Alice Williams

The Production of Luck:

Learning to Act, in the Discipline of Theatre Anthropology.

A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the

The University of Sydney, 2020

For little girls, everywhere.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my associate supervisor Laleen Jayamanne for editing all of my drafts,

and all the other unspeakable gifts you have given me over the years that you have

been my teacher. Thankyou for encouraging me, and helping me learn how to let my

experiences speak. Thank you to my supervisor Richard Smith for your patience,

acceptance of my work, valuable guidance and feedback. Thank you to Marion

Burford for reading my chapters, Grace Cochrane and others at 7 am for your advice,

feedback and support. Lucy Watson for being a generous collaborator. Chris Jefferis

for fixing my page numbers. Marcus Coombs for buying me dinner. Isadora Pei, Vilja

Itkonen and all at Odin Teatret for your openness, rigour, generosity and support, I

hope you find your work has been acknowledged in this thesis.

Thesis Abstract

The Production of Luck:

Learning to Act, in the Discipline of Theatre Anthropology.

Theatre Anthropology is a discipline with a unique place in the history of theatre. It is neither

solely practical nor theoretical, but enacts and theorises the relationship between action and

thought, reflecting how transformations in one area inform the development of the other. This

field is the work of Eugenio Barba, actors of Odin Teatret, scholars and performers of the

International School of Theatre Anthropology. Until recently, Theatre Anthropology has,

predominantly, been received within the categorical bounds of theatre history, intercultural

theatre debates, and performance analysis. This has been necessary for the constitution of the

field, however, it is also important that theatre literature meets this field on its own terms, as

an interdisciplinary model for action and thought. This thesis, The Production of Luck:

Learning to Act, in the Discipline of Theatre Anthropology , is an auto – ethnographic

contribution to this field. Based on my experience as a young artist in workshops at Odin

Teatret, it develops a theory of luck built on vitalist and ancient notions of thought. Luck is

understood as realising conscious or unconscious intentions, unintentionally. Luck is defined

discursively, as well as through action. The actions I have taken in this thesis are a form of

evolution within my own scholarly and theatrical practice, as well as a contribution to the

literature of this field. The thesis' concept of luck is explored through theatrical techniques

developed by Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology that

overcome projected knowledge, paradoxically, by working with the determinism of the body.

Working between practical, theoretical and interdisciplinary research, the thesis

connects Theatre Anthropology with social discourses which are implicit in its work, but from

which it has often distanced itself due to the historical concerns with working between theatre

cultures. It is able to do this as it is a practical study of my own actions. The benefit of this

discussion is that we are able to see dynamic principles of Theatre Anthropology at play in the

formation of 'higher order' faculties such as speech, language and thought between fields. The

benefit of making these relationships clear is the increased capacity for action between

cultures and disciplines. The principles can be traced through the actor's work, through

disciplines such as neurology, psycho – therapy, politics and philosophy, articulating a broad

'pre – expressive' language of transformation. This thesis is written from my development as a

young artist, finding the realisation of my own intentions unintentionally. It is a joyful account

of my creative process, and the foundation of technical knowhow the research has offered to

my development. By speaking through the body it articulates the value of Theatre

Anthropology for my own context, offering a new vision for theatre that goes beyond the

bodies we know. It frames theatre as an evolutionary act of encountering the unknown.

Alice Williams, The Wolf , Holstebro Festuge 2017, Photo Credit: Eva Hallgren.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Seven Years Bad Luck 1

Chapter 1: Pulling Strings, the Snuff Puppet Ramayana 37

Chapter 2: Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week Festival 2012 59

Chapter 3: Snakes and Ladders: An Historiography of Theatre Anthropology 93

Chapter 4: How the Body Speaks: Actions and Evolutions at ISTA, 2016 117

Chapter 5: A Case for Luck: The Production of Luck in a Social Context 154

Chapter 6: The Mouth of The Wolf: Residential Development at Nordisk

Teatr Laboratorium – Odin Teatret, 2017 182

Chapter 7: The Chronic Life : “I came because I was told my father lived

here...” 209

Conclusion: From Not Knowing, To Knowing How Not To Know 238

Bibliography 245

List of Illustrations:

Alice Williams, The Wolf , Holstebro Festuge 2017, Photo Credit: Eva Hallgren. Isadora Pei, Alice Williams, Eugenio Barba, Holstebro Festuge 2014, Photo Credit: Teresa Ruggeri. Alice Williams, The Seagull , Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2014, Photo Credit: Unknown. Various Artists, Animal Glyph , Holstebro Festuge, 2017, Photo credit: Unknown. Performance still The Tale of the Wolf , Goleniow: Human Mosaic Festival 2018 Photo Credit: unknown. Julia Varley and Ulrik Skeel, Wild Island , Holstebro Festuge, 2017, Photo Credit: Monica Bleige. This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. It

contains material published in Real Time 123 , Williams, Alice “From the Ashes, Renewal” on

p. 179. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

Alice Williams

As supervisor for the candidature upon which this thesis is based, I can confirm that the

authorship attribution statements above are correct

Richard Smith

1

Introduction:

Seven Years Bad Luck

In 2011 I heard Ian Pidd speak as part of the Kickstart program for young artists

organised by the Next Wave Festival, a Melbourne based festival of emerging artists and art

forms. Pidd is a festival director and performer working in communities in Australia and

internationally. Founder and co-Artistic Director of the Village Festival and Junction Arts

Festival, he has been a board member and policy advisor to Asia Link arts foundation, other

public and private bodies including Australia Council for the Arts, Sidney Myer Foundation,

Arts Victoria, and City of Melbourne. He is an independent director, and has worked with the

macabrely named Melbourne based theatre collective Snuff Puppets over a ten year period.

Pidd's Next Wave presentation was like a breath of fresh air. A clown in casual dress,

with curly hair, bald crown and checked pants, he booted suggestions into the expectant

crowd like we were AFL fans waiting to catch footballs signed with good advice. There were

no power points, just comments like, make sure you eat together with your team, and, if you

meet tech people who are good at their jobs, treat them well. Pidd emphasised attention to

detail. He reflected it was the process of how an event takes place that creates its cultural

value.

The most important part of Ian Pidd's presentation, for this thesis, was the story he told

about luck. Pidd described a 2008 collaboration between Snuff Puppets and Theatre Gandrik 1

for the Yogya festival in Indonesia. The collaboration, called the Snuff Puppet Ramayana, was

presented in the Yogyakarta suburb Bantul. Pidd described the group rehearsing in a pandopo ,

1 A prominent Indonesian theatre group dissenting against the Suharto regime in the Nineteen Nineties through traditional and contemporary theatre.

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a covered structure open on all sides, where local people could already see the performance

taking shape. The community would watch the rehearsals and comment on aspects of the

Ramayana and its interpretation. He reflected on traditional performances where spectators

surround the performance, behind as well as in front of the stage, chatting throughout the

performance, sleeping, dipping in and out of attention. He began to question whether

spectators would receive anything from the performance, rehearsed without secrecy or

novelty, already on public display. He asked Theatre Gandrik what spectators would gain

from the performance. The response was, the performance would produce luck for the city

throughout the rest of the year. Far from superstition, this anecdote provides an insight into

what is at stake in the living exchange between theatre and its spectators. Beyond novelty,

theatre is an exchange between people that affects a transformation, though exactly what is

exchanged may be unknown. This is the first meaning of 'luck' in this thesis, the exchange

produced by theatre, the effects of which may be unknown. But how does enacting known

stories produce an unknown effect? Production implies a system of knowledge. Luck implies

an unknown effect. Knowing how to produce the unknown frames the relationship between

theatre and everyday life.

In 2012 I received an Art Start grant from the Australia Council of the Arts to visit

Odin Teatret, an historic theatre laboratory on the Western Jutland of Denmark. I mentioned

this topic, 'luck' to Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, who is famed for his knowledge

of theatre's unknown energies. Barba suggested, “luck is finding what you're not looking for”.

His comment suggests luck is the relationship between knowledge and its other. Written

between 2012 and 2019 this thesis documents six of the subsequent series of visits I made to

Odin Teatret, reflecting on what I found that I had not been looking for. As Pidd says of the

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Dhalang who conducts ritual Wayang Kulit performances of the Ramayana in Indonesia, the

process of producing luck is a dangerous relationship with powerful, ambivalent forces that

affect a transformation. Their malignancy is mitigated through the Dhalang 's technical

knowhow. This thesis has been conducted through practical research and the acquisition of

technical knowhow in relationship with the unknown. The process of acquiring this technical

knowhow has been seven years bad luck .

Enter Lady Luck

Having established that luck is a relationship between technical knowhow and the unknown, it

is useful to consider how this relationship is understood in ancient and contemporary notions

of luck. In Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity And Its Legacy Esther Eidinow considers luck

to change over time, as human systems of cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic knowledge

also change . To define luck, fate and fortune, Eidinow translates 'fate' from the latin fatum : 2

that which has been spoken, the inevitable, allied with destiny destinare : what has been made

fast/ established, one's lot. For the Greeks the idea of fate, translated moira , was represented 3

by the three Moirai (or fates) who attended a mortal's birth, Klotho , Lakhesis and Atropos .

The three Moirai spun, measured and cut the thread of human lives. Klotho spun the thread,

Lakhesis apportioned it in lots and Atropos cut the thread at the moment of death . Into this 4

thread, they spun daimons and Erins , forces that would plague a mortal's life. The work of 5

the fates could be compared to a Determinist view of the world, in which everything is

2 Esther Eidinow Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity And Its Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9

3 Eidinow, Luck , 3- 4. 4 Eidinow, Luck , 36. 5 Eidinow, Luck , 8.

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allotted in advance. Their work with thread raises the question of how human actions weave

this thread into the fabric of life.

Distinct from these figures of fate, luck was personified by the Ancient Greek goddess

Tuche . Her name, Tuche, could be declined positively or negatively eutuchie (n)/ eutucheo (v)

or atuchia , meaning with or without luck, while her name Tuche, represented neither good nor

bad. The verb tuchanein 'to happen' is used by Homer which, Eidinow suggests, marked the 6

origins of Tuche as a deity. She was first mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a 7

water nymph playing alongside Persephone . She was described in the Seventh Century BCE 8

as the sister of Persuasion and Good Order, daughter of Foresight. She was whimsical and 9

unpredictable. Her appearance was described by the poet Pindar, wielding a rudder used to

steer the course of human decisions and lives. She appeared particularly in times of

uncertainty or political unrest. Although she was a city guardian guiding decision making, she

also made no assurances for safety, and was responsible for unexpected reversals of fortune.

