4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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from ritual to theater and back
Barba founded his Odin Teatret in 1965, he used these same exercises –
as codified by the Polish Lab and Barba’s own work. Barba’s intense
research project of the 1980s – the International School of Theatre
Anthropology (ISTA) – focuses on techniques of Asian performing (see
Barba 1986).
Western directors looked not only to Asia but to Africa, the Caribbean,
and native America as well. In 1972–3 Peter Brook led a group
of thirty theater artists on a three-month trip through Algeria, Mali,
Niger, Dahomey, and Nigeria. Their experience is much like what
Barba calls “barter” – where performers from different cultures
exchange techniques, songs, stories, whatever. In Brook’s words:
Once we sat in Agades in a small hut all afternoon, singing. We and
the African group sang, and suddenly we found that we were hitting
exactly the same language of sound. Well, we understood theirs and
they understood ours, and something quite electrifying happened
because, out of all sorts of different songs, one suddenly came upon
this common area.
Another experience of that same sort occurred one night when we
were camping in a forest. We thought there was no one around for
miles, but as always, suddenly, children appeared from nowhere and
beckoned. We were just sitting and doing some improvised song,
and the children asked us to come down to their village, only a couple
of miles away, because there was going to be some singing and
dancing later in the night and everyone would be very pleased if we
could come.
So we said “sure.” We walked down through the forest, found this
village, and found that, indeed, there was a ceremony going on.
Somebody had just died and it was a funeral ceremony. We were made
very welcome and we sat there, in total darkness under the trees, just
seeing these moving shadows dancing and singing. And after a couple
of hours they suddenly said to us: the boys say that this is what you do,
too. Now you must sing for us.
So we had to improvise a song for them. And this was perhaps one of
the best works of the entire journey. Because the song that was produced
for the occasion was extraordinarily moving, right, and satisfying,
and made a real coming together of the people and ourselves. It is