English - Odin Teatret

ANDERSEN’S DREAM
Dedicated to Torzov and Doctor Dapertutto
Based on texts by Hans Christian Andersen and the actors’ improvisations
Actors: Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Jan Ferslev, Tage Larsen, Augusto
Omolú, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Julia Varley, Torgeir Wethal, Frans Winther
Scenic space: Luca Ruzza, Odin Teatret - Production architect:
Johannes Rauff Greisen - Lighting concept: Luca Ruzza, Knud Erik Knudsen,
Odin Teatret -
Light design: Jesper Kongshaug - Music: Kai Bredholt, Jan
Ferslev, Frans Winther - Masks and puppets: Fabio Butera, Danio Manfredini
Artistic objects: Plastikart og Studio PkLab - Costumes: Odin Teatret
Dramaturg: Thomas Bredsdorff - Literary advisor: Nando Taviani
Director’s assistants: Raúl Iaiza, Lilicherie McGregor, Anna Stigsgaard
Dramaturgy and director: Eugenio Barba
Drawings: Hans Krull - Cover: Luca Ruzza - Odin Teatret thanks: Lena
Bjerregaard, Den Sønderjydske Højskole, Mette Jensen, Jakob Knudsen, Kaj Kok,
Martin Nielsen, Stine Lundgaard Nielsen, Bjarne Nygaard Nielsen, Keld Preuthun,
Ellen Skød.
Odin T e a t r e t : Patricia Alves, Eugenio Barba, Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Jan
Ferslev, Adrian Jensen, Hanne Jensen, Søren Kjems, Knud Erik Knudsen, Tage
Larsen, Else Marie Laukvik, Karen Lind, Augusto Omolú, Fausto Pro, Sigrid Post,
Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Anne Savage, Pushparajah Sinnathamby, Rina Skeel, Ulrik
Skeel, Stefan Tarabini, Nando Taviani, Julia Varley, Torgeir Wethal, Frans Winther.
Production: Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium with a grant from H. C. Andersen 2005 Fonden
ANDERSEN'S DREAM
Two Tracks for the Spectator
A circle of artists gathers in a garden in Denmark. It is a bright morning. They wait
for a summer night when the setting sun will dance.
A friend from another continent is about to join them. With him, dreaming with
open eyes, they will depart on a pilgrimage into the regions of Andersen's fairy
tales. Europe is at peace, or at least their country is. Or perhaps only their garden.
In that confined space, time stands still and liquefies.
It is summer, yet snow falls, and the snow becomes tainted with black.
Their fantasies sail on a tenebrous dream: a vessel that transports men and women
in chains. The artists feel the weight of invisible chains. Are they, too, enslaved?
When the pilgrimage is about to end, the open-eyed dreamers become
aware that their summer's day lasted a lifetime. The bed of dreamless sleep
awaits them. Figures are coming to take them. Are they ghosts, puppets or toys?
What kind of life do we live, when we stop dreaming? And which tragedy or farce
does the sun dance?
****
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) wrote in his diary how he dreamt he was
invited by the king to travel on his ship. Andersen raced, panting, to the harbour
but the royal vessel had already set sail. Called on board another ship, he was
brutally thrown into the hold and there he realised he was part of a load of slaves.
Hans Christian Andersen's grandfather was insane and his father, a
cobbler with an exacerbated sensibility, died when his son was still a child. His
mother, a washerwoman, drank to keep warm while washing cloths in the river.
She was considered little more than an alcoholic prostitute and died of delirium
tremens in a poorhouse. Andersen kept well away from the squalor of her death.
Already famous, he remained where he was, in Rome.
Since childhood, Andersen had wanted to escape from the slavery of his
social condition. When only fourteen, he ran away from the poverty of his native
Odense to Copenhagen, becoming a singer, ballet dancer, actor and writer.
However, he never lost the anguished awareness that only through constant
struggle could he break the chains of his original condition of serf, and that
perhaps, in the belly of his beloved and civilised country, a people of slaves was
hidden.
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Torgeir Wethal
Mirrors Damaged by Damp and Rust
The voice is hoarse. A cigarette hangs at the corner of the mouth. She is minute,
old, with a bark-coloured face. Her hips shake sensually as she holds a drum
between her legs. She beats on it, sings and incites the lively girls dancing in a
circle around her with swaying hips or on all fours and with shivering bottoms. The
old woman flirts with the men around her, her radiant eyes remain fixed in the
memories and by the cameras that she attracts. She is the queen, dominating the
situation and at the same time playing with it.
When she was young, she was the sultan's favourite dancer and singer.
This was a long time ago. Now she is the main attraction at the Women’s House.
It is festival time in Stone Town, Zanzibar.
A couple of hours later I notice her in the street. She is all covered in
black. I recognise her by the eyes and the bare feet. The ecstasy of the day is
over. She is alone now.
Roberta and I are in one of Africa's extreme points. Roberta has found two dance
teachers: a young girl who comes in her school uniform to give her lessons, and
another more experienced dancer. They belong to two separate dance and theatre
groups. Their dancing shows are full of vitality. Their theatre performances are
amateurish, stiff and full of giggles, but they achieve their purpose, with subjects
like the women's place in the home and in society, the difference and the gap
between generations, birth control, AIDS, Africa.
- Africa?
- Yes, Africa. It is a continent that has never attracted our theatre. We
have to apply ourselves to new challenges, confront situations which are difficult
to explain and in which we don't know how to behave. Each of the actors will
travel to Africa for a period. Alone or in couples.
We are gathered in Eugenio's office, 7th of March 2001. It is not big, but
if we squeeze up there is just room for the actors and musicians of Mythos, Odin
Teatret's latest production. We are still performing it and will do so for a long time
yet. Perhaps we can also continue with it when we have finished the new
production. In fact, all the people sitting here have confirmed their wish to
participate in the new work, despite the fact that they are tired of travelling,
despite problems at home with family, despite difficulties in finding professional
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challenges (as Eugenio prefers to call them), despite age. Age means that each of
us is at the helm of our own projects, guiding and directing others. With age it
becomes more and more difficult, for many of us, to be driven and work with a
director - with Eugenio.
In truth, it needs to be said that some of us are happy to start again,
without reservations.
But Africa?
- The slaves and the slave routes will have a place in our next performance,
Eugenio explains.
The slaves' culture, above all of the slaves of the United States. It may also offer
possibilities of music that we have not used before, for example blues and
spirituals.
I feel cold towards Africa, I cannot imagine myself learning to dance,
jump and stamp in the African way with my joints 'endowed' with rheumatism as
they are. There are so many examples of storytellers in Europe that there is no
need to travel so far to find them. I have no such desires, but I keep silent. Inside
me I know that something will emerge if I get involved. Later, much later, Roberta
finds a solution in which I can also insert myself.
Stone Town - one of the big ports of embarkation. Here the wares - the slaves were gathered, selected, stored, auctioned and shipped away. Here the last
remnant of human dignity was chained to the walls and rocks of the caves. In
narrow underground passages inhumanity mingled with terror of the unknown.
They could not run away or challenge their fate. Did they sing?
- Old people's homes. Each of the actors must also work for a period in an old
people's home, says Eugenio during that meeting in his office in which he spoke
of the slaves’culture. Old people's homes, because one of the subjects of the new
production could be age, how to grow old and get ready to leave - with dignity.
A new performance haunts. I know that it has been turning over in
Eugenio's head for a long time. You can tell by what interests him, by listening to
what he tells those who come to his lectures, or from conversations with his
friends.
Fermenting underneath all this are the things which worry him, both in
the distant world and close at hand, his obsessions, his daily qualms for our future
(that of the Odin), dreams and memories from his youth, an old man's insight and
struggles, professional challenges such as the physical age of his actors, the desire
to destroy everything and rebuild from zero, the temptation to slam the door and
say: "Enough!" But he is also aware that someone must continue to open the door
to those who knock. What do I know, after all, of what is stirring inside him?
Something is on the verge of crystalising, the performance's central topic is
finding its form. Other parallel themes have been exposed, for example the struggle
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to preserve one's own freedom without adhering to the myopic demands of Time.
But this central topic must contain a composite universe which allows us actors to
reflect upon our own obsessions, opinions and dreams, as well as mirror them.
The hotel terrace has its legs in the water. It is a pleasant, almost summer day in
late autumn. At home it is winter. Sardinia. We are surrounded by green,
transparent waves. This is the only moment when we can all gather together
during a break stolen from our manifold tour activities, around a big table.
- Andersen? The subject for our new production? Hans Christian Andersen?
My first thought is: family Andersen, second floor on the right. In the
head of each of us a lot of things must have happened at the same time.
Eugenio gives numerous reasons for this choice, motivating them from
Andersen’s works and biography. It is the 24th of November 2001.
In our activity calendar we had already fixed several periods for the preparation
of the production. Now these periods were filled with two new assignments. First
assignment: each actor had to prepare an hour of 'individual material' with a
dramaturgical structure. We had to invent, create, build, repeat and learn
successions of actions, texts, songs, dances and music, find props and costumes,
organise the performing space, and connect all this through episodes with a
coherent logic related to the production's subject. In this individual work we could
use another colleague in specific situations. For example, to play the music for a
song or a dance, or to help in a technical task. If delicate lights were to be carried
behind the cobweb wings of the costume, this could be done by one or even two
of the other actors. But the point of departure was solitary personal work. A task
that demands a strong need to create, and a desire to progress, to develop
oneself, to discover new aspects of the craft, to surprise the other actors and the
director - for the umpteenth time.
In addition to this desire and need, such work demands great
self-discipline. We had given ourselves enough time, and established various long
working periods. But in the middle of the fireworks of fantasies, dreams and
thoughts that Hans Christian Andersen had set off, I know that some of the actors
already saw themselves banging their heads against a wall. The wall of habit. The
wall of idleness. The wall of clichés. The wall of solitude.
I believe that the other assignment fascinated us much more: each of us
had to direct one of Andersen's fairy tales with colleagues as actors. It was up to
us to decide how to do it. The result should not last more than twenty minutes,
however this was not an iron rule.
Eugenio said it straight: "I will work only with what you bring me. This will
decide the destiny of the production and thus also of our future. I want to receive."
It was an amazing experience to enter Andersen's world, his texts and
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biographies. It was entirely different from what I had imagined. In the beginning,
despite my zeal, I fell asleep reading about him. If I was spellbound, it was more
because of the biographer's narrative style than for the life s/he described.
Everything was so obvious, especially the ambiguities and the questions. Long
periods passed before I could react for or against, before I came across something
that I didn't grasp, that aroused my curiosity or imagination, reflecting or distorting
realities, hopes, degradations, dreams and anger. I need mirrors damaged by
damp and rust. Here all was smooth. Some of my colleagues were in the same
state as me. But not everybody. Some jumped on this universe and went on a
journey of discovery. Others remained on the quay in the hope that they might
board a passing ship as stowaways.
It was different with the fairy tales. Most of us had our favourites, long
before we realised the multiplicity of their hidden meanings. But when I tried to
swallow several of them in one go, it ended badly. The verbosity and the continuous
repetition brought my eyes to a standstill. I fell asleep once more.
There was something in the fairy tales that I didn't understand. I started,
then, to invent Andersen's 'reading intonation'. I imagined the inflexions, the
emphasis and rhythms that he unfolded in front of different audiences. There was
a great difference in 'playing with the words', according to whether he was in front
of ladies in an elegant living room, or among village women, or whether he was
telling his tales to rich or poor children. The age and the social origin of his
audience changed the fairy tale, even if the text remained the same. Sentences
that seemed unequivocal acquired other meanings, and 'if I changed audience',
the meaning was also modified.
December 2002: Eugenio has engaged Augusto Omolú in the new production.
Augusto is a dancer and Brazilian. We have collaborated with him over many years
in ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology). Together we have made
several productions in which, above all, his dancer's experience was utilised. Now
he has to be an actor. It is a long time since fresh blood flowed in Odin Teatret’s
veins. It is good if this will shake the well established dynamics of our chicken
house. It is not a bad thing that someone comes who still knows how to use the
body without having to slalom between weak and vulnerable points (I speak of
concrete things such as knees, necks, hips and backs).
We have enough time, but time runs both fast and slow. The tours with the old
productions and other practical matters at the theatre in Holstebro devour our
days with pleasure and appetite.