During the growing dedications to Tuche in the Fourth and Fifth Century BCE she often

appeared alongside Zeus, Aphrodite and Dionysus. Her image appeared on coins in Cyprus, 10

Megara and Thebes. While Agathe Tuche personified cornucopia, Tuche , with her rudder,

shared characteristics with Kairos, opportunity, and Nemesis, retribution. In Menander's

prologue The Shield, which was performed on the Athenian stage, Tuche caused confusion

and suffering, but only to bring about justice, as an organiser and judge. She reversed 11

fortunes and taught mortals how to respond to circumstance. Considered cruel and

6 R. Loredana Cardullo, “The Concept of Luck ( Τyxn and Εytyxia ) in Aristotle”, Spazio Filosopfico 45, (2014), 541- 42.

7 Eidinow, Luck , 45. 8 Eidinow, Luck , 45. 9 Eidinow, Luck , 45. 10 Eidinow, Luck , 47. 11 Eidinow, Luck , 49.

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unavoidable she became a tool of political rhetoric. Although unstable and associated with

uncertainty she was also known for her generosity, and for giving many good things. She rose

to prominence with the Macedonian empire and the existential anxiety of Hellenistic Greece.

The rise of Rome saw Tuche become an obsession that continued after the advent of

Christianity. She specialised not only in divine justice but also in the everyday matters of

people's lives. She was responsible for what it was impossible for humans to understand. 1213

Tuche was a minor goddess with a questionable reputation, venerated and derided.

While she was worshiped for prosperity she was also seen as a cult like figure of no authentic

religious significance. She could be considered a representation of the limits of human

knowledge, or a figure of superstition, high or low. Tuche was considered a philosophical

topic proper by Aristotle, though was derided by Plato. Eidinow reflects on the ambivalence 14

of luck in Sophocles' Oedipus in which Oedipus enacts the destiny he is escaping. She 15

suggests tuche demands the acceptance of fate as a limit on rational knowledge. Acceptance

of this fate is the condition of action, and is, paradoxically, the condition for producing luck.

The Oedipus myth illuminates the limitations of human perception and the riddles of our own

cognitive patterns. 16

Changing ideas about luck, fate and fortune reflect transforming systems of human

knowledge, and their relationship with the unknown, according to Eidinow. She describes

these ideas as cultural models that activate associations concerning the unknown and our role

in it. These associations draw on intricate webs of culturally specific meanings, studied 17

12 Eidinow, Luck , 51. 13 Eidinow, Luck , 52. 14 Eidinow, Luck , 22. 15 Eidinow, Luck , 57. 16 Eidinow, Luck , 63. 17 Eidinow, Luck , 7.

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through various fields, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology. The role of

human action and the limits of knowledge can also be studied in genetics, behavioural

sciences, and political economics. Speaking about notions of luck, fate and fortune in a

contemporary context, Eidinow describes the ideology of monetising risk during the 2008

Credit Crisis. She describes how the futures market tried to mitigate against the unknown

through its projections, a symbolic action which, when monetised, caused the crisis. She sees

a similarity between this futures trade and chronic gambling that also attempts to mitigate a

permeating sense of loss. She describes how patients in therapy often express an overriding 18

sense of 'fate'. Citing family therapist Glen Larner, who sees the role of therapy as assisting

clients create the capacity for action. She aims to foster an understanding of circumstances as

“what may or may not come to pass” rather than a future that is inevitable. In this way 19

clients begin to act in relation to circumstances, shaping the stories that they tell,

performatively. She compares the political rhetoric of George Bush Jnr and Barack Obama's

Presidential inauguration speeches in the United States, where Bush emphasised a model of

fate. He referred to The American Dream as a given, saying, “we go forward with complete

confidence in the triumph of freedom”. Obama emphasised uncertainty as the condition of

liberty and potential for change. He said “not because history runs on the wheels of

inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Rather it has been the role of the risk

takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often than not, men and

women obscure in their labour who have carried us up the long rugged path towards

prosperity and freedom.” She sees the shared understandings of our relationship with the 20

18 Eidinow, Luck , 157. 19 Eidinow, Luck , 157. 20 Eidinow, Luck , 155.

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unknown as social narratives, applied in everyday interactions, and adapted to tell new stories

about our experiences, generating new forms of luck.

Luck as a theory of causality

In Western intellectual thought, however, luck, as the relation of human action to the

unknown has been elided by the idea of 'chance'. When we speak of chance we speak of

likelihood, the probability that something will happen. This calculation rationalises and

mitigates against the unknown. It removes the ambivalent unpredictability of luck, but it also

removes the necessity for technical knowhow, leaving us unable to act.

One discourse of chance springs from Aristotle's Physics. In the second book of

Physics, Aristotle writes about causality, including a section most commonly translated in

English on “chance”. This discourse on “chance” however, was written using the Greek word

tuche τύχη which is, of course, 'luck'. As in Eidinow's work this word can be traced to the

Goddess Tuche , the personification of Lady Luck. Loredana Cardullo has also argued for the

translation of tuche in Aristotle as luck. In his article The Concept of Luck (τύχη and εὐτυχία)

in Aristotle he begins with Physics and continues with Ethics , to identify the role of luck in

Aristotle's thought as a material and metaphysical event. Cardullo writes, “ An important and

preliminary discussion of such concepts [luck and fate] is in the second book of Physics ,

where Aristotle presents the four causes of reality, or the explanatory methods for everything

that happens. Here, tuche and automaton (fate and causes) are included under the etiological

forms of Aristotelian causality as accidental ( kata sumbebekos ) causes.” He argues for a 21

21 Cardullo, “The Concept of Luck ”, 541.

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translation of tuche as 'fate' and ' eutuchia ' as good luck, attempting to preserve the neutrality

ascribed to Tuche as an ambivalent figure. I situate this ambivalence in relation to luck. I

follow Eidinow's translation of fate from fatum akin to determinism, and tuche as luck, which

defines the individual's capacity for action (as distinct from free will) within circumstances, in

relation to the unknown. Cardullo positions Physics as the basis of Aristotle's later

consideration of luck in the moral sphere, which reflects the individual's capacity to act freely

within the material circumstances of “fate”. He describes luck in Ethics , as a capacity

cultivated with practice and commitment. It is the ability to act courageously and intelligently

with human resources within an unpredictable sea of misfortune. 22

Exploring Aristotle's notion of luck outlined in Physics illuminates luck as a

relationship between distinct levels of motivation or will, the capacity for choice between

actions, and the unknown nature of circumstances. In the context of luck, will is realised

through human choice between actions, though it is realised accidentally, in relation with

unknown circumstances. From his work we begin to glean an insight into the concept of luck

that moves between these various levels of human will, choice, and automaticity, in

relationship with the unknown. In keeping with this thesis’ interest in luck as transformation

Aristotle’s Physics considers luck’s evolutionary function. His Realist view, however,

sidelines luck as anomalous within a presupposed organic unity of nature. Advancing beyond

this Edenic view of nature is Bergson’s notion of Creative Evolution where action within the

unforeseeable is central to evolutionary advancement. Bergon’s notion of intuition adds

complexity to Aristotle’s notion of will, snaking between action, knowledge and the

unknown. This thesis mobilises these two theories to articulate the evolutionary function of

22 Cardullo, “The Concept of Luck ”, 542.

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luck as an agent of transformation.

Aristotelian luck

As described by Cardullo, Aristotle’s Physics considers luck within its aetiology. He describes

two kinds of production: natural production and causal production. In natural production the 23

object retains its substance throughout the process of change. In causal production the

outcome differs. An example of causal production is 'art'. It is the work of humans. He writes,

in the art of doctoring, for example, doctoring produces, not doctoring, but health. Doctoring,

“must start from the art and not lead to it.” Aristotle says, “So it is with all other artificial 24

products. None of them has in itself the principle of its own production.” They are not of 25

nature but change according to the nature of the substance from which they are made, which

endures beyond the transformation of the object itself. Luck, of course, belongs to causal 26

production. Therefore, we are able to say theatrical knowhow produces luck , but cannot say

luck produces itself.

Within causal production Aristotle talks about matter and form. Matter is the origin of

form. Form is the end to which an action is completed. Within matter and form there are two

different kinds of technical production. There is art that directs production in accordance with

matter, and art that uses matter towards the production of forms. In theatre this could be 27

considered as placing the unknown as the outcome, or the origin or an act. Causes can be of

23 Aristotle, “Physics”, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Da Jonathan Barnes ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 19.

24 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 20. 25 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 19. 26 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 20. 27 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 13.

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many kinds simultaneously. For example, hard work causes fitness and vice versa. The causes

could be reciprocal, or principles of motion, or described as lack of the cause of a contrary

effect, for example hard work causes the lack of unfitness. For Aristotle there are four main

causes: 1. matter or 'that from which' effects follow, 2. forms as essences, 3. agents of motion

or becoming stationary, and 4. final causes or the end to which an action is completed. 28

Within these categories, causes can operate in various modes. One of these modes is

accidental causality which includes Aristotle's discussion of luck. In accidental causality

matter and form could both be causes. For example in a statue, both are present, so they are

what Aristotle calls, coincidentally linked. The cause of the sculpture could be the individual

sculptor Polycleitus, in one sense, and in another it is also the art of sculpture. Polycleitus as

an individual and “the sculptor” as an artist are conjoined as causes of the same incident, and

so could be described as coincidentally linked in Polycleitus the sculptor. Here we see that 29

coincidence links two different causes that are simultaneously present. He adds accidental

causes may be potential or actual, definite or indefinite. He attempts to find the most precise

cause of each situation, connecting general causes to general effects, specific causes with

specific effects, potential causes with potential effects, actual causes with actual effects. He 30

considers whether the cause and effect exist within the same timeframe or are temporally

removed. This seems to be a kind of philosophic dramaturgy of temporality, simultaneous and

sequential links between different levels of action. Within accidental causality, what is most

often translated as 'chance' is translated here as luck.

Aristotle writes that many philosophers doubt the existence of luck. This disbelief

28 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 23. 29 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 24. 30 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 25.

