also uses it by negating it~ by turning it inside out: every seven years, the Dutchman must meet and love a woman. This is the condition for his salvation, not because the woman is to redeem him, but because the redemption must arise from the suffering which women will cause him through their infidelity.

The theme of love, which had been introduced as an opposite pole to the theme of condemnation, the Dutchman's riever-ending voyage, now leaps again, to a new opposite, and superimposes itself on the theme of the sea voyage, becoming its spiritual equivalent. The Dutchman's true punishment is the continuous failure of love. Love no longer releases him from punishment, as in Heine and Wagner, but is itself the punishment that redeems, that transforms even die Ghost Ship from a prison to a cross.

Let us recall the story as it was at the beginning. Strindberg seems closer to it than his predecessors. And yet he is very far from it. The core of the story, while maintaining its original value, has acquired a new depth. The torment of the physical wandering is heightened by its spiritual double and the sailor who bad become similar to the Wandering Jew, to Faust, to Don Giovanni, returns to being a lonely sailor, abandoned by a woman in every port.

The Flying Dutchman is exemplary. The leaps of thought, the metamorphoses which upset our ways of believing and reasoning, ought to be characteristic of the behaviour of the 'collective mind' of the ensemble working on a performance.

Square circles and twin logics - A physicist is walking along a beach and sees a five-year old child throwing flat stones onto the sea, trying to make them skip. Each stone makes no more than one or two little hops. The physicist remembers that he, in his childhood, was very good at this game. So he shows the child how it is done. He throws the stones, one after the other, showing how to hold them, at what angle to cast them, at what height over the surface of the water. All the stones thrown by the adult skip many times: seven, eight, even ten times.

'Yes', the child then says, 'they skip many times. But that isn't what I was trying to do. Your stones are making round circles in the water, but I want mine to make square circles.'

We know about this episode because the physicist, Piet Hein, told it to Einstein, at that time an old man, when once visiting him. And because Einstein himself reacted in an unexpected way: 'Give the child my compliments and tell him not to be concerned if the stones don't make square circles in the water. The important thing is to think the thought.'

A dialectic relationship does not exist in and of itself. It is born of the will to control forces which, left to themselves, would only conflict with or degrade each other.

When an adult tries to copy the way in which children draw, s/he generally limits her/himself to drawing badly, tries to renounce the logic of her/his own way of seeing, impoverishes it, abandons her/his hand to chance, avoids precision, imitates childish ways of drawing. And thus becomes infantile.

To the adult, indeed, children's drawings appear to be free, fanciful, but inadequate, often clumsy, scrawls. But they actually adhere to an ironclad logic. A child does not draw what he sees and how he sees it, but what he has experienced. If he experiences an adult as a pair of long legs from which a face suddenly bends over him, he will draw this adult as a circle on top of two sticks. Or else he will paint his own 'portrait', giving himself enormous feet because he is happy with his new shoes. If his mother is more important to him than his father, when he draws his parents he will make his mother bigger than his father. He will draw a rectangle with a pole sticking out from each corner because a table is a flat surface with four legs.

For those who study children's drawings, the scribblings which very small children make are also the result of direct experience. They are not representations, but rather traces of actions of the hand in relationship to a mental image: 'Here is a running dog.'

What makes children's drawings 'infantile' is not their approximate or 'primitive' nature, but the presence of only one logic. However, many 'good' drawings made by older children or adults also adhere to only one logic. The fact that they are more recognizable, that they demonstrate the possession of shared rules, does not make them less banal. The same thing happens with performances. There are performances of which one understands nothing, others of which one understands everything. Both are inert.

In the works of a good painter, numerous logics act contemporaneously. The artist is part of a tradition, whose rules s/he uses or consciously breaks, causing surprise. In addition to transmitting a way of seeing, s/he also represents a way of experiencing the world and translates onto the canvas not only the image but also the 'gestus', the quality of motion which has guided the brush. Thus one can say that the painter has 'kept the child in himself', not because he has kept his innocence and ingenuity (oddly enough, we like to think that children are innocent), not because he has not been domesticated by a culture, but because, with the concision of his craft, he has woven together parallel, or rather, twin logics, without substituting one for the other.