'Andersen' progresses with such an inertia that I am panic stricken. I was
looking forward once more to finding pleasure in the work, in the challenges, in
the liberty with no censorship in which thoughts and actions constantly create
08
new branches. Branches which need to be pruned with time, but first they have
to grow. It is when Eugenio kneels and begins to eradicate the weeds that we
recognise the precious seedlings that have sprung up, those that belong to the
garden of the production. Yes, I looked forward, thinking about the pleasure of
ploughing, sowing and seeing buds blossoming. But I am unable to find any seeds.
I don't discover anything against which to measure myself or that offers me the
possibility to marry different worlds and see amazing, beautiful or horrible
bastards surface.
Vanity occupies a big place in the majority of human beings. It really can be called
human.
During the rehearsals there is an obvious division of tasks, and this concerns
also the actors and the director. According to our way of working, for a long time
Eugenio follows the frames of actions, the songs and the music that we actors
propose. He watches them over and over again. He scrutinises them in order to
memorise them, to find connections with the subject of the production, to discover
how to combine disparate fragments and extract a different or manifold meaning.
Manifold because the manifold memories of the spectators are active at the same
time. What effect will a nuptial hymn have if sung during a funeral? Eugenio observes
our proposals in order to understand how to fuse them with his needs.
After a long time he starts gradually to modify. He combines single
elements in new ways, inserts fragments of our personal material, cuts, builds
bonds, includes texts or actions that help the spectator to follow a logic, or he
eliminates elements that are misleading. He is working on the hull of the plot,
the dramaturgical foundations, the bearing structure. New ideas come to him,
new questions arise. During this period he doesn't work too much with the actors.
He may do so in some scenes or fragments that he 'has understood', trying other
ways of performing the fixed actions, introducing new texts and objects, trying
out new songs. It is an open period. Eugenio gives us room. We give him room.
Then he spends more and more time on the details, both of the story and
of the actor. It is a period of vulnerability that demands trust and availability to
listen and receive. Here it is better if all defensive walls collapse. It is not that
we criticise or condemn each other's results. We are all intent on our tasks. There
is a common modulation, an effort to improve and a struggle to strip us of our
clichés and mannerisms, both the personal ones and those of the group.
It is precisely in this period that the devil of vanity shows its face.
Corrections are taken as criticisms, cuts in the actions and text as incomprehension. If one of us is not able to solve a technical task - for example, to tumble
from a chair without making it fall - s/he feels inadequate. In the past we would
have spent days or weeks finding the solution. An atmosphere of rejection and
defence is easily established, one that doesn't bear fruit, interrupting the tide of
09
the main river in which the other tributaries are converging as an inverted delta.
The consequence is floods or desert everywhere. In situations of this type Eugenio
gets blocked. His ability to improvise is choked, his pleasure in work is extinguished.
The same happens with us, we become mechanical, we act but think of something
else.
We know this danger - the devil of vanity - from experience. We have
met it before and we force ourselves to avoid it. This is probably the reason why,
in a meeting just before starting the rehearsals, Eugenio took the bull by the
horns. Some of us had already mentioned this problem. Eugenio spoke now
directly, in first person. He punched the boil with a scalpel that was not always
sharp. Everyone was irritated, wounded, tired, angry; probably because the tone
had been hard. I was exhausted and sad, almost happy, in every case optimistic.
It had been a lifesaving manoeuvre in a stormy sea, before launching the ship.
During the last thirty-five years I have never tried to imagine what I
would have done if I had not continued with Odin Teatret. I have always thought
at length before deciding whether to participate in a new production. Yet once I
took a decision, I never doubted that I would stick to it. For the first time, I had
some reservations. During one of the following meetings, necessary to clean the
pus from the wound, I had to know if each of my colleagues was still prepared to
participate. I was ready on condition that we worked together. I wanted to have
a sandpit where together we could build a sand castle. There is room for everybody
and we can each build our own tower in the style we wish, provided that it is an
integral part of the castle. But there is no room for those who piss in the corners
and sully the building material for themselves and the others. If this happens, I
step down. I feel a need to respect the people with whom I work.
The time limit established was about to expire. I couldn't get started. My thoughts
bit themselves in the tail, like a wheel of fortune whose arrow passes over
fragments of one fairy tale after another, stopping at random on one of them. It
didn't suit me to work with fragments. In time, everything would have been split
up and reassembled. I wanted to start from a complete story. One day I was able
to take a step back and see the wheel of fortune and the fragments from a
distance. I have to admit that most of the fragments derived from "The Judgement
Day", a tale which had profoundly irritated me. It presents 'the animal which lives
in every human being'. It shows a 'just man' on his deathbed and who he really
was: a man like so many others. Up to this point there were no problems. But the
final part which describes the celestial splendour and how we will meet it again,
is as absolutist as the opinions of those against whom he writes.
I am unable to discover to whom Andersen tells this tale. To someone
who he wants to please? Does he want to attack a particular person? No irony or
ambiguity is to be found in this final part. Were they just words that had escaped
10
one after another from his pen? Was he using a shotgun against all sects? Or was
he expressing his fundamental belief? I have to ask the experts.
Although it continued to irritate me - or perhaps because of this - I chose
this tale as the framework for the work I had to develop alone.
At Odin Teatret we have three large working rooms and one smaller one, but there
are many other places where the door can be closed and you can work undisturbed
if you don't need much space. All the rooms are occupied all day long. A mantle of
secrecy covers everything. Everybody has found details - costumes, props or spatial
solutions - to surprise the others when they have to show their material.
Some feel that they lack resources - literally. They must shape and put
together in solitude that which has occupied each of us for the last eighteen
months. They have to undergo this process without that mirror and partner with
which to converse (the director); and also without the meaning which emerges
while acting and reacting in relation to the other actors, and when what you do
and say is transformed into a part of a greater story. The material we are working
on doesn't need to have the strict logic of a performance. It can be loose, but must
possess what the final performance will contain, including the vulnerability - the
moments without a protective shell when we don't hide behind our ability. Can
we attain all this alone?
Others feel more at ease, having faith in what they have contrived, and
use all their energy on their ideas. All are nervous. Some of those who 'lack resources'
ask for help from a colleague or an assistant director.
Eugenio has almost always had an assistant director while preparing a
production: a student of dramaturgy or a young director. This is a person who
observes the rehearsals, proposing solutions and helping the actors to discover how
to perform a particular action or to handle a prop. It is above all someone with
whom Eugenio speaks a lot outside the working room, explaining what he thinks,
why he works in one way with one actor and differently with another, or why he
does not aim directly at a goal. It is an introduction to theatre practice in a real
situation with all of its crises and doubts.
In the old days, the assistant's role didn't have a practical meaning for the
actors, but in recent years this situation has changed, as a result of the changes
in Eugenio's way of working. Today we have three assistant directors, each with
different experience. They keep a check on what has happened during a rehearsal
in which Eugenio reacts, improvises, cuts and adds texts and actions while, at the
same time, he makes us improvise. If we had to stop to write down every change
to be remembered the following day - as we used to do in the past - we wouldn’t
get very far, and the way of working that Eugenio has developed in the last few
years would not function at all. The three assistants, each with their own directing,
musical and linguistic experience, react with availability if an actor
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asks for help: three people between the ages of 24 and 50 who have chosen to run
this marathon with us, while at the same time one of them is finishing a PhD,
another has to take care of and direct his theatre group and the third intends to
complete her university studies.
Each actor has to select and stage a fairy tale. We draw lots. Frans and Tage
accept to be the first. They have been ready for a long time. Roberta and Jan are
allowed to be the last, since during the preceding months they have been
rehearsing Salt, a new production directed by Eugenio, and have not had much
time. The others want to face the firing line as late as possible since they need
more time. I think that almost all of them have a clear idea about what they
intend to do. The nightmare is how to organise this idea and prepare it with their
colleagues in only two days. And these two days have become two sessions of four
hours, because in the morning everybody wants to work on their own individual
material.
I imagine what we have to prepare as the rough draft of a scene, the
sketch of a scenario or the outline of actions in space. Everything has to be clear
in the head of the 'director' who must forget dreams and table work and come with
ready-made technical solutions. It is a way of working which is exactly the contrary
of what we usually do. No labyrinths, no surprises, no possibilities for the actors
to improvise. Straight to the finishing line.
Later I discover that a few of my colleagues have thought differently:
simple rules of the game, props carefully selected (a big bed, a long blue cloth),
fragments of fairy tales or a whole one, possibly mixed with episodes and
biographical information. The rest is in the hands of the actors. We all devote
ourselves to improving our material and scenes up to the last moment. Some mix
the two methods: they have clear ideas for parts of the scene, and trust in the
actors' inventiveness for the rest.
I have drawn a winning number. I still have some time - at least fourteen days before I have to direct my scene. I have not yet chosen my fairy tale. I have an
emergency solution, but I don’t like it.
A period of fervour starts. It is January 2003 and New Year's Eve fireworks
continue in the working spaces. Each of us has his/her own way to solve the task
in hand: from the dream of realising an elaborate and refined performance in
eight hours, to the simple illustration of the text. One factor is constant in all the
situations. The actors do their best to fulfil the wishes of the directors, come with
proposals when asked, wait patiently when necessary and are concentrated on
their work. Everybody is aware that 'tomorrow will be my turn' or 'they helped me
as best they could'. They try to listen carefully instead of immersing themselves
in their own thoughts.
A few days later I take a decision. No, that's not right. It was an idea - an
image - which decided for me. The light. That fairy tale that I got to know better
than the rest, which whirled incessantly in my head and which I used daily for my
individual material contains a sentence: … But a dazzling Light burst forth, so
penetrating that the soul withdrew as if in front of an unsheathed sword… The
celestial light had to be the blinding ray of an interrogation lamp. A prisoner's
gradual and cynical submission. The final image was a militant torch procession
of 'just', hooded people against Darkness. The rest was all in the text. From the
start I had decided that my scene would take place in an old people's home,
whatever fairy tale I chose. It was one of the ideas expressed in the first meeting
in Eugenio's office, but there had been neither the time nor the desire to develop
his suggestion. None of us had taken a job in an old people's home.
None of us is particularly good at acting with a sheet of paper in our hands. We
stick to our old habits, repeat what we know, embarrassed, feeling exactly what
we are in such a situation: a flock of amateurs. But we slowly became accustomed
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to this and hung our inhibitions on the hat stands in the changing rooms, turning
into a flock of 'happy' amateurs who had to show nine different scenes, one after
the other. The entire procedure lasted four hours. The changes between scenes
also required time.
We are late. In reality we have all the time we need, but we have to
respect some appointments. One of these was with Nando. Since the early 1970s,
the Italian university professor Ferdinando Taviani has been Eugenio's sparring
partner and his closest dramaturgical collaborator, a person on whom to test
ideas and from whom to receive ideas. If the director is the actor's first spectator,
Nando is Eugenio's first spectator. He also helps to weave the narrative threads,
appraise and test them, checking their strength. At the same time he is the most
reliable collaborator for many actors for discussing doubts, building up ideas,
playing with absurd thoughts until they land as simple and unmistakable
butterflies.
Eugenio was travelling while we prepared our scenes. Now he had been back for
some time. Nando's arrival had been fixed previously and could not be changed.
During the few days of his stay we had to show - and to see - everything. One or
two presentations of individual material in the morning, and two fairy tales
during the rest of the day. We needed time to arrange the different scenic spaces
and do the lighting for each scene. The actors had also to remember what to do.
What we had prepared during eight hours three weeks ago had been swamped by
the preparation of the eight following scenes.
Our staging of the fairy tales obviously didn't include an actor's detailed
work. Such results are to be found instead in fragments of the individual material.
This contains ideas for the scenic space, the costumes, the props and, above all,
the actor's strength and impact.
I do not often have the chance to sit as a spectator and watch what my
colleagues do on stage. It is almost against the laws of nature that - after so many
years together - I can still be gripped, amused or touched. But they succeeded
in this, one after the other. Nor is it surprising that they can also irritate me.
Puppets as well. Two of them. Julia and Kai, each with their own. I don't
remember ever using puppets in our productions. I wonder if they will be included
and if Eugenio, without composing separate stories, will find room for them in
the main plot he must build with that heap of construction elements that we
have prepared.