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would be inconsistent with chance which does not ask for courage or belief in the face of

misfortune. He argues luck should be considered as an important philosophical topic. It

touches on discourses of Determinism, Nihilism and Mysticism. We have seen this already, in

the relationship of luck to fate. Aristotle describes these relationships in the example of a

person who visits a market, hoping to see a particular person, and happens to meet them at the

market. He explains a determinist view may focus on the subject's desire to visit the market, a

nihilist on subject's desire to see this person, and a mystic's on fate. Aristotle questions why

luck was not considered by earlier philosophers in antiquity, a meeting between these levels in

human action. He asks why causality was used to refute its existence. Luck does not place 31

among the causes listed by early physicists, says Aristotle. It appears in Empedocles to

describe the circulation of air or how the parts of the animals came to be. We can see this is

already an evolutionary logic. He describes a nihilist cosmogony where the universe came

into being automatically, with an instantaneous a – causal origin, positioning luck as

inscrutable to human intelligence. He reinforces that luck was erroneously ascribed entirely to

divinity by mystics. He seeks to understand luck and automaton as causes of atypical events

in relation to human action. 32

Aristotle considers luck as a final cause, coming about for the sake of an end, but

coming about accidentally. Luck relates between different orders of causality that are 33

simultaneously present. Will, action, and material circumstance coincide as accidental causes.

Aristotle gives the example of a person raising money for a feast, who would have gone to a

certain place had they known the money was there, but going there for another reason

31 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 26. 32 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 26. 33 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 27.

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received the money accidentally. In this example, the cause is towards the end of raising

money, accidentally realised by the actions of the seeker. The seeker's choice of actions

implies thought, says Aristotle. For him this means luck can only occur to those capable of

thought, realising their ends through their chosen actions accidentally. Here again we see 34

luck as a principle of conscious action between will, matter and circumstances. Although the

meeting between these levels and forces is coincidental. The effects of this lucky coincidence

can be good or bad. The magnitude or repetition of good or bad luck may lead to a person

considering themselves or others to be as lucky or unlucky. This reflection forms the character

of their perception as they navigate determinate and indeterminate events between thought,

action, material circumstances and accident throughout life. Luck occurs automatically though

differs from automaton. Aristotle says “they differ in that automaton is the wider”. Every 35 36

result of luck is automatic, but not every automatic event produces luck. This suggests luck is

instantaneous, a meeting of forces that pass through and beyond the human. Luck is related to

human action. It must be enacted by agents capable of choice. Aristotle excludes children,

animals, and minerals from this category. Their actions are automatic, belonging to the puppet

as opposed to the actor. Events become lucky if they are effected by will. But this will 37

intersects with unknown material circumstances as well as action, producing an automatic

effect. This is distinct from the automatism of unconscious action. Action without will

reproduces determinism, the opposite of luck.

Aristotle speaks about luck within the context of evolution. He sees nature as a cause

towards an end. He sees a unity of nature and mind. The spider builds its web, the leaves

34 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 27. 35 Automaton is an important topic in political philosophy considering the construction of sovereignty within industrial mechanism through Hobbes, Descartes, Benjamin and Foucault. 36 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 28. 37 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 29.

13

shield fruit from the sun, the swallow builds its nest, the tree sends its roots down for

nourishment rather than up. Unfortunately, however Aristotle is unable to see luck as 38

anything other than an anomaly in nature. This is where I part ways with Aristotle, seeking a

theory that will assist in describing luck's central role in evolution, transformation and change.

Where he sees nature’s order as given Bergson sees action within the unforeseeable as the

primary creative force of evolution. This thesis turns to Bergson to develop its concept of

luck’s evolutionary function. Aristotle has helped develop this thesis' definition of luck. For

this thesis, luck is primarily an energetic exchange enacted through theatre as transformation.

In Aristotle we see luck is an instantaneous event, appearing to come about automatically.

This event is an exchange between various levels of being, human will and the capacity for

free action meet with the unknown materiality of circumstances. This event realises human

will, conscious or unconscious, by accident. Drawing on Bergson's theory of Creative

Evolution explains how the instantaneous event of luck connects between material, biological

and conscious orders of being, in an evolutionary process. This is an original reading of

Bergson in relation to luck that illuminates theatre as a technique of evolution. In Chapter

Three of Creative Evolution Bergson develops a theory of life as the resistance to matter. For 39

Bergson the instantaneous event connecting between levels is described as 'intuition'. It is

brought about by action within the unforeseeable. Its effect is the increased capacity for

choice between sensory motor actions. This is the evolutionary theory that this thesis

describes as luck and elaborates in relation to theatre practice. Bergson's theory of the

unforeseeable works in concert with ancient notions of the unknown as the condition of luck,

38 Aristotle, “Physics”, p. 32. 39 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution , trans. Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D.(New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,

1998), 186 - 271

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and contemporary notions of the perceptual limits of thought, to develop an original notion of

luck, a seemingly automatic action between levels of being, that has an evolutionary function,

increasing capacity for choice between actions. In this thesis, luck is primarily developed

through actions within the unknown, through practical research in theatre. It refers to the ideas

developed in this introduction as a model of luck in the practical and discursive contexts that

follow.

Bergsonian intuition

I will start by describing the idea of life outlined in Chapter Three of Bergson's Creative

Evolution “The Meaning of Life”. This is an original reading of Bergson's notion of the

unforeseeable. It assists this thesis to articulate the role of theatrical action in producing luck,

within the context of the unknown. Theatre's capacity to produce seemingly instantaneous

events between orders of being is brought about by action within the unknown or, the

unforeseeable. It results in the increased capacity for choice between actions, understood via

Bergson as evolution. The production of luck through theatrical action resists automaticity,

which has been outlined as Determinism, or fate. Evolution is understood, via the increased

capacity for choice between actions, as freedom.

In the first two chapters of Creative Evolution Bergson reconciles diametrically

opposed notions of the inert and the living, instinct and intelligence. He traces the genesis of

intellect from material bodies. This is an important concept for this thesis that focuses on the 40

actor's biology. Biology resists matter, impacting intellectual ideas. As Bergson describes,

40 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 186

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awareness is directed by action, which reciprocally forms the intellect. This kind of thought in

action is also perceived by Bergson in animals. In theatre, thought as action enacts as a

transformation between biological and intellectual levels. The actions of animals are the 41

embryo of intelligence. Intelligence follows the action's already intelligent direction. Chapter

Four of this thesis observes linguistic structures are informed by these dynamic actions, as is

thought, which is elaborated in Chapter Six through neurological and psycho – therapeutic, as

well as practical research. Bergson draws a link between the intellectualisation of

consciousness and the spatialisation of matter. This is reflected in the categorisation of 42

disciplines. He speaks about evolutionary philosophy that prevents itself from discovering

anything but its own categories laid out in advance. This is the loop of rationality he draws

through philosophic and scientific disciplines. He describes Modern Idealism and Relativism,

which could be compared to the ancient Determinist and Nihilist views discussed above. They

make it impossible to conceive action in relation to the unknown. For Bergson, Kant

spatialises intellect which filters perception so reality conforms with its ideal. It sets up the 43

false antinomies Kant hoped to avoid. Metaphysics condenses intellect into categories of

thought that can be expanded by reality. Evolutionary philosopher Spencer deduces intellect

from nature. Each sees intellect as given. It is an accident, Bergson says, that reality seems 44

to conform to rational knowledge. Within rational knowledge, reality cannot be viewed

objectively. Reason is one living fragment within the vital process. There is no simple unity of

mind and nature. This was the limitation of Aristotle's idea of luck, seen above. The illusion

that the individual mind can perceive the whole deprives luck of its evolutionary function.

41 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 187 42 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 189 43 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 204 – 5. 44 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 189 – 90.

16

Bergson sees mind as only one aspect of consciousness. This places the limits of

perception at the centre of thought. Thought relies on action to inform its perception, through

its encounter with the unforeseeable, which lies outside of perception. This is a creative and

evolutionary act. We can see here, Bergson is heavily reliant on what this thesis calls luck as a

methodology, philosophy and evolutionary practice. He describes the role of action in his

philosophy as the role of an animal pulling machinery in resistance with the matter of the

Earth.

Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence.Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in us and making us even transcend it. 45

This quotation describes the aim of Bergson's philosophy, to broaden and transcend humanity.

This is an idea of evolution. He describes this as a collective, progressive action. It re – lives

the genesis of intellect. It does this through the force of life itself, awakened by its actions.

Action gives us knowledge of our relationship with material circumstances, though only

within the limits of a particular task.

Action breaks the cycle that projects intellect onto the world. Bergson says, “It is of

45 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 191.

17

the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle”.

In minute ways it overcomes the limits of perception. He writes “in theory, there is a kind 46

of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risk be frankly

accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that reasoning has tied and will not unloose.” This 47

is the importance of action in research. It describes the methodology I've used of working

between practice, theory, observation and writing. He encourages the mind to leap out of

inaction, “...leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. Reason, reasoning on its powers,

will never succeed in extending them, though the extension would not appear at all

unreasonable once it were accomplished...” The notion of action as the basis of research, 48

and the basis of thought, is further explained,

Philosophy, then, invades the domain of experience. She busies herself with many things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science, theory of knowledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground. At first there may be a certain confusion. All three may think they have lost something. But all three will profit from the meeting... 49

This thesis is pursued through action as practical research. The production of luck

outlined in this introduction gives a theoretical justification and framework for this

methodology. The mind's relationship with matter is described by Bergson as two ends of the

chain of reality. On one hand if the chain is stretched tight, consciousness brings multiple

simultaneous time frames and levels of being into the present moment. On the other hand if 50

the chain is relaxed, consciousness enters into spatiality, a sensuous textural experience of

46 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 192. 47 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 192. 48 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 193. 49 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 198. 50 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 200.

18

matter. Tensioning this chain between matter and consciousness requires a maximum 51

amount of will, sustainable only for an instant. This is the instantaneous occurrence of luck,

though luck can be developed as a practice that extends this instant. The tension drawn tight

within multiple simultaneous time frames could describe the presence of the performer at the

vital moment of creation, working between multiple simultaneous orders of being. The

relaxation of perception lets the past recede without memory or will. The senses become

occupied entirely by the present. Bergson describes these two states as psychic, and physical.