Being-in-life is the negation of the succession of different stages of development; it is simultaneous growth by means of ever more complex interweavings.

One of the most treacherous pitfalls which, unsought for, lies in wait in descriptions of exercises and advice for performers, derives from the fact that in a book, things must be placed one after another. They cannot be interwoven. They are textbooks which refer to one context, the only one which can give them a meaning.

Absurdly, some courses of study at the most mediocre theatre schools are not organized as a context but as if they were textbooks. They set up a time (and sometimes a teacher) for each of the individual 'chapters', separating the various threads from which the experience is to be woven.

Professional experience is formed by means of a quality of time which can be organized, coldly put together, but which cannot be the linear time of writing or of programmes that work well on paper. It is a time made up of intermittances and crossroads, of impulses and counterimpulses. It is organic time, not time fractured by the geometry of schedules and calendars.

The action of thought functions in apprenticeship as it functions in the creative situation and in scenic bios: by means of the dialectic between order and disorder. Order without order.

Meyerhold spoke of pedagogical fiction. Coming from him, a dedicated theatre innovator, 'fiction' could not mean 'duplicity', but the co-existence of several logics, brought simultaneously into view.

The guru knows notbing - 'The master often cheats. The student makes a mistake and the master nods: "Good". Sometimes the student does an entire dance correctly and the master shakes his head: "It's wrong". The master is fishing. He says only: "This is correct, this isn't". He makes no other comment, gives no explanations. The student tries to understand, to think for himself, to concentrate, to observe more attentively. This is how the master fishes for his student.'

I Made Pasek Tempo accompanies his words with a smile. The bluish light from the neon tube makes his face ashen. The first time I came to Tampaksiring, in the early seventies, there was no electric light. Now, twenty years later, in the corner of the courtyard, the whole family is gathered around a television, watching a dramagong. In Bali, electricity and obligatory schooling are corroding the age-old master-student relationship. By day, the children go to school; in the evenings, the images on the flickering screen are more attractive than rehearsals of a gamelan or a performance.

I Made Pasek Tempo continues speaking. He tells about the Bhagewan (master) Dhomya and his student Utamaniyu, who looked after the master's cows but was given nothing to eat. It is a long, complicated, obscure story. Everything Utamaniyu does to get food is rebuked by the master. Desperate, he eats some maduri leaves, the sap of which is poisonous. He goes blind and falls into a well. The Bhagewan pulls him out, asks him how he happened to fall into an empty well. Utamaniyu replies: 'I asked others for food and you said I was greedy; I licked the cowsmilk that had fallen on the grass and you reprimanded me; I ate maduri leaves and I lost my sight.'

Bhagewan Dhomya approves: 'For the first time, you are sincere. Now you may consider yourself my student.'

I don't understand. Stories from distant universes, from epochs long gone.

A few months earlier, in the sophisticated atmosphere of a conference on interculturalism organized by Richard Schechner and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Sanjukta Panigrahi had described her decade of work at ISTA and her collaboration, at first apprehensive and prudent, with masters from other cultures and theatrical genres. She had concluded by referring to something of which she had become convinced: 'The buildings are different, but they rest on the same ground.' Then she had described the beginnings of her career. When she was three years old, she became the first daughter of a Brahmin family to study dance. Supported by her mother, who fought doggedly against prejudice. In order to improve her dancing, she had to leave home at the age of eight and go to Madras, more than a thousand kilometres to the south, to another culture with another language. She had described how her mother reacted when people reproached her: 'How could you send your daughter down there?'

'When I began', Sanjukta remembered, 'the teacher did not correct me, did not say anything. He made me sit and work with eye exercises. Day after day. I went home and complained to my mother. "The guru knows nothing".'

I Made Pasek Tempo shows me a copy of the Adiparwa, the classic pontaining the story of Dhomya and Utamaniyu. I ask him if, at his age (sixtyfive? seventy?), he still likes to read. He answers:

There are two things which are difficult:

- to become a pragina pradnian, a complete performer who knows how to dance, play instruments, who knows the classical texts, how to teach and also how to learn;

- menjiwai, to make one's soul and thoughts live, to give life to what one wants to achieve, to make one's own spirit at one with the spirit of the topeng, of the mask, so that whatever it is that one wants to transmit through the characters, the spectators can feel it, appreciate it, and say: 'This is truly the dalem, the king, the panisar, the clown.'