We have shown at least ten hours of fixed material. The atmosphere in the
theatre is light-hearted. We feel relief. Relieved from the burden of working
alone. The first phase is over. Now we can start together. Together with Eugenio
who, until now, has held back. He said that he would work only with what he
received from us. Here he has something to get his teeth into. But we are
mistaken.
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First the two assistant directors receive the assignment to stage a fairy
tale. Then they have to edit all the material, i.e. establish a succession of our
scenes and their scenes. It is a gargantuan job just to organise the changes of
scenes. Each of us had arranged the space in his/her own way. An altar, gallows,
two different divans, three deathbeds, a river, the hollow trunk of a tree, a
curtain of tulle crossing the space, a washing line with suspended clothes like in
Naples, walls of paper cutouts, music stands placed as though for a classical
orchestra, a puppet theatre, a bonfire, watch towers, a stormy sea, tables and
chairs, the portal of a church. All these elements were built with a lot of
imagination and simple materials. There were also masks and chains for a slave
dance, a Bible and a small paper boat, the tin soldier and many paper hearts, red
shoes and bread, gold, silver and copper clothes. In other words, many boxes of
stage objects.
We place long poles on which to hang our costumes in the space's four
corners, whilst all the props are situated where we can easily reach them. Many
of us had also proposed costumes. It was even more difficult to remember which
costume to put on than which actions to perform in a specific scene. A clergyman's
garb or pyjamas? A white suit with a Panama hat or a black tuxedo with a top hat?
This confusion continued for a long time. We often heard: "Oh shit!" - and an actor
was seen with the costume belonging to another scene. We hung big paper lists
on the walls to remind us of the succession of scenes. We couldn't remember the
order because there was no logic in it for us. Or at least, it was very unusual. We
couldn't understand why the assistants had chosen that particular order. Perhaps
the problem would have been the same if one of the actors had determined the
succession. But I suppose that with the years we have acquired a shared sense of
the possible dramatic development of the material at our disposal. Letting the
assistants choose the sequences helped us to break one of our automatisms, just
as the fairy tales did. We were confronted with a pattern of development to
which we were not accustomed.
We presented the two different montages to Eugenio. He asked the
actors to choose one of them. This we did. The labyrinth's paths were established:
in front of us a series of problems lay in wait. Much has been cut, much has been
added, but the central points of the original succession have been kept until the
end of the rehearsals, although it is difficult to recognise them.
We showed this first result to Thomas Bredsdorff, our dramaturgical collaborator. A literary and theatre critic and professor of literature at Copenhagen
University, he is a man of language who loves words and their possibilities, knows
their sources and is able to translate his knowledge into history, and an anecdote into
a tale which inspires actors looking for details. Thomas is an analyst who discovers
unusual points of view that can stimulate Eugenio's imagination, helping him to create
the performance's hidden layers - its nervous centres and blood circuits.
15
16
Many think that Odin Teatret consists only of the people who move
around daily in our building, but we are only a part of it. Many others have a
continuous relationship with us, even if we don't meet them often. They are
artisans, intellectuals, architects, mechanics, engineers, cooks - almost all the
professions. These are people whose qualified competence, independence,
curiosity, human warmth and ability to dream and break usual mental habits,
create new situations of contact and collaboration. Odin Teatret looks like a game
of dominoes when seen from a bird's-eye perspective.
Among these people you find Luca Ruzza, architect and stage designer.
He collaborated with us for the production The Gospel according to Oxyrhyncus.
He showed us a model of the scenic space for the new production. Nobody had
ever seen a similar theatre arena. Its form had a softness and a sinuosity that
could never be suitable for gladiators or bullfights. It doesn't possess the tension
of a circle; its oval curves are sensual. A space of uncertainty. However it satisfies
Eugenio's need to immediately modify the space - one of the means that he uses
to affect the spectators' senses. For the whole of the following year the arena’s
metallic structure is submitted to innumerable retouches, many details are
changed, re-elaborated and then rejected to be recreated, simplified or made
more complex. The arena’s luminous surface is painted over in grey, but its basic
form is preserved.
While we are waiting for the oval stage structure to be built, we draw it on
the floor and we install in it our montage of fairy tales. At once we are faced with
new problems. It is the most difficult performing space ever. There is only a small
area where all the spectators can see all the actors frontally at the same time.
Usually we perform in a scenic space between spectators seated facing each other.
The oval shape is limiting. It is a space that demands a good articulation - of the
backbone.
In this ellipse traced on the floor with adhesive tape, Eugenio begins to
direct. It is relatively easy to cut the first half hour. Andersen's fairy tales contain
a lot of repetitions, and so do the scenes we have staged.
Besides the professional difficulties with which each of us fights in order
to dismantle the wall of routine that rises up again as soon as you knock it down,
there are the usual frustrations of the type: "How much room will I and my material
have in the performance?" It is a simple arithmetical calculation. We are nine actors
and the performance will last at most 70-80 minutes. It hurts every time that the
director's scissors cut, although we know that they are there for that purpose.
The remaining material is still enormous and I cannot help thinking: "How
will he manage it? How can we transform it?" It is like a spider which has lost its
instinct and has woven only vertical threads, far apart from one another. Is there
the least sign of a final scene? Maybe, even if only in Eugenio's head. The idea of
the final scene or image has often been one of his points of departure. Usually
they are modified, but they were present since the first day.
February 2004, the real work begins. Now our personal history, the pain and the
joy, the hopes, the temptation to abdicate and the right not to be enslaved by the
conventions of the time will confront Andersen's struggle. Thoughts must be
trans­formed into life - our life. And everything has to be connected to his life and
texts.
And what about the old woman with the drum and the cigarette butt at the corner
of her mouth?
She also participates. She holds our hands and says: "Courage, you are
young. You too are forced to keep on doing what you are. And stop thinking it is
the last time." Her eyes flash while, threateningly, she raises her fist, then bursts
into a huge toothless smile, her hips swaying incitingly.
A new performance emerges. At times it looks like a ghost, with old rusty chains,
sluggish and oppressive. At other times it is quivering enlightenment, transparent
as the parchment skin of an elderly hand.
Translated from Norwegian by Judy Barba
Kai Bredholt
Many Layers of Paper with
Glue in between
- It was so terribly cold.
He is breathing heavily (a small impulse in the back which runs up to the
neck and out into the chest). He prepares to speak, moves his hand from his
forehead down across his face. He lifts his head and looks around.
- It was so terribly cold. It was snowing.
He looks up, catches a snowflake and studies it.
- A poverty stricken young girl was walking in the cold.
Turning his head slowly, he watches her pass by.
- With bare feet.
He looks down at his shoes.
- They were red and blue with the cold.
He nods twice at his feet.
His name is Andersen. He is 140 centimetres tall. His head is made from many
layers of paper, stuck together with glue. His eyes are blue, real glass eyes.
Andersen has dark brown, shoulder-length hair: a wig which almost covers the
large wooden handle in the back of the neck. I know every part of him now, right
down to the smallest detail. Danio Manfredini from Milan gave him his face, hands
and body. And I made and remade all the joints. I wanted him to be able to make
every possible movement.
He speaks now, he has a voice: he sings, shouts, raps and whispers. Every
day he learns something new: a small change in the pronunciation of a single
word, a new movement, a new step, a gesture, a new way to use his eyes. He can
now observe and react.
He comes alive.
- I am a poet.
He moves his hand outwards from his forehead. It is sign language and
it means "poet". If the sign is repeated it means "fairy tale".
I must teach him all he has to learn. This means that I also learn a language.
It seems that for the first time I will speak in an Odin performance. For the first
time I will talk with my body. My impulses become the movements of the puppet.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote fairy tales in which things often came alive and were
given voices. That is what I remembered, that is what fascinated me as a child.
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The poet gave life and personality to scissors, flowers, piggybanks, toys
and things from the world of children.
As an actor I wished to be allowed, like him, to give life and personality.
That is why I brought the puppet into the performance.
Many layers of paper with glue in between come alive.
Everything I have learned, I must now teach him.
Everything he learns, I am now learning.
Translated from Danish by Anne Savage
Julia Varley
Scheherezade's Sister
I was sitting in the darkness of a small cinema in Paris. The film had ended but I
was unable to stop weeping. Closed Doors, an Egyptian film, told the story of a
woman who lived alone with her teenage son in present day Cairo. During the film
the relationship between mother and son deteriorated from friendly complicity
into a desperate distrust. At the end the son stabbed his mother to death. He
could not bear the idea of her visiting a man, inadmissible behaviour according to
the religious ideology that had attracted him as a way of appeasing his teenage
anxieties. While the film's end-credits were scrolling down, I thought that too
many women are subjected to similar tragedies. I cried with a sense of impotence
in the face of a problem much greater than myself.
Since seeing some Arab women in a shop in Milan wearing a lot of make-up
under their chadors, and after a tour to Istanbul, the complex question of veiled
women has fascinated me. I wanted to address this theme in a performance. I had
bought and worn a chador, subsequently feeling an immense sensuality in the
moment of uncovering and loosening my hair. At the end of a vacation I showed
Eugenio Barba Voice Threads, a first montage of scenes based on songs about
women from all over the world. I used the black chador, a mask, a white Arab
dress and a red one, balls of gilded thread and a window of inlaid wooden grating.
Eugenio asked me: "Why are you wearing an Arab dress?" He gave the answer
himself: "Perhaps you are Scheherazade's sister…" I started searching for a story
of a contemporary Arab woman to tell.
Then came the 11th of September 2001. I set aside all the work that I
had done. Whatever I said or did my interpretation was no longer free of the
prejudice provoked by the situation of conflict which had been generated. It had
become difficult to defend basic women's rights without this appearing to be a
criticism of religious or cultural choices.
During a session of the University of Eurasian Theatre at Scilla in 2002,
the sculptor Fabio Butera demonstrated a puppet, the construction of which he
was still improving. The puppet had an attractive face and a fascinating simplicity
of movement. In search of unpredictable directions that might interrupt and
recreate the habits and experience of previous performances, Eugenio asked
Fabio to build me a puppet that was a replica in miniature of my characters, Doña
Musica, with her long white hair, and Mr. Peanut, with his skull head. The new
puppet would also have a third face, beautiful, charming and young, like that of
20
the original model. I didn't know if I was interested in working with a puppet, but I
said nothing. It is nice that the director engages in finding inspiration for his actors.
When I actually received the puppet with the three interchangeable
heads, it made me think of Edvard Munch's painting The Seasons which had been
one of the points of departure for the performance The Castle of Holstebro. The
painting shows a young girl in white, a mature woman in red and an old lady in
black.
For Andersen's Dream, all the actors had to prepare one hour of resource material
(scenes, sequences of actions, texts, songs), and choose one of Hans Christian
Andersen's tales to stage. In a meeting in 2001, Eugenio had spoken of further
themes that might be pursued: Africa (a continent not so well known to Odin
Teatret); an old people's home and its inhabitants; the slave route and the oases of
culture that it had produced - jazz, the blues, samba. Eugenio had reconfirmed his
need as a director for physical scores to shape, cut and edit which would have the
quality that comes from continuous repetition and from roots that engage with the
profound motivation of the actor. He had imagined the little match girl from
Andersen's fairy-tale dressed as a young Palestinian woman.
Soha had grown-up in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. I met her in
May of 2002 at the Women's Voices Festival organised by Brigitte Kaquet in Belgium.
I was there to direct a public intervention by mothers, sisters and wives of desaparecidos (missing people). Soha had spent ten years in jail in total isolation after
having shot a commander of the Lebanese militia in the service of the Israeli army.
She had not succeeded in her intention to kill him. While laughing, joking, dancing
and singing with the other 'mothers' to the music and songs of women from many
African countries, Soha still looked very young. I chose her to read the declaration
that had been compiled in the preceding days, while the 'mothers' from Algeria,
Argentina, Belgium, Turkey, Iran… appeared on stage with their missing relatives'
photographs round their necks. One of the mothers carried eight photographs,
another eleven. Soha read with a warm, deep, calm voice. At the end, after the
mothers had been welcomed into the audience with a Berber song, Soha whispered
happily: "We will make it! We will change the world!"
To begin practical work on Andersen's Dream, I chose some African music and some
postcards with images of old people. I had bought the cassette Ladies of the Jazz
and the complete works of Hans Christian Andersen in English. In the rehearsal room
I danced freely accompanied by the African songs. One of these provoked me to
move my arms and body in a way that made me think of a woman defending herself
from people throwing stones at her. I learned some blues, and some songs from
Egypt and Azerbaijan, and every day I fixed one of the postcards and one of
Andersen's tales in a physical score.