The spirituality of the first is inverted in the materiality of the other. 52

Bergson also applies this analogy to a spectator's attention. Active will allows the

spectator to follow what is happening in the performance. Inversely, their wandering attention

produces complexity. The deficit of attention intersects with intentional will to connect

perceived textures with the performance as a whole. The intersection between consciousness 53

and matter informs intelligence. Conscious perception of matter is informed in this process of

reciprocal action. In the same way that Aristotle's concept of luck noted disjuncture between

intention and the material circumstance of the world, creation is characterised by the tension

of this meeting. Creation is free action, an extension of Aristotle's idea of choice.

For Bergson, the capacity for choice concerns how the vital body resists matter. This

could be compared to the knowhow of the actor. He speaks about forms of production, which

vary between different orders of being. He asks, how are we able to think production when

vital organisms are composed of multiple simultaneous orders of being? He describes the

action of resistance in its most basic physical terms,

51 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 200-1. 52 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 201. 53 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 209.

19

Let us think rather of an action like that of raising the arm; then let us suppose that the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that there subsists in it, striving to raise it up again, something of the will that animates it. In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself. 54

This resistance is a theatrical concept. It creates a continuum between the actor's body and

their environment, a reality simultaneously making and unmaking itself, explored through

practical accounts of theatre training in this thesis. It allows performers to act on matter and

also on the mind of the spectator. This action of the will on matter is the means by which luck

is produced.

Production here is an evolutionary concept, explored in this thesis as theatre's

relationship with everyday life. As we have seen, the intellect becomes a fragment of the

advancing whole. Creative evolution occurs between various orders of consciousness and

materiality. The instantaneous event called luck in this thesis is described by Bergson as

intuition. He states this occurs in astrophysics, for example, or in the work of a great

composer, “...we find an order no less admirable [mathematical] in a symphony of Beethoven,

which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself.” In the relationship 55

between one order of being and another, Bergson places the unforeseeable at the centre, that

which cannot be known in advance. The intuitive transcendence of the foreseeable belongs to

everybody, “Every human work in which there is invention, every voluntary act in which

there is freedom, every movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, brings

54 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 247 – 8. 55 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 224.

20

something new into the world.” This creativity can take place on the scale of a free decision 56

or as a work of genius, “In the composition of a work of genius, as in a simple free decision,

we do, indeed, stretch the spring of our activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere

assemblage of materials could have given (what assemblage of curves already known can

ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great artist?)” Here Bergson describes the gift 57

that is given through the technical knowhow of an artist, or person in any profession, that

allows themselves and others to transcend what is known. It is the creative gift of life itself.

The expansion of the “universe” and the creation of the poet perform this action which

the intellect would freeze as eternity or instant gratification. Resistance is an act of will. This

is true for perception as it is for action. Bergson writes “ seeing should be made to be one with

the act of willing – a painful effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature,

but cannot sustain more than a few moments...the pure willing, the current that runs through

this matter, communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly feel, which at most we brush

lightly as it passes.” In this moment of luck we are in contact with the force that animates us, 58

but that is beyond knowledge, hardly perceptible to the senses. This contact with the unknown

broadens the capacity for action in relationship with what may appear to be set in stone. Fate

or Determinism are no longer immovable, but are mobilised by action. At that moment, we

can dance with destiny and on some level, and restore its flexibility through the resistance of

the vital body.

Bergson suggests, if sustained beyond an instant, this thought would reach agreement

with itself, and all thoughts with one another. He seeks external reference points for this

56 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 239. 57 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 239. 58 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 222.

21

intuitive instant, to dilate its time frame into a system of production. There are many systems

created intuitively, that outlive the intuition that created them. Bergson states, “There is no

durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts, vivified by intuition.” It is a 59

specifically human capacity, Bergson suggests, to be able to make systems through which we

escape our own determinism. He describes: “to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an

instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use

the Determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very Determinism

had spread.” This capacity uses the materiality of Determinism to escape fate. Language is 60

one such machine, Bergson describes, that humans have developed to evolve in this way. This

thesis explores Theatre Anthropology as a discipline that studies how theatres transcend

Determinism, furthering the evolution of theatre. The actor's work with their bios – the special

use of the human body in theatrical action described by Theatre Anthropology – performs real

actions which transcend the limits of thought and inform perception, an evolutionary act

producing luck.

Bergson also distinguishes luck from chance. He describes chance as the confusion of

one order of being with another. Its inexplicable appearance is the brain's projection of one

order of being where in reality it encounters another.

When the wholly mechanical play of the causes which stop the wheel on a number makes me win, and consequently acts like a good genius, careful of my interests, or when the wholly mechanical force of the wind tears a tile off the roof and throws it on to my head, that is to say acts like a bad genius, conspiring against my person: in both cases I find a mechanism where I should have looked for, where, indeed, it seems as if I ought to have found, an intention.... And of an anarchical world, in which phenomena succeed each other capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of chance, meaning that I find before me wills, or rather decrees,

59 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 264. 60 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 264.

22

when what I am expecting is mechanism. 61

Chance presents the illusion of luck. With chance the subject is unaware of the forces at play.

They attribute intention to mechanism, which is superstition. They see one order where there

are many orders of being. Where luck goes further than what can be seen, chance limits the

subject's perception of what is. Where luck finds something she wasn't looking for, chance

looks for something that is not there. As a false genius, it limits rather than evolves our

capacity for action.

What does it mean to talk about evolution in the context of luck? Evolution, Bergson

says is the increased capacity for choice between sensory motor actions. Organisms develop

digestion, respiratory, and circulatory systems to service an increasingly complex nervous

system. The nervous system performs its increasingly complex range of voluntary and

involuntary actions by will. Will increases the energy, precision and independence of these 62

actions. The actions are encoded in the brain and spinal cord, increasing the complexity of the

nervous system. This in turn increases the capacity for choice between sensory motor actions,

an evolutionary process. Organisms develop as a montage of less complex functions. The

increasing complexity of their capacity for action is described by Bergson as evolution.

The actions of organisms mobilise matter in varying directions in this process. Their

energy is traced by Bergson to the sun's light. Evolution is the gradual accumulation of

energy, channelled in varying directions towards free acts. He writes “...all life, animal and

vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into

flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied

61 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 234. 62 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 241.

23

kinds of work.” This resistance of varied actions to the fall of matter began with 63

Chlorophyllic plants. The energy of the sun was diverted in various directions by the

materiality of their make up. This multiplicity produced varied forms of life and, with their

increasing complexity, increased the range of actions they could perform. He suggests that the

capacity to create systems through which action evolves belongs only to humans.

From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. 64

This is Bergson's suggestion that the capacity, not only for choice as in Aristotle, but

to produce systems that overcome determinism is a human capacity. Bergson contrasts this

capacity for consciousness to the animal that “escapes automatism only for an instant, for just

enough time to create a new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are

opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it.” The jaws of habit also 65

threaten to crush the individual's capacity for free action. Bergson defines humanity by the

capacity to break this chain “to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of

freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use the

determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this “very determinism had

spread.” For this thesis, his concept of teleology is disregarded. What matters is the use of 66

these systems to develop action and awareness, increasing the potential for choice between

63 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 254. 64 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 266. 65 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 264. 66 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 264.

24

actions. This is the evolutionary function of luck.

The potential to choose between actions is described by Bergson: “it is consciousness,

or rather supra-consciousness, that is at the origin of life. Consciousness, or supra -

consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter;

consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket itself, passing through

the fragments and lighting them up into organisms.” In this instant of illumination we 67

perceive freedom, “But this consciousness, which is a need of creation, is made manifest to

itself only where creation is possible. It lies dormant when life is condemned to automatism; it

wakens as soon as the possibility of a choice is restored.” Consciousness is the capacity for 68

choice where creation is possible. Scientific explanations are convenient but phenomena must

be understood in relationship with the organism's capacity for choice between real actions.

These actions within the unknown or unforeseeable inform the development of consciousness.

Luck is predicated on the capacity for choice, for free action, produced by resistance of will to

material circumstances. The energetic meeting of will with matter realises something of life's

nature, which connects bodies to a vital unity, changing their capacity for thought and action.

This is the evolutionary purpose of the production of luck. This original concept of luck,

informed by Bergson's unforeseeable and Aristotelian ideas of the unknown, is an

interdisciplinary concept enacted through practical research in this thesis. It is considered

within various discursive contexts, to understand how Theatre Anthropological notions of

action inform consciousness. This is a contribution to Theatre Anthropology, which is itself

an interdisciplinary approach to theatrical cultures. It views Theatre Anthropology as the

study of how theatres enable us to escape the meshes of our Determinism, and increase the

67 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 261. 68 Bergson, Creative Evolution , 261.

25

capacity for conscious choice between human actions, informing consciousness, the

evolutionary process of producing luck.

Literature review

This thesis is original in the notion of luck it conceptualises. Luck is the exchange between

the performer and spectator in a theatre performance, a seemingly automatic event that

connects between levels of being, realising conscious and unconscious intentions in specific

material circumstances. It is produced by unforeseeable action, or action in the unknown. It is

a lightning strike between orders of being that results in the increased capacity for human

choice between actions. This is luck's evolutionary function, advancing consciousness in

resistance to determinism, or fate. This thesis draws on my practical research as an emerging

artist, participation in workshops at Odin Teatret, primary and secondary texts on Theatre

Anthropology and Odin Teatret, discursive reflections on the changing limits of anthropology

and Theatre Anthropology over time, practical Theatre Anthropological research as a

participant at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, primary research as a

participant in Holstebro Festuge and artist in residence at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – Odin

Teatret, individual and collective experiences of luck for spectators of Odin Teatret

performances Judith and The Chronic Life and their evolutionary function for myself and for

other spectators, as well as interdisciplinary research. It documents an evolving method of

producing luck which works between action and reflection, and between disciplines. It

contributes to the field of Theatre Anthropology, a field founded in interdisciplinary and

intermodal forms of research, but that is rarely received with a response in kind. It draws on

26

various instances of luck from my own and others' practical research and spectatorship, which

increase the capacity for conscious choice between actions, in theatre and everyday life.

Within the field of Theatre Anthropology and the literature on Odin Teatret, luck illuminates

the exchange between the inverted and opposed ideas of “theatrical” and “daily life” snaking

its way through the terminology of this field towards its more primary function, the

transformation of consciousness that brings about new forms of being, the production of luck

as a theatrical process of social and individual transformation.