Then I breathe out, empty my lungs and concentrate in order to let the
kundalini reach the eye of the bathin, the inner force. Kundalini is the
energy which makes the body and the mind live. I am still learning.

Shakespeare: Prologue to 'The Life of Henry the Fifth' - The actor enters and asks:

... Can this cock-pit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden 0 the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

This is one of the most famous perplexities regarding the meaning of the theatre: can the massacres of history be represented in a cock-fighting ring?

How to bring the multiplicity and vehemence of the life of an individual, of a society, into the artificial situation of the theatre?

Even Brecht doubted that the theatre could expose the thick web of forces which move history.

Is it possible to bring into the theatre all the horror, the grandeur, the mystery and the simultaneity of human existence without reducing it to a twodimensional image? Is it possible to dilate this image, as if under the lens of a microscope, bringing to the foreground the dynamic of every fragment of reality, that which is not perceived in everyday life?

There is no gap between the performer's work to master and model her/his energies and the moment in which the creative process emerges as an objective and social result - the performance.

In the same way that the performer's extra-daily behaviour can reveal the tensions hidden within the design of movements, the performance can be the representation not of the realism of the story, but rather of its reality, its muscles and nerves, its skeleton. It can lay bare that which is seen only when the flesh of the story is stripped away: the power relationships, the socially centripetal and centrifugal forces, the tension between freedom and organization, between intention and action, between equality and power.

What the theatre says in words is not really very important. What counts is to disclose the relationships, to show at one and the same time the surface of the actions and their internal parts, the forces which are at work and in opposition, the way in which the actions are divided into their polarities, the way in which they are executed, the ways in which they are endured.

Making it possible for the spectator to decipher a story does not mean making her/him discover its 'true meaning'but creating the conditions within which s/he can ask herlbimself about its meaning. It is a question of exposing the knots of the story, those points at which extremes embrace. There are spectators for whom the theatre is essential precisely because it does not present them with solutions, but knots.

In past centuries, there existed 'Anatomical Theatres'. Even then, on the tiers of the operating theatres, there mingled together starving and thirsty spectators, and curious and conceited spectators, frowning philosophers and young believers, all drawn by the fascinating and frightening mystery of the open man.

Down below, the surgeon and the open man hid their mystery behind the exposure of the organs and the meticulous work. 'How did he get there?', they wondered of the one. 'Why is he doing it?', they wondered of the other.

Similar to one and the other at the same time, to the opened body and to the knowing and heretical surgeon who opens it, is the presence of the performer and what is, above all, her/his own mystery. Vision of what is hidden under the skin.

Similar to the Anatomical Theatre is the theatre of which I am thinking as I sing to myself the song which is my memory: half-way between performance and science, between didactics and transgression, between horror and wonder.

You are still very beautiful - Luis says: 'Decroux always sang while we worked. The rhythm of the song guided the speed of the movement while the intensity of his voice regulated the dynamics. Sometimes he sang by himself while directing us, sometimes we sang with him while we did the exercises. He always used his voice. Old, popular French or English songs, which he interpreted ironically, playing with the pronunciation. The exhalation, as opposed to what usually happens, was the active phase upon which he supported and developed the action. The inhalation was quick, he called it the spasme. It was the beginning of the action which collided with the resistance obtained by prolonging the exhalation as much as possible. I imagine that the spasme corresponds to what you from Odin Teatret call sats.'

'He was obsessed with invisible movement, that movement which - he said -could only be discovered if examined through a microscope. He used the example of a violinist: the bow moves imperceptibly, yet there is sound; one doesn't see the movement, yet one hears the music. The echo resounds, even if you don't want it to. He called this the "gong effect", the movement is finished but continues.'