21
As the days, months and then years passed, a character began to emerge
from the repetition: a rather simple person, happy and desperate, whom I had
seen on a television programme about refugees from Kosovo. The war was over
and Denmark wanted to send back the refugees, against the advice of the social
workers. On the screen I witnessed suffering and pain manifest in the uncontrollable
emotional expression of exasperation: hands gesticulating frantically; laughter
and tears; incomprehensible sounds and lines of tension on the face.
of the pines I could see from the window or I let my mind take shelter in the
patterns of the carpet. Back in Holstebro I bought a small Persian carpet to keep
me company. Kneeling on it, I improvised with sounds made only of air and breath,
while lighting matches and allowing them to go out, recalling the images of
cigarette smoke that I had studied with Michael Vetter. Dogan, Holstebro's Kurdish
carpet seller, offered me another smaller carpet, telling me with a well-informed
twinkle in his eyes that only silk carpets can fly.
I had been to Germany for five days to work on improvisation with the
musician Michael Vetter. I worked barefoot on the beautiful Persian carpets of his
study. To help me find variation, while improvising with only one sound, syllable,
word, position or musical tone, my eyes followed the birds flying among the tops
The day was approaching when I had to show the material to the director, so I
started to organise my scenic space. I had the black chador and all the objects
that I had used in Voice Threads in the room with me. I had to fill the sixty minutes
requested by the director! The puppet with its three heads was also there. I
sometimes devoted myself to her, but the endless technical problems of working
with her tired me. I had to solve how to keep the puppet's support attached to my
shoe, how to hold and light matches with her hands, and how to change the heads.
These difficulties distracted my attention from the more important task of
animating the puppet, deciding how to hold and manoeuvre her arms, how to
move her head and use the particularity of her flexible support leg, how to walk
and make her walk, how to sit and make her sit, how to get up and make her get
up, how to breathe with her. I preferred to dance to the African music that moved
me towards a character, accompanying myself with rhythmic vocal sounds.
One day, while I was trying to make the puppet fly, she doubled up. It
seemed as if she had broken. I got a fright, but nothing had actually happened.
The effect for an audience would be just as strong, so I exploited it when I showed
all the puppet's possibilities to Eugenio. Another day, I dressed the puppet in the
chador and placed her on the small silk carpet. The black cloth of the chador
emphasised the expression in her eyes and she began to speak to me. I started to
address the actions and texts of the fixed score to her. A sense that I had not
searched for started to emerge from the scenes and texts. Suddenly the song that
spoke of the leaves tumbling down and the sun going out in September, and the
exclamation that damned God, acquired other meanings. I understood that the
puppet had become Scheherazade for me. From that day the chador became the
motivation for making the puppet dance. I had to expose and uncover her veiled
life, free her from immobility and find her voice, liberate her from the black
shroud and give her colour.
Mrs Skød is a tailor in Holstebro who has helped me make my costumes since she
made Mr Peanut's first tailcoat in 1978. Mrs Skød has also fallen in love with
Scheherazade, and has given her a brooch and a lined box in which to keep her
jewels. We made Scheherazade's new dress with the fabric I had purchased in the
bazaar in Damask, during a tour in Syria. In an alley behind the Great Mosque I
23
Luca Ruzza
found a shop that sold camel wool shawls woven and embroidered by hand by
Palestinian women. They were expensive, but irresistibly beautiful. I bought one
to make a cape for Scheherazade. In Syria I added to my collection of Egyptian
and Azerbaijan music, songs by the Lebanese Fairouz, and then I spent a year
learning songs in Arabic.
Dressed like a princess and holding a box of matches between her fingers,
Scheherazade has taken me hand in hand into the world of fairytales. The work
has changed. The process of months and months remains hidden as I devote myself
to slowness and to containing my acting vitality within the energy of a flower. I
am absorbed by the discovery of minute, delicate and fleeting movements. I have
to dispel the trace of my footsteps, the concreteness of my weight, the tension
of the scores and sequences, in order to transform the relationship between our
dissimilar presences into a continuous magic flow. I have to understand how to
move her whilst remaining still myself, how to pour my life into her without
holding it back in me alone.
Eugenio asks me to fix small actions: the way Scheherazade touches,
prays, combs her hair, greets, applauds, undresses, calls, and says yes and no… I
need hours and days to understand how to make these simple gestures. I search
for a delicate voice, like a light breeze, placed slightly above my own. A shy little
giggle fills the pauses needed to change the position of her hands, to tilt her chest
or make her kneel. The giggle conceals and reveals us when we meet Andersen,
the puppet manoeuvred by Kai.
As I write, I know that the process of gestation and transference is still
taking place. I haven't yet succeeded in entirely abandoning the pull of the ground
that supports my acting base to fly with Scheherazade like Chagall's lovers. During
rehearsals I try to see through her, to let my eyes look through her eyes before
going out into the space to conquer the spectator's attention. I am not convincing
yet. The director would like me to look only at her, so that the spectator only sees
the puppet, but I rebel against this destiny. I don't want to end veiled behind
Scheherazade. I must discover our separate lives, while I remain, sister like,
behind, underneath or beside her. Eugenio first glimpsed this possibility after
Scheherazade embraced me and he asked me to look at her like a loving sister. I
learn from her beauty and poetry, from her flirtatious and playful desire to amuse
herself. I am Scheherazade's sister and I sit close to her on the flying carpet. A
veil of clouds protects us while we fly, telling fairytales and observing the defeats
of the world from afar.
24
The Vertigo of the Vision
The dust
Every twenty years in Japan wooden temples, which were built in the 16th
century, are dismantled, repaired and rebuilt. The people assigned to carry out
this operation hand down the secrets of their construction. In fact there are no
drawings which illustrate their complex structure. The working group consists of
three generations of men. The twenty-year-old boys help the forty-year-olds,
followed by the sixty-year-olds who remember how the pieces are put back
together again. The next time the operation is repeated, the boys will take the
place of the adults, and the adults that of the masters.
When Eugenio Barba phoned to invite me to Holstebro it was just a little
over twenty years since we had last worked together. I spent my apprenticeship
as a set-designer/architect at the Odin but then, like the young Japanese workers,
in practice I was helping the elders. Not that I did a lot, I just watched. I had
decided to follow the group of molecules which made up the structure of the
performance, understood as 'matter'. I scrutinised the extraordinary itinerary of
the particles which ended up creating that something called theatre, just as I had
spent my afternoons as a boy scrutinising dust particles in the light from the
windows. I learned very early that the theatre space is not defined by solid walls,
but by the vision of the spectator.
The theatre's space is formed in the mind of the spectator.
A space can become closed or open itself without there being a need to
place in it any element that delimits it. The energy of the actor is capable of
evoking depths, backgrounds and colours, just as the voice can amplify or narrow
the perception of it. The matter I was measuring myself against and which in time
I learned to manipulate like an artisan, also consists of invisible corpuscles.
Lucretius, the poet of physical concreteness, first of all reminds us that emptiness
is just as concrete as solid bodies. His greatest worry in the De rerum natura
seems to be our being crushed by the weight of matter. Perhaps my attraction for
emptiness started during those years. Only later did I begin to construct spaces
for the theatre, studying the secrets of theatrical structure and architecture.
25
The space of Andersen’s Dream and the value of instability
In its productions the Odin has always chosen to break with the convention of a
central perspective - the frontal stage - discovering with each production the
appropriate space for the action. For me it was important at that moment to
redefine with Eugenio a grammar, which would not be tied to our knowledge prior
to the moment in which we had parted years earlier, in order to guarantee a
condition of absolute creative freedom.
From a sketch Eugenio made on a piece of paper, I got the impression that he was
interested in identifying a structure that could help to orient the spectator's
perceptive condition. Without thinking about the specific shape of a pre­deter­mined
space.
We imagined that the space of Andersen's Dream should create a
condition of instability in the eye of the spectator by constructing constantly
shimmering perspectives. An instability to be transferred to the spectator so as to
involve him in a process of loss and recovery.
I got down to work. I knew that I would not redesign the same space
which the Odin had used in the latest productions, and Eugenio, too, was pushing
towards a change. I decided to pursue this 'emptiness' with which I found myself
faced and with which I had to come to terms. The space which preceded the
action was empty. This same emptiness would become structure, form and
content for this production.
In this case we would experiment with a space which was prior to the
action. Eugenio mentioned an installation by Trondur Patursson that he had seen
in the Silkeborg Museum. A container covered inside with mirrors which created
a sensation of disorientation, a vertigo like the one we were looking for. Silkeborg
is a couple of hours' drive from Holstebro. We took the car and left without further
ado.
The infinite reflections of the mirrors and the fact of being at the same
time part of it created a physical alteration. I asked myself if I would be able to
reproduce that condition in the performance. Later, in a drawing by Piero della
Francesca in the De Prospectiva Pingendi, I observed the human head divided into
partitions in a horizontal section. What I saw was an extraordinary formal
assonance with the possible space which was gradually being defined for Andersen's
dream. Eugenio's sketch looked like the concave section of the human head. I
found the holes for the ears, the eyes, the protruding nose, and this likeness
Trondur Patursson, Cosmic Sea 1996
Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, 2002
Luca Ruzza: preliminary model with mirrors
provided me with a precise indication. I had to define a volume which, like the
scorpion’s exoskeleton, both contains and separates from the outside. A volume,
which can receive, protect and seduce.
Preliminary sketch by Eugenio Barba for Andersen’s Dream, 2002
An oblique view
Retracing a childhood enchantment, I returned after a long time to the Church of
26
27
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, designed by Borromini. In the geometry
of Borromini's ingenious structure I found that sense of vertigo that I had
experienced then. I imagined turning the cupola upside down, and this would
become the container (tribune). I knew that in Andersen's Dream the musical
score would play a fundamental role, and this volume would be a kind of sounding
board. The spectators, sitting as if inside a violin, would perceive even the
smallest whisper perfectly from every point.
Back in Holstebro again I drew the same San Carlo plan on the floor of
the working room. We delimited the oval with a row of chairs and for the first
time the actors' actions came to terms with this space. The plurality of the point
those paper clippings with which Hans Christian Andersen had told his stories. It
was like a magic lantern used to send children to sleep at night. And so the
anatomic theatre turned into a gigantic kaleidoscope.
Andersen's Dream takes place between two mirrors, one placed over the
heads of the spectators and the other on the ground. The spectators sit, as if
suspended, in the hold of a 'floating' anatomic theatre, which is being visually
constantly changed by the reflections.
As in Andersen's fairy tales deformed, contorted figures surface from an
obscure universe to invade the entire space. Those images, calculated with
precision, blend with the actions and the actors' scores together with lighting,
Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane Church
in Rome
Hans Holbein: Skull in Anamorphosis. Detail from The Ambassadors, 1553. National
Gallery, London. (By bringing the left corner of the image close to the eye, the reader
will be able to reconstruct the image)
Piero della Francesca, 1482
of view created infinite perspective, deforming the itinerary of the spectator's
vision. And so we decided to follow this de-formation and bring it to its natural
conclusion by transforming it into a structure.
The upside-down dome immediately looked like an anatomic theatre.
The idea of raising the parapets so as to make it able to receive anamorphic
images only emerged later. Anamorphosis is a word, which appeared in the 17th
century and describes a certain kind of 'optic perversion', founded on the play of
reflexes and perspective. They were distorted, oblique and undecipherable
images which, seen from a certain point or reflected in mirrors, reassemble,
rectify themselves and reveal figures which were not perceptible at an initial
glance.
Kai Bredholt introduced a small slide projector to the improvisations. He projected
28
scenic space and music. The narrative spirit induces a visionary process in the
spectator. Initially it could seem that each had its own sphere and that they were
at loggerheads. But a new factor intervenes: the deforming genius. He is the one
who has managed to get them to collaborate.
Translated from Italian by "abc traduzioni srl"
29
Fabio Butera
Andersen’s Dream:
scenic space
The Things that Remain
In a hundred years, when we are no longer here, probably only a few objects and
the masks will remain of Andersen’s Dream, apart from the documents, both
written and in other media.