Chapter One: “Pulling Strings, the Snuff Puppet Ramayana” offers an example of

theatre producing luck to augment the anecdote that initiated this research. It draws on Ian

Pidd's work on the Snuff Puppet Ramayana in Indonesia, as well as Edward Gordon Craig's

intercultural work with masks and puppets recounted by Nicola Savarese. The technical

activation of masks, puppets, formal and social structures produces luck between cultures.

Chapter Two: “Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week Festival 2012” documents instances of

luck in my experience of Odin Week Festival 2012, through the principle of resistance in

training at Odin Teatret, which is also described by Bergson and in Theatre Anthropological

texts. It is an embryonic account of training as auto – ethnographic research that documents

how acts of resistance inform thought, producing luck. Chapter Three: “Snakes and Ladders:

An Historiography of Theatre Anthropology” reflects how thought itself proceeds through its

encounter with the unknown. It observes this in the evolution of both Theatre Anthropology

and Cultural Theory as disciplines that attempt to overcome the limits of rational perception,

producing luck. The centrality of action to Theatre Anthropology proposes a departure from

semiotic responses to Theatre Anthropological performances. An embodied response to

Theatre Anthropological research is provided in the context of the International School of

27

Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Chapter Four: “How the Body Speaks: XV ISTA, 2016”.

Chapter Four works through practical research at the International School of Theatre

Anthropology to document the performer's bios as a montage between functions. It observes

the development of traditions through performer's biographies and demonstrates the human

capacity for choice between actions is the basis of the body's capacity to speak. It describes

dynamic action in Theatre Anthropology as parallel with dynamic cases within language. This

is a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of how the body speaks, an evolution in Theatre

Anthropology, away from signification towards the human capacity to create dynamic

systems between its functions as common to language and thought, as well as action. Having

established this continuity between functions as the basis of theatrical speech Chapter Five:

“A Case For Luck: The Production of Luck in a Social Context” considers the role of this

relationship between action and thought in an Australian context, and at Odin Teatret's

Holstebro Festuge (Festive Week). “Chapter Six: The Mouth of The Wolf: Residential

Development at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret” documents the luck produced by

the performer's presence which connects between multiple levels of being, and transforms

their capacity for speech. It adds technical information from training at Odin Teatret to

neurological perspectives on action as the basis of speech and consciousness. Chapter Seven:

“The Chronic Life: 'I came here because I was told my father lived here...'” returns to the

spectator's experience of luck overcoming the final limit of Determinism, death, in Odin

Teatret's performance The Chronic Life . Writing from repeated spectatorship of the

performance reflects the development of language from the dynamics of its action. The

performance's theme of loss is a fecund space for generating insight into the dynamic

relationships at the basis of meaning. Spectators are able to observe the way meanings are

28

formed and reformed through these relationships, through their individual and collective

experiences of luck. This insight resists the spatialisation of thought and projection of reality.

It is a reflection of the evolutionary role of theatre for producing luck, a previously unknown

capacity for action within individuals and social groups, developing new forms of

consciousness and new ways of being.

This thesis differs from the work of other scholars on Odin Teatret for whom lucky

events may have provided the impetus for writing about Odin Teatret, but for whom

documenting the nature of these events auto – ethnographically has not been the focus of their

work. I have approached the PhD process through my theatre practice. In this research,

working with my own actions, materials, and reflections allows me to articulate the

relationship between action and thought. The thesis is a contribution to how knowledge is

created and adapted, as much as a contribution to knowledge. It demonstrates the theatricality

of thought. My theoretical work moves between Aristotle's Realism, Bergson's Vitalism,

Benjamin's Historical Materialism and Nietzsche's Transcendentalism, theoretical systems of

thought referenced within Theatre Anthropology itself. This discursive contribution

articulates interests implicit within Theatre Anthropology, linking it to other fields. My

contribution increases the capacity of this field to resonate within varied contexts, producing

luck as an evolution of its discourse.

The oral history I draw on is from my work as a young artist and student, first at the

Next Wave Festival, as noted in this introduction, and then through my research at Odin

Teatret. This research includes: Odin Week Festival 2012, Transit Festival 2013, The Ninth

Holstebro Festuge and Odin Teatret's Fiftieth Anniversary Celebrations 2014, Cohabitation on

Theatrical Structure 2015, International School of Theatre Anthropology XV 2016, Tenth

29

Holstebro Festuge and the residential development of the Tale of the Wolf at Nordisk

Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret, 2017. The practical experience I have documented

presents an evolution of my theatrical process. It tracks my initial disorientation and inability

to understand exercises that have since evolved into a rich bedrock of theatrical technique for

my own work. Although many books and articles, including the recent Tatiana Chemi's A

Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Learning: Odin Teatret and Group Learning

(2018) and Vicky Ann Cremona's “Drawing back the curtains on the 'actor's private place': a

personal journey into ISTA 2016”, draw on the authors' experiences, they maintain a focus on

the actions of Odin Teatret members and others rather than primary technical experiences of

transformation. The field of secondary scholarly literature on Odin Teatret, beyond the 6970

writing of Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret actors, was founded by Ian Watson's Towards a

Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret and Erik Exe Christoffersen's The Actor's

Way , both published in 1993. Watson documents the historical ethos, development of 7172

training, dramaturgy, and reception of Odin Teatret performances as well as Barba's work with

the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). He establishes an objective lens on

the theatre's activities while Christoffersen engages with the theatre's work with perception

and considers the ethos of the group as central to the development of their craft.

The question of critical distance when responding to Odin Teatret's performances

continues to be a question in Adam Ledger's Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century released

in 2012, which includes Ledger's responses to the theatre's performances since 2000. As well

69 Vicky Ann Cremona, “Drawing back the curtains on the 'actor's private place': a personal journey into ISTA 2016”, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training , 81:1 (2017), 33 – 45.

70 Tatiana Chemi, A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Learning: Odin Teatret and Group Learning , (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

71 Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret , (London: Routledge, 1993). 72 Erik Exe Christoffersen, The Actor's Way (London: Routledge, 1993).

30

as questioning the place of interpretation in this field, Ledger discusses training, intercultural

and community theatre at Odin. Although Ledger mentions the intense experiences that can 73

accompany Odin Teatret performances, he positions these interpretively, where my own

interest is a technical conception of how these events take place, based on primary experience.

I am interested in the transformation of thought through action, within and beyond theatre.

My text performs multiple functions, inaccessible to writing in an objective mode. Shifting

between modes is also characteristic of the theatre laboratory, which performs many activities.

This range of activities is captured in John Andreasen and Annelis Kuhlmann's 2000

compendium Odin Teatret 2000. Their book draws on the diaspora of practitioners and 74

disciplines whose work intersects at Odin Teatret including administrators, anthropologists,

theorists, photographers and musicians as well as Odin Teatret actors and the work of Eugenio

Barba. Exchange between diverse fields is explicitly theorised in this thesis' notion of luck.

I begin Chapter One: “Pulling Strings, the Snuff Puppet Ramayana” drawing on Ian

Pidd's honours thesis From Panakawan to Punk , written in the School of Communication and

Culture at the University of Melbourne, 2011. Here, Pidd gives important historical and

practical insights into the circumstances that this thesis' notion of luck evolved from. An oral 75

history written from practical experience, Pidd's work observes the Ramayana's role in

Indonesian cultural and political shifts. It begins with regime change in the turbulent 1990’s.

To explain the function of the epic in this context he adds scholarly observations of how the

Ramayana became embedded in religious and secular Indonesian social structures. He writes

within the field of community theatre, observing his collaboration with Theatre Gandrik on

73 Adam Ledger, Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 74 John Andreasen and Annelis Kuhlmann eds. Odin Teatret 2000 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press,

2000). 75 Ian Pidd, From Punakawan to Punk (Melbourne: University of Melbourne School of Culture and

Communication Research Project, 2011).

31

the Snuff Puppet Ramayana challenged the predominantly Western aesthetics and

assumptions of this discipline. The master of Wayan Kulit puppet rituals, the Dhalang is an

important figure in his work representing the transformation affected by a performance of the

Ramayana. The open architectural structure of the Pandopo becomes another motif in his

work, linking the actors with their social context. His work is a scholarly document of

practice by an active and influential figure in our region. It develops a specifically local

language for the transformation that takes place through his collaboration. Collaboration and

exchange between theatre cultures is defined in this thesis through Theatre Anthropology.

Developed through the collaboration of Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, alongside

scientific and artistic staff of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Theatre

Anthropology moves between observation and scholarly frames of thought. To introduce this

field, I continue, in Chapter One: “Pulling Strings, the Snuff Puppet Ramayana” to draw on

Nicola Savarese's Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West which

allows me to expand on themes identified by Pidd's work in Indonesia, a technical discussion

of theatre between contexts. Savarese's book is a history of theatre and theatrical thought on 76

the Eurasian continent, drawing on exchanges between actors and theorists in Europe and

Asia. Savarese's “Marionettes on the Banks of the Ganges” in Eurasian Theatre cites letters

between Anglo - Ceylonese scholar Ananda Coomaraswaamy and British theatre reformer

Edward Gordon Craig, who were searching for a language that would speak between theatres,

while preserving their cultural differences. This search is also reflected in Craig's work with

masks and puppets from Nō, Javanese and Greek theatres, which informed his concept

Übermarionette .

76 Nicola Savarese, Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West (Holstebro: Icarus Publishing Enterprise, 2010).

32

My own engagement with Theatre Anthropology as a practical researcher in this thesis

begins in Chapter Two: “Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week Festival 2012”. This chapter

documents the student body in action in the context of a theatre tradition that was unknown to

it. It is a record of the disorientation of encountering the unknown through action. It

documents the diverse modes of action that Odin Week engaged with, including practical

training, theoretical seminars, work demonstrations, and presentations by the theatre's

administrators. We were invited to perform our own short pieces, as well as to be spectators at

Odin Teatret performances. This chapter focuses on the physical principle of resistance,

introduced via Bergson as the basis of connection between matter, biology and consciousness

through action, as a technical process of training developed at Odin Teatret, and its role in

Theatre Anthropological research. I discuss my experience as a spectator of the performance

Judith and how my perception was informed by the performance's action . Judith embodied

resistance as a source of growth through the dynamics of the performance that created a

relationship between matter, biology and consciousness through its actions. Documentation of

this experience is augmented by Erik Exe Christoffersen's description of Judith , Carreri's

reflection on her process of creating the performance and my own primary experience of luck

in Theatre Anthropology.