I draw Luis' attention to the fact that the same image is used in no: io-in, the vibrations of a bell after it has been struck with the clapper; that Meyerhold spoke of 'braking the rhythm' and used music to gag his actors' spontaneity. Luis gets up, demonstrates the spasme, the 'gong effect', in certain figures, the exhalation which is like a hiss accompanying the physical action. The consequence of this exhalation, this sonorous echo, is contraction of the muscles of the abdomen. Our fellow passengers stare at us in surprise. Our enthusiasm at discovering points in common among Decroux, Meyerhold, Japanese performers and Odin Teatret actors; seems out of place in the departure lounge of Sao Paolo's Congonhas airport. As he does every time we meet, Luis tells me about his 'master', Etienne Decroux. He worked with Decroux in Paris, for three years, from 1976 to 1978. Luis is an actor, a director and a professor at the University of Campinas in Brazil, where he directs a laboratory of performance research. We are travelling together to the Londrina Festival, which this year has been devoted entirely to Odin Teatret.
Luis continues:

In August of 1990, after the Bologna ISTA, I went to visit Decroux in Paris. Jeannette, who runs the bar on the corner, had the house-keys and let me in. She told me about the state of Decroux' health. And that he was always singing, even at night.

He was seated in an armchair, staring into space. He did not respond to my greeting. I knelt down, took one of his hands and kissed it. He looked at me and began to sing. It was as if an arrow had pierced my breast. His fingers rhythmically squeezed my hand. With his elbow resting on the arm of the chair, his forearm was swaying in time to the music.

I too began to sing. I knew those songs so well. I had repeated them every day, hour after hour, during my years with him. Sometimes he tilted his head to one side, gazing upwards and prolonging the final note of a verse, his mouth wide open ... the violin effect. The movement had stopped but the sound continued. The tension vibrated inside him. He seemed excited.

We sang together for more than an hour. I got up to take my leave. I tried to recognize, in that deformed skull, in those eyes which were two gaping cavities, in that toothless mouth, the old man I had loved. I would not have recognized him if I had seen him somewhere else. I bent down, kissed him on the forehead, and whispered to him: 'You are still very beautiful'. A broad, pure smile and then, suddenly, a profound sadness covered his face. I left him, asking myself if I had done the right thing, saying those words. Six months later I learned of his death.

He said that the performer is like Christ, the right hand must not know what the left hand is doing. He defined improvisation as a ,muscular erection': one should not think, the muscles are singing, and this melody, like an erection, comes and goes without one knowing why. AH those who have studied with him have a refined, extraordinary technique. He had a lion inside him and his technique kept it at bay.

The pincess who kept the winds at bay - In Denmark, and in southern Sweden, there are some singular archaeological remains: stones strewn over the ground according to a design which, at first glance, looks like the skeleton of a gigantic or prehistoric animal. Some archeologists maintain that these stones represent the paths of a labyrinth. They trace its origins to the legend of Trella, a Norwegian princess whose boat was sailing towards Denmark and was constantly thrown off course by freezing winds. Trella landed on a deserted coast, built an elaborate palace without walls and managed to trap the winds in its wandering corridors, keeping them at bay. And then she continued on her way. In antiquity, the story of Trella inspired other people to create new trellaborgs - borg means fortress - to exorcize the forces of nature.

My theatre is a trellaborg. Stones which I knowingly scattered in order to build a labyrinth-castle, without bastions yet present, vulnerable yet effective, where I confront the winds of the spirit of the times.

My dream is to transmit how to build a trellaborg.

Another version of the legend has it that while Trella was trying to resist, the winds of the time captured her in the palace which she had built and made her dance at their will and to their fury.

Shiva's female balf, moon and darkness - The performer's dilated body is a hot body, but not in the sentimental or emotional sense. Feeling and emotion are reactions, consequences. It is a red hot body, in the scientific sense of the word. The particles which make up daily behaviour have been excited and produce more energy. They have undergone an increment of motion, they move apart, they attract each other, they oppose each other with more force, more speed, within a larger space.

This is fascinating and sometimes deceptive; one is tempted to believe that it has to do only with 'bodies', with physical and not mental actions.

But a way of moving in space manifests a way of thinking. It is a way of thinking laid bare. Or a way of moving which guides the thought.

Bonn, October 1980, the end of the first session of ISTA. Sanjukta Panigrahi dances Ardbanarishwara, Shiva's female half. Immediately afterwards, Then Nagel Rasmussen presents her professional autobiography: Moon and Darkness. For a month, all of us assembled here have obstinately examined the cold, technical pre-expressive bases of the performer's work.