In the Black Room I saw a selection of the objects for the exhibition that
will be prepared for Odin Teatret’s 40th anniversary in October 2004: some
costumes, props and masks from past productions. I had the clear sensation that
there was a profound difference between these masks and those that originate
from my studio. The masks used in a performance - with their signs of wear, the
padding added to avoid them marking the face, the traces of make-up on the
inside - manage to contain both the life introduced by the sculptor and the life
introduced on stage by the actor who animated them. A mask that has lived
through a performance is substantially different from that presented to the actor
at the beginning of rehearsals. It has another identity and even a new name.
There is a gap between the mask I sculpted and that which has been used
on stage. This gap begins to grow as soon as an actor puts on the mask, although
it is not an automatic result. The mask has to be sculpted in such a way that it
accommodates the gap, it is capable of including the dramaturgy, and is like a
well from which the actor and the director can extract endless dramaturgical
possibilities.
The Baron
My first mask entered into Andersen's Dream by pure chance. I had started to beat
a thin sheet of copper, and two big eyes appeared. Then I began to sculpt a piece
of cypress wood which had been given to me as a gift. I had started without a
precise idea, but later I was to recognise a strange mask that for me evoked those
of Nô theatre. After colouring it with the ancient technique of egg tempera, I
provided the large copper eyes with tiny holes to see through.
Some time later Roberta Carreri asked me to make a mask for the
production she was rehearsing, Andersen's Dream. After a couple of chats we
agreed on a mix between a wizard and a bird, a sort of Medico della Peste (Plague
Doctor) with a large apotropaic mouth. In the meantime she had seen the strange
Nô mask with the copper eyes. She asked if she could borrow it to work with while
waiting for the one we had agreed on.
mirror
mirror
actor
spectators
31
The Baron's mask
Two masks from an imaginary tribe
To my great surprise, when I went to watch the rehearsals of Andersen’s
Dream, the Nô mask had been christened "The Baron" and burst into the space
with a wild dance and an extremely elegant white suit. The mask made for the
performance, on the other hand, was jealously kept in Roberta’s dressing room,
waiting for a future dramaturgy.
impression of being a giant. Eugenio Barba suggested taking advantage of this
verticality. So I worked on the proportions of the head. The masks that I sculpted
are slightly smaller than a human face and are not connected directly to the face.
They surmount a second 'anonymous' mask, which is similar in shape to those used
for fencing and which completely cancels the features of the actor's face. This
expedient elevates the figure, magnifies the body and, because of the weight, has
an effect on the tensions of the spine and on the movements.
The most difficult work has been on the eyes, for which I drew inspiration
not only from Inuit masks, but also from those of the ritual helmets of the ancient
populations of southern Italy.
However, the actors had to speak and sing, and the 'anonymous' mask
without a mouth risked compromising this possibility. I experimented much to
obtain a particular sonority, carving channels and small resonating chambers on the
inside of each mask, which were then adjusted to the head and voice of each actor.
When I brought the eight masks to Holstebro, even though I had an idea
of how they should be assigned, I asked Eugenio to distribute them. He answered
that I should do this. It is common practice in my group Proskenion that the
director and I assign the masks to the actors. For the first time it was the actors
and me who decided.
The masks of an imaginary tribe
During the rehearsals for Andersen's Dream there was a scene (later altogether cut
out of the performance) in which the actors followed the rhythm of the Afro-Brazilian
dances of the Orixá, wearing African-style masks made in Cuba for tourists, of the
type you hang on the wall. This kind of masks didn't work, just as authentic African
masks probably wouldn't have worked. I was given the task of making eight new
masks that would give the impression of belonging to an imaginary tribe.
I had asked Augusto Omolú to associate each actor with an Orixá, and
during the rehearsals I made some quick sketches to catch the essence of everyone's
energy. I then searched, among traditional masks, for those which in my opinion
could synthesise these two souls. In the course of rehearsals I was also struck by Jan
Ferslev who, with a long mask, a cylindrical hat and a long cloak, gave the
32
33
Scheherezade
Much more complex is the story of Scheherezade. I had been working for two
years on a very particular 'mask', a puppet, manipulated in full view by just one
actor and capable of evoking the quality and the suggestiveness of the Bunraku. I
followed the opposite way, however, simplifying the mechanism to the utmost.
The puppet is held up by a stick fixed to the shoe and operated by holding its
forearms.
I gave myself the objective to create a puppet that, although new in its
conception, would appear to be born out of a tradition where clearly no tradition
existed. To do so it was necessary to recreate an inheritance of errors, ruptures,
possible movements and energies. During a session of the University of Eurasian
Theatre in June 2002 Eugenio saw the puppet on which I was working and asked
me to make one for Julia Varley, with three faces: one of "The Beauty", one of
"Doña Musica" and one of "Mr. Peanut", characters from some of her performances.
So I sculpted the puppet in cypress wood, with three interchangeable
heads and painted it in the manner of the Nô masks, using the egg tempera
technique with cherry gum and precious pigments: ultramarine, ivory black,
Chinese white, and gofun (white extracted from oysters). As a model for the
hands, I used a stage photo of Else Marie Laukvik, a founding actress of Odin
Teatret.
The work with "The Beauty", which was to represent Scheherezade in the
performance, has been developed through a tight collaboration and a regular
series of meetings with Julia. More complex was the process of complying with
the intentions of the director. His indications were ever more demanding: the doll
had to kneel, remain seated or lie down on a flying carpet (by itself), play a barrel
organ by turning a handle, light matches, rise into the air and split in two, as if
its spine was broken.
Hence the struggle between the director's requests and my necessity not
to construct a robot. I am convinced that the restrictions caused by the simplicity
of the mechanism which limited the possible movements, and their absolute
abstraction from everyday life, are the keys for attaining the subtle enchantment
of which Zeami speaks.
At a certain point the puppet ceased to be the 'doll', to represent Scheherezade, it became Scheherezade.
Scheherezade
Translated from Italian by John Dean
34
35
Jørgen Anton
In the Beginning...
In the beginning were the stories - all the stories, the small scenes which the nine
actors and the two assistant directors had created around each of their Andersen
fairy tales. If you then add the individual - not Andersen-related - material which
the actors had prepared, then we are approaching a performance lasting about
ten hours.
By about the end of February 2003 all the many Andersen-sketches have
been placed in a more or less random order and the many mini-plays have become
a maxi-performance with neither head nor tail. They have been presented to
Eugenio Barba one after another, and he has studied and evaluated each of them
individually.
The pieces are in place and work can begin: the job of condensing,
elaborating and positioning the existing elements.
My 'work' with Odin Teatret began back in 1967 when, as a critic, I was
confronted with Kaspariana and the magazine "Teatrets Teori og Teknikk". Later
on came seminars and conferences, interviews in a professional context and
private conversations - a personal approach to the particular world, attitudes and
people who sustain Odin Teatret.
We made a deal regarding Andersen's Dream. I was free to follow the
work when it suited me and, at the same time, those involved were to make
themselves available for interviews so that I had a picture of the process - of
shattered dreams, of dreams taking shape and becoming part of the performance,
of considerations and thoughts during the process.
During these conversations the actors could not lie or dissemble - nothing
but the truth was permissible. In return, I had to promise not to make public any
sensitive subjects unless agreed to by the 'sincere' person in question. It turned
out to be a complicated deal. Sincerity is a variable concept that can be
conjugated. When it came to key personal facts and problems, there was much
suppression and alteration of memory. Or just imprecise questions - as the actors
said later.
Nevertheless we all went through the process in good spirits and that is
something!
Following Odin Teatret and the work process was a weary desert crossing. A
journey on the road from the 'beginning', from the 'actions' to the greatly reduced,
36
compressed sand castle which has now found its form; through labyrinthine
mental and technical processes, living together with sweaty, sometimes cursing
actors who were battling with their daily tasks. This process was divided up into
6-7 periods, some lasting only a few days, others a couple of months.
It was a winding route past "slaves as bearers of culture", "old age and
the aged", and "The Book of Q - The Lost Gospel", which is the basis for the gospels
of Luke, Mark and Matthew.
Hans Christian Andersen makes his entrance several months later as the
last element on the road towards Andersen's Dream.
The actors were familiar with these themes at least a year before the
physical work began; they struggled with books and pictures, CDs and videos. In
addition they were given three different tasks by Eugenio Barba, including a
month's study trip to Africa, resulting in visits to Ghana, Ethiopia, Zanzibar and
the Cape Verde Islands.
Secondly there was the aforementioned individual work - an hour with
one or more scenic elements which could stimulate personal self-expression or
bring inspiration to colleagues. No limitations were set by Barba and the actors
were given the freedom to develop their own angle and theme for the third task:
the mini-performance of an Andersen fairy tale which each of them had to choose
and direct with the other actors in the group. They each had two days to work on
the stage design, direction and memorising. The time factor could well explain
the somewhat low standard of material Barba was presented with at the beginning.
The ideas and thoughts were often more interesting than the final outcome.
But the level of work input and energy was high from the very first day
of rehearsals - a working day of less than twelve hours is the exception. It has to
be said, too, that many of the actors began the process without much enthusiasm.
Their average age is well over fifty and their bodies are plagued by many years of
hard physical work.
In addition a new production means that they have to travel all over the
world for at least five months a year for the next five years or so.
The fascination with hotel beds and restaurant food vanished many years
ago.
The fact that they nevertheless accepted to take part can be partially
explained by a good portion of group morale and group pressure, but most of all
by a supposition that Andersen's Dream could well be the last big production for
Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret.
Age sets its own limits.
Andersen's Dream is not a nightmare. However the road to this dream was often
sleep inducing for a spectator. One can have spectacular dreams when falling
asleep while director, actors and technicians on the floor alter a detail for the
hundredth time in order to achieve the 'right' form or technical solution.
37
Clearly an actor has to be hung in style if he is to die on the gallows, and
a subsequent resurrection cannot be a question of faith for the spectator.
Technique plays an ever-greater part in Odin Teatret's performances and
present-day productions exploit theatrical possibilities to an extent which is light
years away from the corporal expression prevalent in the mid sixties.
There was a time when a performance could be transported in a couple
of suitcases and a box for the lighting equipment. Andersen's Dream weighs close
to five tons and transportation demands a container or lorry. Setting up the stage
takes one or two days - if all the actors and technicians take part.
On top of this are the dozens of costumes, props and musical instruments,
each actor being personally responsible for whatever s/he uses during the
performance.
The list of characters in this Andersen 'dream play' is long and necessitates
many costumes or elements of costumes. Often only details indicate who or what
the character is, or a possible connection between them.
During the rehearsals kinships arose, for instance, between Andersen's
one-legged tin soldier and the one-legged black soldier who stepped on a landmine;
between the greedy-for-gold Tinder-box-soldier who killed the witch because she
did not want to explain why she wanted her tinder-box, and the mercenary who
killed to give people in the third world a series of new 'values', while making a
huge profit in so doing; not to mention the interaction between Andersen’s
laundry-woman mother and the black women who still do their washing on the
river bank; and countless other associations.
Perhaps these relationships were created only in my brain. To follow an
Odin performance on its way is also a confrontation with one's own judgements
and prejudices. "An ugly duckling" can hardly be black, and the classical ballet
"Swan Lake" surely can't be performed by a black man in a tutu.
Perhaps it is just because in life we see everything 'as in a mirror' that in
the performance we see the events from above through a play of mirrors. Here
humans are suddenly reduced to small colourful blobs, moving around on a white
surface, and we are unable to see the facial expressions or gestures which give
them meaning.
In our culture, when you spend months following a process from its
embryonic and rather banal beginnings to the distilled and finely chiselled end
product, then you hope to come to a conclusion. You can have insight and impressions
but no recipe. Conversations and interviews with actors, assistants and the director
only supply you with information on a few of the technicalities, associations and
conflicts which come together in the final version. But you have to combine all
these elements with the experiences during work in rehearsals.
I have seen scenes that have been cut down more and more or moved into
different contexts, thus creating completely new associations in my head. I have
38
seen actors fighting fiercely to keep their contribution to the performance from
being reduced to nothing - and often loosing the battle. A battle lasting several
years - and one on several fronts.
In the end they all give way to Barba's decisions - a fundamental rule at
Odin Teatret.