Theatre Anthropology is distinct from intercultural theatre as has been discussed by

Ian Watson in Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate, and revised

by Adam Ledger in two articles “Looking up 'secrets': definitions, narrative and pragmatism

in A dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: Secret Art of the Performer ”, and “'A spider moved

by the wind': a response to the Symposium of the thirteenth session of the International

33

School of Theatre Anthropology”. In this thesis, Chapter Three: “Snakes and Ladders: An 7778

Historiography of Theatre Anthropology”, draws on Eugenio Barba's early essay. “Knowing

with the mind and understanding with the body”, published by Icarus in The Moon Rises from

the Ganges which defines the field of Theatre Anthropology . First delivered as an oral 79

presentation in 1980 this text was later published as “Theatre Anthropology: First

Hypotheses” in Polish, in 1981. It defines Theatre Anthropology's resistance to the projection

of rational thought, thinking through physical actions to articulate the principles that link

theatre cultures. This is the “secret” capacity of actors to speak the unspeakable through their

actions. This unspeakable language is compiled in Theatre Anthropology's founding text, A

Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of The Performer , in which Barba and

Savarese collect insights gleaned through the International School of Theatre Anthropology

between 1980 and 2005. I revisit the origins of Theatre Anthropology in Chapter Three: 80

“Snakes and Ladders: An Historiography of Theatre Anthropology”. Whether the actor's body

speaks has been a central question posed to Theatre Anthropology. This question has been

posed by a semiotic frame of analysis. In “Dancing with Faust: reflections on an intercultural

mise en scène by Eugenio Barba”, in Theatre at the Cross Roads of Culture, Patrice Pavis

suggests it is not possible to read the performer's body beyond its encoding in cultural

signification. Following his initial thesis in 1995, however, Pavis attended subsequent ISTAs 81

77 Adam Ledger, “Theatre Anthropology and ISTA Looking up 'secrets': definitions narrative and pragmatism in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: Secret Art of the Performer ” , Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 2 (2006).

78 Adam Ledger, “'A spider moved by the wind': a response to the Symposium of the thirteenth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology”, S tudies in Theatre and Performance 25, no. 2 (2005).

79 Eugenio Barba, “Knowing with the mind and understanding with the body” in The Moon Rises from the Ganges (Holstebro: Icarus Publishing Enterprise, 2015).

80 Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of The Performer 2 nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2006).

81 Patrice Pavis, “Dancing with Faust: reflections on an intercultural mise en scène by Eugenio Barba” in Theatre at the Cross Roads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992).

34

through which he developed a system for reading performances by ISTA's Teatrum Mundi

ensemble that included formal and anti – narrative levels of readability, an approach applied

by Jane Tuner 's analysis of Ego Faust in the 2003 Routledge guide, Eugenio Barba . Despite 82

the interest of this layered analysis, I contest in “Chapter Three: Snakes and Ladders: An

Historiography of Theatre Anthropology” that the semiotic approach elides the living

exchange at the heart of theatre that produces luck. Its focus on what is already known

prohibits the unforeseeable. Rather than focusing on readability, I consider dynamic

relationships between different orders of being as the basis of speech, within theatre and

between disciplines. I contextualise the body which speaks within discursive thought in

Anthropology and Cultural theory, and thought that acts between multiple orders of being.

This discussion draws on Mary Douglas's introduction to James Frazer's The Golden Bough:

A Study in Comparative Religion – which studies the emergence and transformation of

knowledge. Michael Taussig's “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic”

in Walter Benjamin's Grave , reflects on anthropology as itself a projection. This demonstrates

that the shared reference points between systems of theatre and language are actions between

matter, biology and consciousness.

The capacity for the body to speak is explored through practical research and

observation as a participant at the XV Session of International School of Theatre

Anthropology in “Chapter Four: How the Body Speaks: Actions and Evolutions at XV ISTA,

2016”. In this chapter I document practical research as a participant at ISTA into the extra –

daily body, as an observer and a workshop participant. I observe the continuum between

different orders of being that is formed in this extra – daily body. I document the montage of

82 Jane Turner, Eugenio Barba , (London: Routledge, 2004).

35

functions that is developed in the performer's bios of each tradition, and the increased

capacity for choice between actions they offer the performer within their own tradition. These

documentations are augmented with the evolutions described in theatre forms through the

biographies of performers presented at the festival. Observing work demonstrations directed

by Barba at this ISTA revealed that the body spoke through the actions it performed between

the functions developed in their bios . These actions created dynamic relationships. I compare

this form of speech to the actions performed by language. Drawing on the grammatical

structure of linguistic cases it is possible to perceive how words act and bodies speak. The

commonalities of these systems reflect the primary human capacity to create relationships

between different orders of being that engage with our material, biological and mental

determinism to overcome it. The sequence enacted at ISTA reflects that this capacity follows

the already intelligent direction of the natural world.

The capacity for speech is an important theme in an Australian Cultural context, which

is explored in “Chapter Five: A Case For Luck: The Production of Luck in a Social Context”.

This chapter draws on the vernacular notion of Australia as “The Lucky Country”, coined by

Donald Horne's 1964 classic The Lucky Country, which observes a schism in Australian

society between action and knowledge. This gulf is also observed by Kath Leahy in her

chapter “The Larrikin Revolution” in Lords and Larrikins: The Actor's Role in the Making of

Australia . , Leahy writes about divisions in class and ethnicity that have hampered speech 83 84

in Australian Theatre, rendering action inaudible to critics who sought to reaffirm values

detached from the performances they encountered. The nature of theatre as a social and

83 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Melbourne: Penguin, 1964). 84 Kath Leahy, Lords and Larrikins: The Actor's Role in the Making of Australia (Strawberry Hills:

Currency House Pty Ltd, 2009).

36

biological phenomenon is explored in the context of the Holstebro Festuge, a large scale

social community theatre festival staged by Odin Teatret. This discussion draws on Deleuze's

writing about Buster Keaton in Cinema One: The Movement Image which links the biology of

the actor with “large form” as a cog in the social infrastructure of the railway network, for

example, or a natural disaster. In Alexis Wright's 2007 epic Carpentaria , speech is an action 85

that develops the capacity for evolution, between matter and biology. Her 2017 posthumous

biography of Indigenous Australian economist Tracker Tilmouth Tracker is a polyphonic

Indigenous oral history that reflects speech as a material and cultural act that transforms social

discourses. , 86 87

“Chapter Six: The Mouth of The Wolf: Residential Development at Nordisk

Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret, 2017” continues to explore action as the basis of speech

from a neurological point of view. It draws on an interview with neurologist V. S.

Ramachandran, “Brain Games: the Marco Polo of Neuroscience”, in The New Yorker 2009,

which describes the link between action and the evolution of language in Ramachandran's

theorisation of mirror neurons. The arguments surrounding mirror neurons are discussed by 88

Maxine Sheets Johnstone in “Movement and Mirror Neurons: a challenging and choice

conversation.” Her 2011 article outlines the heavy – handed use of the concept by 89

neurologists writing about the visual and performing arts. She describes the complex

developmental neurology of everyday life, suggesting mirror neurons are an offshoot of the

neurology of movement. Training with Roberta Carreri during the residential development of

85 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, t rans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. (Minn eapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1986).

86 Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (University of Western Sydney: Giramondo, 2006). 87 Alexis Wright, Tracker (University of Western Sydney: Giramondo, 2017). 88 John Colipano, “Brain Games: the Marco Polo of Neuroscience” in The New Yorker, May 11, 2009. 89 Maxine Sheets Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons: a challenging and choice conversation”,

Phenom Cogn Sci 11(2012).

37

The Tale of the Wolf at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret, adds technical

information to this discussion of how actions inform language and thought. Carreri's work

with resistance articulates how the actor's bios links between one order of being and other.

Her work, eliminating tensions in my bios , reflected that luck is produced through actions that

encounter the unknown. I describe how action on this level transformed the capacity of my

performance to speak during the development. I've augmented my experiences with details

from Carreri's 2014 professional autobiography On Training and Performance: Traces of an

Odin Teatret Actress. This book documents Carreri's training exercises, compositional 90

techniques and creative process, including Judith discussed in Chapter One of this thesis.

Chapter Five of this thesis continues to elaborate the actress' capacity for speech at Odin

Teatret. Iben Nagel Rasmussen writes about women's speech in “The Mutes of the Past:

Responses to a questioning spectator” in 1979. Rasmussen writes about her own mother's 91

voice in the performance Ester's book. The performance responds to Iben's mother, Ester

Rasmussen's Book of the Seed , a diary written to Iben when she was in utero through

theatrical actions. I draw on my own mother's work in psychotherapy “Permission To Speak:

Therapists Understandings of Psychogenic Non – Epileptic Seizures and their Treatment”

which describes therapy as a process of mutual transformation for therapist and client from

the client's somatic language. Rather than seeing this as limited to the therapeutic context, 92

this chapter reflects that Theatre Anthropology offers dynamic, pre – expressive actions as the

basis of language itself, which can transform the ways that meaning is made within and

90 Roberta Carreri, On Training and Performance: Traces of an Odin Teatret Actress , trans. Frank Camilleri (London: Routledge, 2014).

91 Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Itsi Bitsi (Holstebro: Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium). 92 Maria C. Quinn, Margot J. Schofield & Warwick Middleton, “Permission to Speak: Therapists’

Understandings of Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures and Their Treatment”, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation , 11:1 (2010).

38

between disciplines.

Chapter Seven: The Chronic Life : “I came because I was told my father lived here...”

traces the way actions speak to spectators of Odin Teatret's performance The Chronic Life

which contests the final limit of biological determinism, death. In this chapter, my own

repeated spectatorship of the performance, collected alongside others' responses to The

Chronic Life published in Dramatica by the University of Babeş-Bolyai in Romania, reflects

individual and collective experience of luck affected by the performance. Barba's writing on 93

the performance, “Incomprehensibility and Hope” describes the transformation he seeks to

affect within the spectator's perception. Varley's “The Birth of Nikita: Protest and Waste”

recounts the way Varley wove materials and stories about loss into the performance. Walter

Benjamin's seminal “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” describes the instantaneous

reappearance of the past as a flash that transforms its perceived order. His classic text “The

Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov”, from Illuminations, describes the

way craft weaves material and mythical levels of being together to transcend the limit of

death. While these transformations take place in instantaneous flashes they indicate the 94

durability of a system. The durability of Theatre Anthropology as a system is described

through the Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Return. Klossowski's discussion in Nietzsche

and the Vicious Circle , “The Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, outlines The Eternal

Return as an evolutionary process of action in the unknown. The work of Eugenio Barba and 95

Odin Teatret on The Chronic Life , and in Theatre Anthropology resists the projected logics of

rational thought, allowing us to experience transformation that contests the limits of

93 Ştefana Pop-Curşeu ed., “Eugenio Barba” Dramatica 1 (Romania: Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, 2014).

