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This is characteristic of men who are convinced they are in the right, and think they are the instruments of a Higher Justice. They think of themselves not as Cangaceiros but as Ąngels who administer Justice. , NOG: One of.them is actually raised to the status of Angel is hoisted up as an Angel with black wings. Eugenio Barba: Yes, there’s a moment when that takes place. NOG: But it isn't simply a performance about atrocity and the horror of our time. Àntigone, for example, couples with the body of Christ before they are both cut to bits.

Eugenio Barba: You say is Christ. And I reply: it is and isn't Christ. In the production he is called Polinices, Antigone's brother. And both were children of Oedipus, who, having found the truth, blinded himself. He is at the same time the Prodigal Son who returns to his father’s house to submit to him, while Polinices returns to Thebes, his birthplace, to attack it. The production is a tangle of threads in which opposites are interwoven, corresponding precisely to the temperature of the spirit of our times - a time when people accept cruelty as completely normal, something as unsurprising as the return of the Prodigal Son or the burying ofia rebellion. And it is this temperature which the actors and I try to distil in an emotional way through images which attack the senses, individual memories, the memories of our personal histories and of History. NOG: An essential element of the production is the stone that moves and gives off sparks at two specific moments. Yet after we have experienced various forms of human execution the stake, the guillotine - - the stone no longer emits sparks, but allows itself, instead, to be pierced by a sword. Eugenio Barba: Yes, and wasn’t there, once upon a time, a sword lodged in a rock waiting for pure, strong, honest men to come and draw it out? At the present time, the sword is stuck in its rock, but a day will come when someone pulls it out again. Surely a generation will come along which is able to free the sword from the rock. NOG: Will someone really? At the end of the production it is still there, like a cross on a gravestone. Eugenio Barba: Relations are not eternal. You can’t think merely in terms of you and me. There will be those who come after us.

NOG: You say that with some conviction. Are you sure that someone will come? Eugenio Barba: Yes, I am sure. NOG : Isn’t this more a Mass for the first day rather than for the last days? Eugenio Barba: It is said in the production and it is written in the program; It is only Winter. And in Winter the seed is sown in order to reap in the Red Summer. Summer will definitely come. Even if we are no longer here, there will be people to harvest. We have to sow our seeds even though we may never see the results. NOG: Could you tell me something about the way you worked on this production? Eugenio Barba: I asked each of the actors to choose a figure to test himself with, to inspire, to feed him, a kind of guardian angel or travelling companion. It wasn’t long before we discovered a range of such characters: Joan of Arc, Antigone, the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th century’s False Messiah, and , the Prodigal Son.

These figures brought a great deal of personal information with them, historical contexts, associations and implications. Moby Dick, for example. And for me, Moby Dick’s presence was there the whole time, even if he never actually assumed a living form. And he's still there. In the form of this white, pale-skinned body that links the scenes together. He seems to be a bridge but he is the skeleton of a white whale, the last

of the white whales. So, starting with the characters and the stories brought in by the individual actors, I began to weave a play together, began to develop the performance text. NOG: Still, the text was originally yours not the actor’s. Eugenio Barba: Several of the actors came with suggestions, others came with requests, others with detailed proposals. In a particular phase of rehearsals, I wanted to make seven different performances that could be performed at the same time, making, in effect, an eighth performance. I could have called the performan: ce Antigone one evening and everyone would have recognized ; Creon, and the fratricidal fight be-1 fore the gates of Thebes. , Another evening I could have calt led it Joan of Arc, the Peasant Girl i Who Wants Her King to Oppose î His Historical Destiny. The third evening, it could have been a play

about Cangaceiros bandits, who i hide their crimes within a camouflage of historical personages. NOG: A collection of Noms de Guerre? Eugenio Barba: Something like that. And these Cangaceiros would tell one another what these persons, whose names they bear, had done. At the same time, they would help them along and justify them; Aha! So you’re Joan of Arc? Well then you have to burn! For fun, without the necessity of having real fire. NOG: Without having real fire? But there is a burning torch laid at her feet. Eugenio Barba: Yes, she pretends she’s being burned. But then you see her again, immediately afterwards, actively helping to suppress revolt, that is, Antigone. It has something to do with how you tell a story. What do people expect from theater? Should theater recount the obvious to the minutest detail? Or should it create a mental space, a kind of labyrinth into which are thrown the perceptions and conscious knowledge of

the spectator? Each member of the audience has to fight to find the way out, must measure himself vis-a-vis what he sees, feels, perceives, imagines. Naturally, this only works when a person is stimulated by the production. If he weren't stimulated his time at an Odin Teatret performance would have been wasted. NOG: A number of the people were allowed to see the final rehearsals on the condition that

they describe their experience ofthem in a letter. Were these letters stimulating? Eugenio Barba: Extremely. It is incredible how individual the images are that they see, the way they express themselves, the way they orient themselves with respect to what they have lived. This is the word which kept cropping up. Some reactions were formulated so strikingly you could sense they had experienced somthing that had gone straight to the core, something essential to them as individuals. The best are to me always from children. Children are able to distil into one sentence what is going on around them. As long as children can formulate an impression, I can be sure the performance is on target. Children don’t play with associations or abstractions. They proceed in a quite literal way. A child came with his mot- her, an actress, and the mother

told me how her child had said to her during a pause: I know what this is about. It's hell. He had said it with total seriousness and conviction as children do when they relate to you a discovery. NOG: Do you use these reactions to change the performance? Eugenio Barba : The letters are a sensitive temperature guage that helps me to fine tune many details, never to change them, but to calibrate them. Such things have to do with length of an action, the duration, the breathing of a situation, the degree of intensity, the kind of dynamiowhich leads to other, unexpected associations. Those kind of things can be fine tuned. Above all, the letter responses contained a wealth of interpretations and impressions that we weren’t even aware of. So they help us develop various associative possibilities. NOG: How long had you worked . before you began to let people , into the rehearsals? i Eugenio Barba: The rehearsals be. gan on March 1, 1984. The first : people to see the work entered

the room exactly one year later. We actually rehearsed for seven or eight months, since- many things interrupted us. But the production had been in my head and my guts for a longer time, two years at least. NOG: What was the first thing you did the first day of rehearsal? Did you begin by discussing the actors characters? Something else? Eugenio Barba: I asked each actor to come up with a character and

to bring any material that he or she might have. In our theater there is an understanding that the actorsfirst begin by improvising, building sequences of actions, fragments of situations, which we then develop together. The character of Joan of Arc may be an illuminating example. The actress had read that Joan of Arc was a woman who always wore the clothing of a man, who was fascinated by her sword, by her banner. Details of that sort. She then began to work with these props, exploring episodes taken from the biography of Joan of Arc, These were points of departure for improvisation. The way we work resembles film making' Each actor is like a cameraman who has shot a lot of footage, that is, he has assembled a sęries of actions, most stemming from an improvisation, the minute rhytmic and dynamic details of which he must be able to repeat. After these actions have been refi-