Andersen's Dream was born through the work of the actors, work which
has been filtered through the director's brain, his conscious and unconscious
thoughts. It is Eugenio Barba's performance because it has been created through
his imagination and philosophy of life, but is based on and has grown out of the
human and professional foundation of the group, a group which is a mini-world in
itself. More than theatre - or just another kind of theatre.
Translated from Danish by Anne Savage
Thomas Bredsdorff
A Dream Come True
Reminiscences of rehearsals
Odin Teatret was a globalised venture long before the advent of globalisation. Its
members came from anywhere. It travelled everywhere. Odin Teatret's 'language'
- the means of expression the actors use - is polyglot and universal. It is a language
of action in space, whose dictionary is found by studies in what has become known
as theatre anthropology.
Yet Odin Teatret's actors are also ordinary human beings who were raised
in various parts of the world, with very little in common, learning, like everybody
else, their native, and different, languages as they grew up. One of the few
shared linguistic experiences prior to their encounter as adults with Odin Teatret
is the fairy tale language established by Hans Christian Andersen. If ever there is
going to be a universal literature anthropology - similar to the theatre anthropology shaped by Eugenio Barba and his collaborators in ISTA (International School
of Theatre Anthropology) - the best of Andersen's fairy tales will be one of its
staples. Written in a unique and highly personalised idiom of one specific native
language, his tales have managed to pass the entrance doors of nurseries
worldwide and to remain with ex-children of all cultures as a distant memory of
areas of our psyche to which we had easy access before we got immersed in adult
activities. It is one of the raisons-d’être of a theatre like Odin Teatret to reopen
that access.
Having had the privilege of watching the birth and rise of Andersen's
Dream at close quarters, I am sure that the personal response of each individual
actor to the experience of an Andersen tale lingering in his or her memory,
consciously or otherwise, has contributed to the tinge of the resulting performance.
Odin Teatret was founded by outcasts and remains a theatre at the
fringe, never the centre, of mainstream culture. The experience of being an
outsider is fundamental. The feeling of being excluded from the company of good
and honest people never left Andersen, no matter how much of an insider he
became. It is there, at the core not just of "The Ugly Duckling", but of one fairy
tale after another, from beginning to end. The feeling is present even in the note
he made in his diary as late as September 26, 1874, only months before he died.
He had dreamt that night that he was on a voyage with the king. The ship
had called at a port and the dreamer had gone ashore. Then suddenly he was
asked to return aboard as the ship was going to put to sea, but he was dragging
his feet, as people often do in dreams. He could not get his act together in time.
Eventually he arrived at the quay and rushed aboard, only to realise, too late,
that he had boarded the wrong ship. Instead of being adored he was whipped.
Instead of boarding the royal vessel he had entered a slave ship.
The Odin actors began their journey into Andersen's world by selecting one fairy
tale each and bringing it to life in the rehearsal room. From their contributions
Andersen's Dream gradually emerged.
In the end result, the individual fairy tales are still recognisable, at least
some of them, in assorted glimpses. However, while the various story lines of the
various tales have faded, something else has come to the fore, as I see it: an
experience of exclusion and the nagging mental battle between exclusion and
acceptance. It is an experience that is at once individual, culturally defined, and
universal. It is also an experience that is very Hans Christian Andersen. In an idiom
far from his, Odin Teatret has paid tribute to the teller of tales by touching a
central nerve in his oeuvre.
41
Eugenio Barba, Nando Taviani
Seven Meetings between Andersen
and Scheherezade
Texts written for the performance, but not intended to be spoken in it.
SATURDAY
(Evening. Andersen sits in his flying suitcase. Scheherezade is stretched out on
her carpet.)
ANDERSEN: It's all over. The actors have left and forgotten us.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: It doesn’t matter. We will wait here.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: No, they don't travel by train anymore. They take the plane. They
hurry for fear of missing it.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: We fell asleep. The show is ended.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: I don't think they were afraid. They rush because they are tired.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: That's right, they are also tired of telling stories. For us it's different...
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: … because we have days inside other days, one night inside another,
and yet another.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: You have a sharp tongue, my friend! A tongue that's too loose.
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: Really? A matter of life or death?
SCHEHEREZADE: Whispers.
ANDERSEN: Were you pregnant?
SCHEHEREZADE: And you?
ANDERSEN: Scheherezade, God gives us the nuts, but He doesn't crack them for
us.
42
SUNDAY
(Night)
ANDERSEN: Where are you?
SCHEHEREZADE: I'm here. Can't you see me?
ANDERSEN: You are so tiny!
SCHEHEREZADE: They always keep us in the dark.
ANDERSEN: It's logical, we are the poets of the nights. I only wrote thirty-three of
them, one after another. And you… we all know how many.
SCHEHEREZADE: Why did you tell your stories?
ANDERSEN: I didn't tell them, lily flower, I wrote them.
SCHEHEREZADE: Do you know how to write?
ANDERSEN: Like everybody. Don't you?
SCHEHEREZADE: I told and sang…
ANDERSEN: … only voice and memory…
SCHEHEREZADE: … stark naked, sitting on the edge of the bed. And often with a
belly big like this. Because three times, around noon, unknown to the court, I gave
birth to a child. And the same night...
ANDERSEN: Tiny and indecent, that's what you are.
SCHEHEREZADE: Weren't you afraid?
ANDERSEN: I was poor. Invisible. The poor are invisible.
SCHEHEREZADE: Did it frighten you to be invisible?
ANDERSEN: No, it made me angry. An anger stronger than pain. As if I couldn't breathe.
(Pause)
SCHEHEREZADE: I am small enough to sit on your knee.
ANDERSEN: It's strange to have you on my lap, rose flower, I who climbed onto
your shoulders and became the greatest of all. The greatest…
SCHEHEREZADE: …
ANDERSEN: … after you.
SCHEHEREZADE: Here we are, the best and the second best, one on the knees of the
other.
ANDERSEN: ...
SCHEHEREZADE: Take it easy. They keep us in the dark. No one can see us.
ANDERSEN: What are you thinking?
SCHEHEREZADE: How do you know that I was thinking?
ANDERSEN: I can feel it when someone is thinking about me.
SCHEHEREZADE: I'm not thinking about you.
ANDERSEN: About whom, then?
SCHEHEREZADE: About my king.
ANDERSEN: That assassin!
SCHEHEREZADE: My king was a joy.
ANDERSEN: ?
SCHEHEREZADE: Can't you understand? He was ferocity and joy. All in one.
43
MONDAY
(Dawn)
SCHEHEREZADE: Thirty-three nights?
ANDERSEN: ...
SCHEHEREZADE: One after the other?
ANDERSEN: From the setting of the sun to the setting of the moon.
SCHEHEREZADE: The moon, when it’s there, sees everything.
ANDERSEN: It's always there, facing the world or behind its back.
SCHEHEREZADE: The one who sees only backs understands little.
ANDERSEN: The moon flees, you know?
SCHEHEREZADE: ?
ANDERSEN: It flees from the sun. Like you.
SCHEHEREZADE: My king was fierce and splendid.
ANDERSEN: I followed the moon for thirty-three nights, watching it rise and set,
and rising yet again and fleeing. From one side of the earth to the other. Astride
its gaze, I climbed over years and mountains. I saw the Ganges and a little Hindu
girl with a shell in her hand. I saw the snows of Greenland, the ruins of Rome and
Venice, life in Pompei. And I saw you, loved and hated, while telling your stories.
SCHEHEREZADE: Loved and hated because I was a woman. He screwed us and then
slaughtered us. But don't believe that things are so simple. My king believed in
simple things. Nevertheless, in the end, it was me who got him.
ANDERSEN: I was there when the moon didn’t set for three nights over Thebes,
while Alcmene made love, saw double, her heart trembling. I was with the last
glimmer of the moon, in the twilight, when the order was given: cut the throat of
the newborn, shoot the prophets. I was with its first ray, the night that it kissed
the face of a tired woman, sitting at the window, near to death.
SCHEHEREZADE: A mother!
ANDERSEN: Oh, no. She was very beautiful.
SCHEHEREZADE: Exactly, all mothers…
ANDERSEN: Not mine.
SCHEHEREZADE: ?
ANDERSEN: She smelled of alcohol and laundry soap, freezing to death in the
Odense wash-house. She never had time to sit at the window and wait for me
when it was time for me to come home.
SCHEHEREZADE: And that other woman, then?
ANDERSEN: I saw the moon kissing her tired, dying face. She looked like a girl in
the bloom of youth. I saw an old lady making her up and combing her hair to
perfection, while she sat there with a candle so that men could respond to the
call of her beauty, that evening as they passed under the windows of the brothel.
SCHEHEREZADE: How sad.
ANDERSEN: It's comforting. We sing a lullaby to those who are about to die.
44
SCHEHEREZADE: I am drowsy. Make me sleep.
ANDERSEN: During the day?
TUESDAY
(Scorching noon)
SCHEHEREZADE: Can you see down there?
ANDERSEN: ?
SCHEHEREZADE: They are carrying away a wounded angel.
ANDERSEN: Another fairy tale?
SCHEHEREZADE: I don't know.
ANDERSEN: Is it one of mine?
SCHEHEREZADE: It's not one of mine.
ANDERSEN: Is it us?
SCHEHEREZADE: It's you.
ANDERSEN: Two children with a stretcher and an angel who has fallen like a bird
from the nest. I would never have thought of… I have never seen something like
that.
SCHEHEREZADE: The angel has a bandage on its fair forehead, and blood on a
wing.
ANDERSEN: Perhaps they hit it with a catapult. Then they discovered what it was,
were afraid and repented.
SCHEHEREZADE: The smallest child is wearing a hat. The other has anger in the
white of his eyes.
ANDERSEN: Almost a teenager.
SCHEHEREZADE: Did they also repent what they did to you?
ANDERSEN: I am not an angel, dear perfume of tulip.
SCHEHEREZADE: Certainly not! You are a swan, a duckling. You were born with a
broken wing and wrote in order to fly. What else could you do?
ANDERSEN: It is the broken wing that makes us fly and tell stories. It's not possible
in the void, when life is like an empty bottle.
SCHEHEREZADE: So said your mother.
ANDERSEN: You talk too much, my little master. Our teachers said so when they
invited us into their theatres of experiments. An imprisoned white dove flutters
in a glass bell. They pump out the air, the dove beats its wings uselessly and
drops, lifeless. The Holy Spirit expires.
SCHEHEREZADE: What are you complaining about? You have flown everywhere
with glory. You are known in every corner of the world.
ANDERSEN: You did even better. Your tales made you bride, mother and queen.
SCHEHEREZADE: I risked having my throat cut at daybreak. Do you know what it
means to kiss a king at night, to have him between your legs..
45
ANDERSEN: …
SCHEHEREZADE: … there is no shame in words, my timid friend… to have a king on
top of you and feel the blade of the axe on your neck, still wet with kisses? I sang
like a nightingale to avert death for me and my sisters. But I loved my king with
all the happy laughs I had in my throat. I hate my stories, my poet friend, and I
adore them. And you? What about your tales?
ANDERSEN: We poets are faithful to humans only in misfortune. We don't care
about them when everything goes well.
SCHEHEREZADE: We are impassioned hunters. Our prey…
ANDERSEN: We don't eat the meat of our prey. That's what distinguishes us from
hunters.
SCHEHEREZADE: A fine distinction.
ANDERSEN: An essential one.
SCHEHEREZADE: The blade too is fine. Yet it kills.
WEDNESDAY
(In the twilight)
SCHEHEREZADE: Teach me to sleep.
ANDERSEN: Before nightfall?
SCHEHEREZADE: You and your habits!
ANDERSEN: Listen. Many years ago an emperor lived here and he loved to spend
all is money on fancy clothes.
SCHEHEREZADE: I like that.
ANDERSEN: He was not interested in soldiers, gardens or comedies. He only
enjoyed being seen in new outfits. In the city, life was rather pleasant...
SCHEHEREZADE: You bet!
ANDERSEN: ... then one day two young men arrived.
SCHEHEREZADE: Brothers? One blond and the other black?
ANDERSEN: This, I don't know.
SCHEHEREZADE: It doesn't matter, go on.
ANDERSEN: They said they were weavers, able to produce the most splendid
fabric imaginable.
SCHEHEREZADE: The fabric had one defect: it was invisible to the eyes of the very
stupid, or of those who were not doing their job properly. So said the two young
men.
ANDERSEN: That is not a defect - thought the emperor - but a formidable weapon.