94 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn (Great Britain: Fontana, 1970). 95 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, T rans. Daniel W. Smith (London: continuum,

1997).

39

knowledge as finality, fate, and death. This thesis contributes insights gleaned about how this

luck is produced through action in the context of Theatre Anthropology and its relationship

with other fields. It is a product of my own evolution, and aims to share the luck that has been

produced in this process with others.

40

Chapter One: Pulling strings: The Snuff Puppet Ramayana

From the anecdote told by Ian Pidd about luck produced by the Ramayana in

Indonesia, we came to understand luck as the exchange produced by theatre. The energetic

exchange has a transformative effect on people and social systems alike. In Ian Pidd's

Honours thesis written at the University of Melbourne he provides a greater insight into the

Ramayana's role in the transformation of Indonesian society. He gives a history of the

embedded nature of the epic in the region's social and material history, which has created an

audience receptive to its retelling, and the transformative effect of how it is performed, on

social life. The commentary that he gives demonstrates the relationship between the presence

and actions of the live performance and the materiality of individual and collective thought,

which produces luck. Although the examples given are from Indonesian society, the principles

of energetic exchange, materially embedded narratives and an educated audience are common

between cultures according to Theatre Anthropology. Nicola Savarese's writing about Wayang

Kulit puppetry and its significance for Twentieth Century theatre reforms between East and

West draws on some of the formative dialogues between European and Asian theatres

concerning these principles, their attendant potentials for exchange and the misunderstandings

they encountered. His work introduces the field of Theatre Anthropology through these

dialogues, which is addressed in greater detail in Chapter Three of this thesis. Chapter One

considers the relationship between puppets and presence described in both Pidd and

Savarese's work as a metaphor for material and vital forces which interrupt one another in this

discipline, and their relationship with social, cultural and political narratives in the production

of luck.

41

The Ramayana in Indonesia

Pidd describes the trajectory of the Ramayana from India to Java. Its orality wove animist 96

and Hindu traditions together with the genealogy of Javanese life. Pidd draws on Sear's 97

argument that the transmission of the text came from travelling artists, priests, and

storytellers, invited to the kingdoms of SouthEast Asia following the opening of trade routes

in the First Century BCE, transmitting the epic, and its companion, the Mahabharata, orally. 98

This refutes the attribution of the Ramayana's importance in Java to the spread of text.

Sanskrit texts from the Fifth Century in Indonesia document the cultural impact of these oral

exchanges, and practices of Buddhism and Brahmanism flourished in Indonesia from this

time. The Ramayana appears in the frescos of Candi Prambanan temple north of Yogyakarta

built in the 9 th Century CE, an idiosyncratic local temple that reflects the adoption of these

epics into Javanese cultural life. The frescos extend from the temple of Shiva (the destroyer),

through Vishnu's (the preserver) temple to temple of Brahma (the creator) linking the

Trimurti. The Ramayana is currently performed at Candi Prambanan as a ballet, though there

is a long link between the Ramayana and more traditionally Javanese styles of performance.

The first performance linking the Ramayana with Wayang Kulit is dated to 907 CE when the

monarch Baliitung declared that his daughter's coming of age should be marked by the

recitation of the epic verses. Descriptions of this event include its buffoonery, and note that

the event included Wayang performances in honour of the gods. Wayang itself is a form of 99

96 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 11- 15. 97 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 13. 98 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 19. 99 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 14 – 15.

42

performance originally thought to have married Javanese traditions of ancestor worship with

courtly Indian theatre using marionettes. By the Tenth Century, many aristocratic Javanese

families traced their ancestry back to characters in the Ramayana. The genealogical

investment of Javanese culture in the Ramayana reflects its uniquely generative relationship

to everyday life, an archetypical progenitor linked with a sacred performance tradition that

anchors the present in relationship with an archaic, fictional 'Real' from which daily

behaviour, interactions and identities take their cues. This epic as origin is renewed and

reinvented in each retelling, each enactment of the myth.

Pidd describes the Ramayana as embedded in Indonesian social, cultural and political

life. It is played by Wayang Kulit, heard in gamelan orchestras, referenced in text and

performance. It colours Javanese pop-culture, and the epic's heroes, villains and clowns figure

in advertising, graffiti and on tourist souvenirs. Pidd notes Keeler's suggestion that the 100

Ramayana is one of the dominant influences on the Javanese character, a suggestion

supported by the comment of Yogyakatan artist and architect Eko Prawoto who describes the

three paths simultaneously trodden by local citizens, who are practicing Muslims and

animists, and leading a life animated by the Ramayana at the same time. Pidd describes the 101

qualities of the epic that might allow it to have this power of animating life. As with the

Brechtian description of epic theatre, its epic construction reflects spectator's attention onto

the construction of everyday life. Many of these elements contain contradictions and

paradoxes that refer the viewer back to the circumstances in which they are viewing the piece,

enabled by its enduring core and the adaptability of its oral retelling. The Ramayana is made

up of thousands of fragmentary stories, so many that the vast entirety could not be known by

100 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 11. 101 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 12.

43

any one person. And yet its fixed characters are well known by all of its viewers, which

renders explanation unnecessary. It is both archetypical and unorthodox, generating a plurality

of representations and interpretations of these fixed characters. So it is a living traditional

form, continually re-invented in its original state. It is an ancient sacred text, attached to a

theatrical form with supernatural potency, allowing the piece to have an active role in

facilitating change, bridging that gulf of the unknown unavailable to humans in a rational

mode. It is a transversal text, cutting through layers of social organisation, sacred, political

and profane, comprising polyphonic modes of presentation, at times dramatic, allegorical and

vernacular. It has had this status over hundreds of generations and is inflected with particular

cultural, historical, political resonance for this reason.

Pidd demonstrates the tale's resistance to political and religious manipulation, that has

given it the power to affect change. Attempts to adapt the Ramayana to the agenda of a

dominant political power have been deflected by its archetypical, mercurial nature. The

Ramayana was at stake in inter Sultanate conflicts, particularly between the kingdoms of Solo

and Yogyakarta between the Tenth and Fifteen Centuries. The Sixteenth Century advent of

Islam as the dominant religion in Java initially suppressed the Ramayana, and then adapted its

appeal to reflect Islamic values. Pidd says Sear recounts the birth of Rawana as a contested

scene in this period. Rawana is the Ramayana's antagonist giant who steals the protagonist 102

Rama's wife Sita. The Ramayana recounts a series of battles, exploits and genealogical

anecdotes in Rama's pursuit of Sita, aided by powerful king Hanuman leading an army of

monkey men. In Valmikmi's text Rawana was born when his mother imprudently interrupted

a powerful sage Vishrava performing a fire sacrifice. According to Sear, the Sixteenth

102 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 19.

44

Century Javanese version portrayed Rawana's mother interrupting the recitation of a Muslim

text, an Islamic taboo. This adaptation was designed to suppress mysticism, but the

adaptability of oral performance meant that the “Islamic text” could be recited in Sastrajendra,

an ancient high Javanese text, making the puppet a kind of saviour. This version became the

norm by the Nineteenth Century. Pidd recounts the role of the epic in the Twentieth 103

Century, following two centuries of struggles against Dutch Imperialism. While Indonesia's

first President Soekarno encouraged the use of classical forms, he became vulnerable to

critique and commentary through his investment in the “pure” classicism of these forms,

inventing a fictional orthodoxy, which meant performances could be denounced as decadent

or subversive. His successor the military dictator Suharto called a meeting of Dhalangs to 104

encourage their use of Wayang Kulit Ramayana in the “spiritual education” of the people,

garnering critique and rejection for the taint that his dictatorship brought to the performance

of the work, leading to a schism within the Dhalangs . 105

Ramayana performance as political resistance

The Ramayana had an important role in the regimen change that overthrew Suharto in 1997. It

connected between mystic artistic practice, social movements and political change in an

example of luck . Pidd's description of this event demonstrates the political implications of this

topic in which theatre's energetic transfer can be political as well as a vital form of resistance.

During the turbulent Nineteen Nineties, Theatre Gandrik, among other groups worked

103 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 21. 104 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 25. 105 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 25.

45

between classical and contemporary forms as vastly popular, populist, savvy lightning rods

for political dissent against the Suharto regime. Describing themselves as Avant Garde

looking backwards they drew on Brecht and Pirandello as well as Indonesian cultural

traditions to guyan parrikena, make a serious point while appearing to be joking. They 106

describe the time as a thrilling tactical game of participating in and provoking popular dissent

without appearing directly oppositional enough to be suppressed, stating that as time went on,

the constant presence and repressive force of the regime meant any action could be interpreted

as being about the political situation. Pidd describes the conjunction of events that led the 107

performance by Theatre Gandirk's Butet Ketarejasa on 26 th May 1997 to bring change for the

Suharto regimen. He cites Hatley and Kwetarejasa to describe the role of the Ramayana in

regime change for this dictatorship. 108

The performance took place at a rally called by Hanengkubuwono X, Sultan of Yogya,

a leading critic of the regime. His nephew, Butet had developed a popular impersonation of

Suharto on Saturday night T.V.. The protest was surrounded by the army who, six months

earlier would have broken up the demonstration. The economic crisis provoked by the

International Monetary Fund had seen basic costs rising manyfold, a crisis that highlighted the

corruption of Suharto's family and lessened their grip on power after twenty years of violent

dictatorship. Butet aped the impotence of the President in his performance that would not

have been possible before the economic crisis, and ushered the Sultan to the stage whose

speech implied the respectable action would be for the President to step down. The following

morning the President Suharto stepped down. The performance was able to effect this 109

106 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 25. 107 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 25 – 6. 108 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 27. 109 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 1 -2.