Sanjukta dances:

I bow before you
You who are both male and female
Two gods in one
You whose female half
has the vivid colour of a champak flower
And whose male half
has the palid colour of the camphor flower

The female half jingles with golden arm bracelets
The male half is adorned with bracelets of serpents
The female half has love-eyes
The male half has meditation eyes

The female half has a garland of almond flowers
The male half has a garland of skulls
Dressed in dazzling clothes
Is the female half
Nude, the male half

The female half is capable of all creation
The male half is capable of all destruction

I turn to you
Linked to the God Shiva
Your husband
I turn to you
Linked to the Goddess Shiva
Your wife

Iben Nagel Rasmussen sings a lament, the song of the shaman of a destroyed people. She then reappears as Kattrin, the mute daughter of Mother Courage, a stammering adolescent on the threshold of a world at war. The Indian actress and the Danish actress seem far apart, each deep within her own culture. And yet, they meet. They seem to surpass not only their personas and sex, but even their artistic skill, and reveal something more.

I know how many years of work have led to these moments. And yet it seems as if something is blossoming spontaneously, something neither sought for nor desired. I have nothing to say. I can only watch, as Virginia Woolf watched Orlando. 'A million candles burned in Orlando, without him having thought of lighting even a single one.'

A fistful of water - My gaze wanders over the candles which are spread everywhere. I have been told that this is not a performance, yet I see 'people who are acting'. If what is happening here is only for them, then why am I here? Why was I invited and why did I come? May 1990; it is thirty years since I first met Grotowski, who is now seated beside me in a converted barn in the Tuscan countryside where Roberto Bacci has provided him with a sanctuary in which to work.

I am here to become a witness, to confirm that 'this' has happened. How does one be a witness? By writing, explaining, justifying, as I had done in 1961 after seeing Grotowski's Dziady with a handful of other spectators in that grey Polish town of Opole? What is the duty of the witness: to recount in detail, by allusion, with metaphors, orally, writing for everyone or only for the few who show interest? To be silent? To mask silence with words?

This is how legends are born: there were never any candles in Grotowski's productions; only in the first part of his last one, Apocalypsis cum figuris. And yet a performance in which there are candles is defined with a clich6: Grotowskian. Grotowski today is Grotowskian.

What is 'this' that I am watching: a ritual with no content, a celebration of technique, a liturgy without theology or simply a refined montage of physical and vocal actions which the impeccable mastery of a'director', a'metteur-enespace', lifts to the level of ceremony?

What would happen if 'this' had to go in search of witnesses, if it had to move and not remain in its barn?

What would 'this' become in a gymnasiurn, in a suburban school, in the foyer of a museum, in the warehouse of an abandoned factory?

I watch 'those who are acting'. Some of them are from theatre groups I know. What has made them leave the spotlights to move around here, among the shadows cast by the candles? What will they take with them when they return to the alacrity of theatre work?

I don't know why, but something tightens inside me. Then I am ashamed, I become angry. I think of myself in Opole, when everyone said I was crazy to leave theatre school and spend months and months with Grotowski, a charlatan who was putting on meaningless performances. Everything I have done has been a search for freedom in the theatre. Now I am witnessing freedornfrom the theatre.

I am struck by the quality of the work. But I remain outside it, as if a sheet of glass is preventing me from sensing the energy of the bodies in front of me. It is the same feeling I had when I saw Dziady. I drown in the mystery, in the non-sense, in my inability to orient myself, to recognize, to connect. 'This'provokes only questions.

The rhythm of 'those who are acting' does not surge, does not quiver, neither accelerates nor slows down. It is a river current which flows implacably, yet seems, to my attentive eyes, to be still. This stillness stirs up thoughts and memories, the torpid life of memory and of the senses. I feel as though I am very far away, within myself, absent from what is happening. An alteration of the normal state of consciousness. Is this the secular sacrum to which Grotowski, in Towards a Poor Theatre, yearned to give life? it is neither the theatre nor 'this' which is sacrum. It is the act, the work which can become it.

The current continues to flow. I immerse my hand in it~ to grasp something. My hand comes up empty, again and again. A fistful of water. Why do I imagine, then, that I have seized the meaning?