Now I can discover who is a fool.
SCHEHEREZADE: I too knew this story, but it was better not to tell it. Too
dangerous. My king might understand it and cut off my head.
ANDERSEN: ?
47
SCHEHEREZADE: How do they end, in your story, the two weavers of the invisible?
ANDERSEN: They have no end. By the time everybody becomes aware that the
magic cloth does not exist and that the emperor is leading the procession in his
underpants, the two youths have already secretly left. They vanished and nothing
more is known about them.
SCHEHEREZADE: Excellent idea. We are the two weavers.
ANDERSEN: Watch your tongue, my friend!
THURSDAY
(Early spring, at dawn)
ANDERSEN: Hey! Hey! What's happening here? What is this place?
SCHEHEREZADE: Look how the moon dances on the Tigris.
ANDERSEN: Cover yourself, my friend!
SCHEHEREZADE: They cannot see us. From up here the palms look like crickets.
ANDERSEN: The moon glides over the roofs of Fionia.
SCHEHEREZADE: It is the Tigris, and the feluccas adorn its shores.
ANDERSEN: A small paper boat sails with my tin soldier on the Odense river.
SCHEHEREZADE: Listen how the wind from the desert sings through the streets of
Baghdad.
ANDERSEN: Hu - u - ud, fare hen! Go, fade away, says the wind.
SCHEHEREZADE: There, as a child, I played with my sister Dunyazad.
ANDERSEN: There kneels my mother washing cloths in the icy water of the river.
Look, Scheherezade, now the actors are a prey to our stories. They have fallen
into them, like flies in a cup of tea.
SCHEHEREZADE: To the gallop!
ANDERSEN: Look, Scheherezade, our stories cast them into the unexpected.
SCHEHEREZADE: To the gallop! Like horse thieves, they leap onto the backs of our
stories and are carried away, they don't know where.
ANDERSEN: The wind of our stories transports them where day and night blend
together. Black sun and gold sun.
SCHEHEREZADE: To the gallop! They turn back to look, and have no eyes for what
is in front of them.
ANDERSEN: Our simple, harmless and kind stories. But unknown to them, a shadow
grows within each one. Stories of winds with a storm inside in an unknown language.
SCHEHEREZADE: To the gallop! Who is the horse? Who is the rider? Our words are
mad crows in the desert, shadows of blind horses.
ANDERSEN: Our words are like the wind in mountain gorges. Expectations, fears,
tears and hopes: just a laughing wind.
SCHEHEREZADE: Can't you see the mosques and the minarets?
ANDERSEN: No, but sooner or later they will be there.
48
FRIDAY
(A winter night)
SCHEHEREZADE: Did you hear? One of the actors thought: life is over, as if she had
not lived. And another had so many dreams and, in the end, had forgotten all of
them.
ANDERSEN: Actors are not like us. We have days inside other days, one night inside
another.
SCHEHEREZADE: They behave as masters.
ANDERSEN: They have taken over our stories.
SCHEHEREZADE: Are we their servants?
ANDERSEN: Oh no! We are their ghosts.
SCHEHEREZADE: The actors pass, but we remain. We arrive at night, like naughty
thoughts. Tell me a naughty thought.
ANDERSEN: She was just a child, barefooted in the snow, during a freezing New
Year's night. She sold matches but nobody bought them. In their cosy homes
people ate, drank and celebrated. To keep warm, the child lit all her matches.
Then she died of cold and flew to heaven. This is all I was able to invent. In my
time, matches were sold on the corners of streets. Here they are. Look. Take
them. To light them, you do this.
SCHEHEREZADE: Was that a naughty thought? It is just sentimental.
ANDERSEN: Nevertheless it made me famous. And you, how would you tell it?
SCHEHEREZADE: Do you want to see how a little girl warms herself?
ANDERSEN: I want to see a laughing child behind the mask of death.
SCHEHEREZADE: Behind the mask there is a laughing wind, happy, serious and
useless.
(Scheherezade sets fire to herself. Or to the theatre.)
Translated from Italian by Judy Barba
49
Eugenio Barba
Children of Silence
Reflections on Forty Years of Odin Teatret
To the secret people - the friends of Odin Teatret
I often react as I used to fifty years ago. "Look at that elderly person", I say to
myself observing a man of about forty. And I immediately laugh at myself, aware
that he is the same age as my theatre and was a child when I already started
thinking that my latest production would be the last.
I also feel like smiling when Odin Teatret performs in a new town and we
meet young people who know us from books. They believe we are just a chapter
of theatre history, and our abnormal persistence disturbs their way of thinking.
Bones hurt, the sight has weakened and it is a lot more tiring to work
twelve hours a day. Yet it is as if an unreasonable force keeps alive my need to
do theatre. Several motives make me continue. I can synthesize them in a single
sentence: the theatre craft is my only country and Holstebro my home.
And here I am, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of my theatre,
rehearsing a production on Hans Christian Andersen and his fairy tales. I am almost
seventy years old and people will assume that I am becoming childish.
I too would like to write a fairy tale. It would tell of two brothers,
children of Silence, who travel the world, the one as the shadow of the other.
They have the semblance of hooligans and their names are Disorder and Error.
Disorder
In recent years, I have been using the word 'Disorder' more and more when
speaking of the theatre craft, aware that it creates confusion. For me it has two
opposite meanings: the absence of logic and rigour characterising nonsensical and
chaotic works; or the logic and rigour which provoke the experience of
bewilderment in the spectator. I ought to have two different words for this.
Instead I will use an orthographic trick - the difference between small and capital
letters - to distinguish disorder as a loss of energy, from Disorder as the irruption
of an energy that confronts us with the unknown.
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What I have always longed for with my performances is to arouse Disorder
in the mind and the senses of a particular spectator. I would like to shake up his
habits of foreseeing and judging, to set in motion an emotional oscillation and sow
amazement.
The spectator about whom I speak is not a stranger, someone to be
convinced or conquered. I am speaking first of all about myself. Whoever directs
a performance is also its spectator. Disorder (with a capital letter) may be a weapon
or a medicine against the disorder that besieges us, both inside and around us.
I know that no method exists to provoke Disorder in the spectator.
Nevertheless, I believe that I can come close to it through a particular form of
self-discipline. This implies a separation from the correct and reasonable ways to
consider the values, justifications and objectives of our profession. It is an attitude
that nobody can impose on or grant me.
It has to do with liberation and, as with all liberation, it is a source of pain.
A clearing
The clearing is just a few kilometres away from a town. A handful of men and
women are gathered in front of a hut. They belong to the class of the dominated
and exploited in an African colony in the middle of the twentieth century.
The gathering is secret and forbidden. It looks like a conspiracy but it is
not, since the rifles are fakes like those used in theatre. But it is not theatre. Yet
these people disguise themselves and turn into characters. They put aside their
daily way of speaking and walking and behave differently. They pretend. Is it a
game? They mean it seriously. In common accord they perform a transgressive and
violent act. In the centre of the clearing a dog is being cooked in a big pot and its
meat, which is taboo for them, is eaten.
The people who have turned into characters are possessed, but not by the
gods of their past. Instead of the traditional divinities, their actual masters manifest
themselves: the governor of the town, the chief of police and the ladies of the
European upper class in a colonial country. For a few hours, the Africans are no
longer dominated by the whites who rule them. They embody them and, through
possession, appropriate momentarily their life and destiny.
The protagonists of the rite seem insane and out of control. The European
who records their images in a film considers them, however, masters and calls them
'mad masters': two incompatible terms striving to define Disorder.
A recent newspaper article makes me watch again the half century old
film sequences of those possessed people in an African clearing. For a ruse of the
imagination and memory, the figures of other departed masters, dear to me and
always near, surface in my mind.
Mad masters
On the night between Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th of February 2004, Jean
Rouch died at the age of 86 in a car accident in Niger, 600 kilometres north of
Niamey. He was a leading personality in French cinema, one of the fathers of the
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Nouvelle Vague. They called him le maître du Desordre, the master of Disorder.
Fifty years ago, on the outskirts of Accra, the capital of Ghana, then a British
colony, he shot Les maîtres fous. This ethnographical film showed directly one of
the cases in which chains still weighed painfully on the flesh and the mind, and
Disorder and torment blended in an attempt at liberation.
This film was the testimony of another rationality, subterranean and
subversive. It overwhelmed Jean Genet, who wrote Les Nègres, it made an
impression on Peter Brook and his production of Marat-Sade by Peter Weiss, and
it accompanied Grotowski's reflections on the actor. Anecdotes and legends
circulated in European theatre milieus concerning the influence of Les maîtres
fous. In those years the parallels and distinctions between theatre and ritual were
discussed more and more frequently. Some artists were inventing a subtext which
today is more than evident: theatre can be a clearing in the heart of a civilized
world, a privileged place in which to evoke Disorder.
Let's move for a moment to Moscow, where the streets are white with
ice. On one of the first days of January 1889, Anton Cekhov wrote a long letter to
the rich publisher and literate Aleksej S. Suvorin. Reading it, I feel the same
red-hot taste of suffering and conceit that I sense when observing the ceremony
in the African clearing: the scorching agony of liberation. With raw realism Cekhov
describes in advance the tensions and raptures of the participants in that ceremony
as it outlines a man "who, drop by drop, squeezes out the slave in himself".
It is not an ex-enslaved African, it is the great and famous Russian writer,
son of a serf. Despite the relative comfort that surrounds him, he recognises in
himself the wounds from invisible chains. Many times he suffered the lashes of his
father and teachers who educated him to revere hierarchies, to kiss the hand of
popes, to bow to other people's ideas and give lavish thanks for every crumb
received. He had become a youth who tormented animals, enjoyed lunching with
rich relatives, a hypocrite towards God and humankind because he was aware of
his own nothingness.
The Cekhov who confesses the struggle against his own chains and sense
of nothingness is a sharp, sensitive and self-ironic writer of civilised Europe. His
words are not unrestrained. But their composure is fed by the same Disorder that
nourishes the actions of that African ceremony, disturbing and, to our eyes,
unrestrained.
At the news of Jean Rouch's death, this master of Disorder, I wonder: do
his mad masters also say something about me, my history, my imaginary theatrical
ancestors? Which are the chains we want to break?
I don't know how to explain it, but something unarticulated, almost
shameful, urges me to recognise a few theatre artists from the past as mad and
possessed masters.
53
Silence
When I think about the extremism of their thought, the protagonists of the theatre
revolt in the twentieth century, from Stanislavski on, become for me maîtres
fous.
In a climate of aesthetic, technical and economic renewal, they raised
questions which were so absurd that they were met with indifference and derision.
Since the incandescent core of these questions was wrapped in well formulated
professional theories, these were considered as attacks against the art of the
theatre, or 'utopias', which is a harmless way of saying that we do not need to take
them seriously. Here are some of these cores:
- to look for life in a world of papier-mâché;
- to let the truth stream into a world of disguises;
- to reach sincerity through pretence;
- to transform the training of the actor (an individual who imitates and represents
people different from himself) into a path leading towards the integrity of a New
Human Being.
Some of the masters of the extreme added insanity to insanity. Unable
to understand that those 'utopias' were unachievable, they realised them.
Let’s imagine an artist today applying for a grant from the Ministry of
Culture to research the Truth through theatre. Or the director of a theatre school
writing in its program: here we teach acting with the aim of creating a New
Human Being. Or else, a director who demands from his/her actors the skill to
dance in order to mirror the harmony of the Celestial Spheres. It would be
permissible to consider them as nutcases. Why, then, do theatre historians
describe Stanislavski, Copeau and Appia as if their mad questions were noble
utopias and original theories?
Today it doesn't cost anything to see in their apparent madness a sensible
reaction to the strains of an epoch that was jeopardizing the survival of the
theatre. It is easy, today, to recognise perspicacity, coherence and cleverness in
the bewilderment that the masters of Disorder brought to the theatre of their
time. They rejected its century old organisation, overturned hierarchies,
sabotaged the well tested communicative conventions between the stage and the
audience, cut the umbilical cord with literature and surface realism. They brutally
stripped the theatre down and reduced it to its essence. They justified themselves
with a paradox: they gave life to performances that were unimaginable in their
extremism, originality and artistic refinement in order to deny that theatre is only
art. Each of them, with different words, stressed that the theatre's vocation was
to break intimate, professional, ethical, social, religious or cultural chains.
We are used to reading the history of modern theatre upside-down. We
don't start from the incandescent cores of the questions and the obsessions of the
54
masters of Disorder, but from the reasonableness or the poetry of their printed
words. Their pages have an authoritative and persuasive tone. But for each of them
there must have been many nights of solitude and fear, while suspecting that the
windmills they fought against were invincible giants.
Today we see them portrayed in picturesque photos: intelligent faces,
well fed and ironically placid, like Stanislavski; suggestive begging kings, like
Artaud; proud and aware of their own intellectual superiority, like Craig; eternally
frowning and pugnacious, like Meyerhold. It is impossible to sense in each of these
bright spirits the incapability to forget or to accept their own invisible chains. We
are unable to feel that their efficacy derives in part from the strain of tearing
themselves away from a condition of impotent silence.
Art which is capable of provoking the experience of bewilderment, and
thus of changing us, always conceals the zone of silence that has produced it. I think
about this sort of silence that is not a choice, but a condition suffered as an
amputation. This silence generates monsters: self-denigration, violence towards
oneself and others, gloomy sloth and ineffective anger. At times, however, this
silence nourishes Disorder.
The experience of Disorder doesn't concern the categories of aesthetics.
It happens when a different reality prevails over reality: in the universe of plane
geometry a solid body falls. As when unexpectedly, like lightning, death strikes a
beloved one; or when, in a split second, our senses ignite and we are aware of being
in love. Or when in Norway, as a recent immigrant, I was contemptuously called
'wop' and a door was slammed on me.
When Disorder hits us, in life and in art, we suddenly awaken in a world
that we no longer recognise, and don't yet know how to adjust to.
A clearing in the confusion
Artistic directions are always individual paths trying to escape prefabricated
mechanisms, rails and recipes. They must discover their own organicity which is our
'need'. These paths breathe and remain alive according to a personal self-discipline.
Self-discipline doesn't correspond to a voluntary adhesion to norms invented
by others. I repeat: it consists in separating ourselves from the obvious and reasonable
ways to consider the values, aims and motivations of our craft. It also implies the
strength of mind to submit ourselves to that inner silence which enchains us and
arouses fear, but which we sense may guide us as a mad master in an African clearing.
The self-discipline which is one of the premises for realising Disorder in my
mind as a spectator, is born out of a clot of silence. It has such a particular nature
that it remains unknown even to myself when I feel the first symptoms. Therefore
no method can steer towards Disorder.
55
There are performances where the actors, the director and the
spectators know the story. There are performances where the actors and the
director know it but the spectators do not. With the years, I like to let a type of
performance grow in which, at the start, neither I nor the actors are able to
imagine the story that we are telling. We have to discover not only how to tell
it, but also what we are telling. Only the performance to which we will give life
can partially disclose what we wanted to say.
It is a consciously hazardous way to lose and find myself again, making
use of two contrasting forces: on the one hand, I trust my long professional
experience; on the other, I try to invalidate this experience by building disjointed
and arduous conditions of work. I want to paralyse the certainties of my
knowledge, to disarm the mannerisms of my reflexes and to relive the experience
of the first time, revitalising my skills through a bewilderment in front of a
situation that I don't control. Such an enterprise is feasible only with the actors
of Odin Teatret whose strong personalities have been tempered through this
paradoxical exploration: we know how to search, but we don't yet know what we
are searching for.
I have to create a new production. The first effort consists in being able
to create a state of collective incubation starting from 'black holes'. These may
be two or three different texts or else several captivating stories, a few questions
which are reciprocally incompatible, or else the positioning side by side of
discordant themes. The actors and I let these 'black holes' act on us attracting a
flow of ideas, memories, ghosts, associations, biographical or imaginary episodes
and historical facts. Through improvisations and a work of conscious composition,
we give an anatomy to this inner flow - a nervous system, a dynamic and sonorous
temperament in the form of physical and vocal actions. This scenic material will
be macerated, blended and distilled during the rehearsals letting, at times,
sensorial, melodic, rhythmic, associative and intellectual connections appear
which were impossible to foresee: something we ignored in the beginning.
It is a process shadowed ceaselessly by uncertainty and apprehension.
Days and weeks fly past and we feel as if we are shipwrecked in a sea of disparate
proposals, strange potentialities, incongruous scenes and directions: confusion. I
proceed by leaps, coincidences, incoherent choices, misunderstandings and
accidental interferences. I decide without knowing why, and my intuition is often
disconnected. Tiredness and obstinacy guide me. With time, I have acquired a
certain familiarity with my way of thinking, seizing my thoughts that I interpret
in words to myself and my companions. A reflex warns me which roads lead
nowhere and which, instead, bring me home. I pursue presentiments. I presage
the house of winds that we are blindly building.
This way of proceeding is not an example to be followed, especially for
inexperienced directors who might be seduced by the charm of serendipity, of
fortuitous discoveries and unexpected solutions through erring - making mistakes
and going astray - during a laborious period of rehearsals.
When I try to lean on safe rules, I am penalised for my naivety. If I resign
myself to the idea of a world deprived of rules, I pay for this naivety with failures
that are just as drastic. What is there, then, between rules and absence of rules?
Between law and anarchy? If I think in the abstract, the answer is nothing. But
practice teaches me that there is something there, combining simultaneously the
nature of the rule and that of its negation.
This something is usually called error and it is this that helps me out of
the confusion. I recognise two types of errors: solid and liquid. The solid error may
be measured, shaped or modified, thus losing its quality of inaccuracy, misunderstanding, insufficiency or absurdity. It may be brought back to the rule and turned
into order.
57
The liquid error cannot be seized or appraised. It behaves as a spot of
damp behind a wall. It signals something that comes from far away. I notice that
a certain scene is 'wrong', but if I am patient and don't make immediate use of my
intelligence, I become aware that it should not be corrected, but pursued. Just
the fact that it is so obviously wrong, makes me suspect that it is not merely
foolish, but indicates a lateral way which leads I don't know where.
The most difficult thing to learn is the skill to cling to an error instead of
immediately correcting it, and so discover where it carries us.
This acquired tacit knowledge is buried in me, in my nervous system, in
the muscle of my heart. It cannot be taught or passed on as a method which can
be formulated and applied. Each one of us, caught up in the confusion, becoming
dazzled and going off track, banging our heads against our own silence and
solitude, must jeopardize professional certainty and guess where to open a fissure
to our particular Disorder.
The anarchy of fairy tales and the art of error
Disorder does not build anything. At times it is extremely unpleasant, but it helps
to break the chains.
I have been taught: love your enemies. In everyday life, this is the
enterprise of saints. In artistic life, it is normal practice. How many times,
preparing a production, do I plunge into the confusion and realise that I am on the
wrong road. Confusion and disorientation are enemies to be loved.
I have been taught: life is a dream. It is not true. Life is a fairy tale. It is
a world of pure anarchy where those who stubbornly try to prevail, struggling
along reasonable paths, lose. And those who behave foolishly find a princess in
the end.
The world of fairy tales is pure anarchy because it concentrates on the
need to break the chains. A fairy tale breaks the fetters that tie the stories to the
world such as it is. It pays for this liberty, however, with the risk of arbitrariness.
Therefore fairy tales are populated by monsters, shadows endowed with an
autonomous life, men and women who are half animal, speaking corpses and
objects which think and are alive. It is not the world of myth or imagination. It is
one of confusion. It is a world that children love, but which doesn't love children.
There they die in profusion, are abandoned and overpowered. They experience
naked reality: anxiety and fear broken by flashes of unreasonable justice.
What does the pure anarchy of fairy tales teach me in my theatre work?
While rehearsing, if confusion takes the upper hand, everything becomes
indistinct. The fog prevents me from seeing in any direction. To find my bearings,
I force myself to condense this evanescent confusion into solid errors to be
corrected and eliminated, reinstating order into the situation.
58
At the same time, I have to know how to detect the liquid errors on which
to slide to places where I had not imagined going. Where I didn't want or believe
it possible to go.
If it were true that fairy tales could teach, I would have to admit that above
all they prove that error can be a blessing. The foolishness or the forgetfulness of a
protagonist, a person mistaken for another, a prolonged sleep, a dead crow that
you put in your pocket are often the premises and the conditions for an unexpected
happy ending.
Does an art of error exist? Now, after forty years with Odin Teatret, I am
inclined to affirm that there are errors which increase confusion and errors which
liberate. Of course I believe in inspiration, in the voice of the muse, in the dáimon,
the duende or the guardian angel. But I have more faith in errors which liberate
when I have the adroitness to predict them and pursue them. They are signs which
detach themselves from the silence. They originate from that part within me that
I ignore. I consider them as messages that the mad master has entrusted to me.
Organic material
All this involves the whole body, not only the flesh and bones but muscles,
nerves and the complex relationships between organs, blood circulation and
synapses. The body resembles thought precisely because it is organism-spirit:
body-mind. Therefore the organic material which makes up theatre has always been
a passion of mine, together with the radiations which this material releases. I love
to work with this living material in order to weave silent dialogues with anthropophagous spectators - people with the need to devour with their senses. I like to
use this material to open up paths which will immediately close behind me,
allowing me and my actors to remain in transition. During my apprenticeship, I have occasionally lived through the
unexpected clash with a theatrical reality that sowed bewilderment within me.
The Mother by Brecht/Gorki with the Berliner Ensemble, a long kathakali night in
Kerala and The Constant Prince by Grotowski remain indelibly printed on my brain
and marrow.
Similarly, in an unexpected and involontary way I have experienced and
still experience Disorder while working with my actors. From the very beginning,
certain designs of their physical or vocal actions, continuously repeated and
refined, leap into another reality of being.
I have personally witnessed it: a denser, brighter and more incandescent
body than the bodies we possess emerges in the theatrical space from an elsewhere
which I cannot place. This body-in-life irrupts, regardless of good or bad taste, by
a combination of chance and craft or because of an unforeseen event in a highly
structured calculation.
Today it is clear to me: theatre has represented a precious tool to make
incursions into zones of the world that seemed out of my reach. Incursions into
the unknown region that characterise the vertical or spiritual reality of the human
being. And incursions into the horizontal space of human relationships, of social
60
circles, of power and politics in the viscous daily reality of this world which I
inhabit and to which I refuse to belong.
Still today I am captivated by the fact that theatre furnishes tools, ways
and alibis for incursions into the double geography: the one which surrounds me
and that which I surround. On the one hand, the external world with its rules,
vastness, incomprehensible and seductive regions, evil and chaos; on the other,
the inner world with its continents and oceans, its folds and fertile mysteries.
What has the training of my actors been if not a bridge between these
two extremes: the incursion into the machine of the body, and an opening for the
irruption of an energy that shatters the limits of the body?
Theatre can be the craft of incursion, a floating island of dissidence, a
clearing in the heart of the civilized world. On rare and privileged occasions,
theatre is turbulent Disorder that rocks my familiar ways of living the space and
time around me and, through bewilderment, compels be to discover another part
of myself.
Translated from Italian by Judy Barba
61
September 26, 1874
Last night I had a strange and dreadful dream.
I dreamt that I had to sail with the king and since I
was on land, a messenger announced that the king
was waiting for me, we had to leave. In haste I
packed two suitcases, but I was unable to finish,
something was always missing, I was anxious, a
gunshot sounded, the king was already on board,
I had to hurry. I closed the suitcases, gave them to
a servant and ran towards a river, but I was told to
go in another direction, through a wood.
A new gunshot announced that the king's ship
had set sail, but there was another royal ship
on which I could embark. I could see her, and a
man with a red kaftan and an unsheathed sword
made me a sign, he looked like old Rambusch from
Korsør. When I got close, he received me with
insults and pushed me on board, striking
me on the back. I turned furiously, but was thrown
into the hold and there I heard I was on
a slave ship. Then I woke up.
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Hans Christian Andersen: Diaries 1873-1875
G.E.C. Gads Forlag, Copenhagen, pp. 329-330
63
ODIN TE­A­TRET
NOR­DISK TE­A­TER­LA­BO­RA­TO­RIUM
særkærparken 144 · POST­BOKS 1283
DK-7500 HOL­STE­BRO · DENMARK
TEL. +45 97 42 47 77 · FAX +45 97 41 04 82
E-MAIL [email protected] · www.odinteatret.dk
Holstebro · September 2004