46

transformation because it was working with the Goro Goro a recognisable trope from Wayang

Kulit performances of the Ramayana where at midnight in the performance, the Dhalang

breaks from the narrative and ushers in the clown Gods, Punakawan who lecture the story's

nobility on the correct use of power, often with reference to current events, using a lot of

bawdy humour, bad puns and irreverent comments. It is one of the most popular moments in

the performance. While the Sultan, who has traditional power, was given nominal power in 110

the Suharto regimen, the performance used a traditional form in which power was contested

to give the Sultan power to speak in a way that transcended the role designated to him by the

president. It was a play between low and high, the base enactment of Goro Goro speaking

through social hierarchies. It resonated with the economic and social crisis in a way that it

allowed an actual transfer of power to take place. The act resonated with popular sentiment

and resisted the narratives Suharto attempted to impose. In this instance of luck, the

Ramayana's relationship to regime change was effected through the presence of the Sultan

and Butet, and their enactment of a traditional form within these economic and social

circumstances that realised the social will obliquely. As we have seen, the Ramayana's role in

political resistance has persisted throughout a millennium of struggle in Indonesia, and is

given by the oral nature of the tradition that resists final meanings that are projected onto the

piece.

Pidd suggests that its special status allows the epic to comment on, without being

subject to regimes of power. This is also reflected in the traditional role of the Dhalang . The 111

Dhalang is seated behind the screen in the pandopo , the traditional performance area that is

open on all sides. Although the screen, about a meter and a half high, is the focus of the

110 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 3. 111 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 15.

47

performance, the audience surrounds this space. The Dhalang 's role is to select the fragments

of the Ramayana that will be presented in the performance, narrate these fragments, perform

the characters's voices. The Dhalang will also conduct the gamelan orchestra with nods and

gestures, and operate the fifty or so buffalo leather puppets used in the performance. Pidd

notes the unique place of the Dhalang in relation to money and authority that allows the

Dhalang to conduct power without being subject to it. The Dhalang is commissioned by a 112

sponsor for the performance, usually a male head of a wealthy, aristocratic family. The

Dhalang 's mystical power is purchased by this sponsor, reenforcing the sponsor's power, for

whom the Dhalang is a kind of representative in the performance. Although standing for this

commissioning figure, the Dhalang is not subject to their power, but performs as the local

presence for a remote supernatural actor. This mystic presence is a dangerous ambivalent 113

force. The Dhalang must be familiar with dark forces in order to produce the performance.

The danger of this malignant presence is mitigated through the technical work of the

Dhalang. T he Dhalang performs the simultaneous actions of the piece, lasting from early

evening to dawn, often to an absence of spectators in its final hours, or to just a few sleeping

bodies. We could describe this puppeteer as producing luck. The Dhalang 's taboo status and 114

role in contact with ambivalent mystical forces is part of the ritual function of the Wayang

Kulit . This is not only in the case of regime change where this power ushers in change. It is

their profession, the shared technical principles of which are discussed between theatre

cultures through Theatre Anthropology in this thesis. In a routine Wayang Kulit performance,

luck can be produced that affects the status of a family, the health of the crop, or can heal the

112 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 15. 113 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 15. 114 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 22.

48

sick. To perform these acts the Dhalang is in conversation with the same mystical,

archetypical, genealogical forces described above, making it possible for the performance to

affect without being affected by social and political narratives. Pidd also comments that these

powers, as well as being mystical and culturally specific, are also technical aspects of acting

and dramaturgy. These common technical aspects that intersect between action and matter 115

make it possible to speak about luck in the context of Theatre Anthropology, a question that

addresses the fundamental function of theatre.

The Snuff Puppet Ramayana

Snuff Puppets are a Melbourne based community of artists crafting giant puppets for

performance interventions in communities across the world. They work between performing

and visual arts, as well as engineering and sound to create performances that aim to disturb

and delight audiences with a uniquely Australian sensibility. Pidd describes his process on the

Snuff Puppet Ramayana that made him more aware of implicit assumptions and values of the

Snuff Puppet's team. Snuff Puppets value a seemingly equal collaboration between

community members and artists (based on values drawn from discourses of community

theatre). Pidd states Kelly divides didactic and craft based community theatres in Storming the

Citadels, based on the work of Augusto Boal and Welfare State International or Bread and

Puppet Theatre, where political processes and hierarchical group structure oppose the

democratic values of community practice. He found the group's values were challenged by the

explicit hierarchies of Javanese cultural life. In this context skilled local artists 116

115 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 15. 116 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 37.

49

differentiated themselves from community collaborators, creating explicit tiers within the

project's operation, a process, Pidd notes, that rendered decision making and leadership roles

that often remain implicit within Snuff Puppets projects, explicit. Pidd describes the 117

thematic concerns the collaborators had discussed before settling on the subject of the

Ramayana for their performance. They spoke about the changing social role of middle class

women, the relationship between globalised pop culture and traditional values, as well as the

ambivalence with which the growing 'democratisation' of Indonesia had been met. These

discussions reflect an awareness of the local social and political environment that had been

built through Pidd's visits over five years. He describes the choice of the Ramayana led the

group to forget these ideas, which reemerged none the less through the rehearsal process and

appeared in the final piece. The way these themes reemerged also reflects the relationship 118

between the Ramayana as an epic and the presence of the artists working on the performance

who contribute to its continually metamorphosing, yet unchanged form. Perhaps this

continual transformation to remain the same, as Barba describes his work, could also be

described using Carter's question about material knowledge in practice based research

contexts, used by Pidd throughout his writing, “What matters here?”. His question reflects 119

the matter of thought or social life animated and transformed by the live presence of the

performance.

The Snuff Puppet Ramayana was set in the Kingdom of Bantul, a nod to the

Ramayana's power to bestow luck on the village of their patron, though also a joke that

resonated with the inhabitants of Bantul, a poor suburb of Yogyakarta. In the Snuff Puppet

117 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 40. 118 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 45. 119 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 37.

50

Ramayana the battle between Queen of the Giants, Sarpokono and Sugriwa, the Monkey

King, was staged as a t.v. game show. Pidd suggests that sympathies lay with Sarpokono,

reflecting the values of the Ramayana that afforded dignity to its antagonists even in defeat,

juxtaposed with the crass humiliation of T.V. culture. He notes later that Wayang and

Ramayana are used by local artists to comment on pop culture, though also questions how this

decision may have been perceived in relation to the nationality of the Snuff Puppets

collaborators as Australians. Another battle, between the Giants and the Monkeys, was

planned in slow motion. Pidd responded to the momentum, however, behind the suggestion of

staging the showdown with a cockfight, which generated widespread excitement. Pidd notes

the resonance of this suggestion with the canonical anthropological essay Deep Play: Notes

on the Balinese Cockfight, in which Clifford Geertz discusses the way substitutes and betting

in an illegal cockfight reflexively comment on the values and hierarchies of Balinese life.

There was a further unorthodox suggestion, that the Bhuto cock defeat the Monkey bird, on

which the entire group voted. This unexpected twist was followed by a return to form in

which the watching Monkeys solemnly slaughtered the Bhuto, demonstrating that the play

with form retained its power when it cohered with the enduring values of the work. 120

Pidd discloses the practical decision to cast Hindra Setya Rini of Theatre Garasi as

Hanuman, leader of the Monkey army because of her experience in Javanese dance, which

was adopted as the fighting language of the monkeys. This choice went unremarked during

the performance, though was met with a gasp when Rini removed her headpiece to reveal her

gender when the performance ended. This is one example of the way themes discussed by 121

the group resurfaced through the performance, and resonated with vital questions in everyday

120 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 52. 121 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 53.

51

life. The formal separation between the codified performance tradition of Wayang Kulit and

the Ramayana is reflected both in the role of the Dhalang, and in this project, the way the

Javanese artists separated themselves from the community collaborators. Though the function

of this separation is to create a dialogue and flow between the two arenas. Perhaps this

relationship could be expressed through the image of the pandopo , the traditional rehearsal

and performance space in which the artists worked. Eko Prawoto describes the nature of a

pandopo as “happily confused about whether it is inside or outside”. Pidd notes that it is a

large structure with a formal space for the Dhalang to perform in the centre and for

aristocratic patrons to sit backstage, visible behind the performance. The rest of the audience

surround the piece and its simultaneous actions from all sides. Even in the rehearsal of the 122

Snuff Puppet Ramayana these “casual collaborators” watched and commented on the work,

paying distracted attention, demonstrating that contact between formal artistry and everyday

life was facilitated by this open structure.

Ian Pidd's work demonstrates the genealogical role of oral storytelling and the capacity

of this theatrical practice to transform everyday life. The Ramayana's orality resists political

manipulation and enacts transformations of the social fabric that it is deeply embedded in. It

does this through the technical knowledge of its storytellers, puppeteers, performers and

directors. There are particular cultural and historic conditions that allow the Ramayana to

produce its particular form of luck. Its archetypical nature has made it a genealogical

wellspring to which the often hierarchical values of daily Javanese life can be traced, and by

which regimes of power can be challenged. It creates a simultaneity of time frames between

the Ancient Javanese past and the present moment. In this way it has ushered in political

122 Pidd, Punakawan to Punk , 45-6.

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change as well as generating other more everyday forms of luck. In the example of Pidd's

collaboration on the Snuff Puppet Ramayana we can also see luck at work. The collaboration

for Pidd was the technical process of rehearsal, where meanings were either misunderstood or

incomprehensible but where an appreciation of the dynamic of a scene and its development

could be shared. He also notes his deepening understanding of the implicit values of his own

tradition. Pidd's observations resonate with the values of Theatre Anthropology, where

pre-expressive principles are shared between theatre cultures, making participants more aware

of the values of their own cultural traditions, as well as contributing to a discourse of theatre

where meanings are not primary to the exchange. To elaborate the value and limits of

deepening self perception through Theatre Anthropology I draw on the work on Nicola

Savarese, co- founder of International School of Theatre Anthropology, and his writing about

the impact of Wayang Kulit puppets on Twentieth Century theatre reformer Edward Gordon

Craig. Savarese writes about the ambivalent value of cross cultural dialogue for Craig, and

the contribution of Eastern theatre traditions to his evolving idea of the Ǖbermarionette .

Puppets and the animation of matter between cultures

In “Marionettes on the Banks of the Ganges” Nicola Savarese quotes Jaques Copeau's

description of Edward Gordon Craig's apartment in Florence in 1915. At that time Craig was

the leading theorist of European theatre, though refused all offers to work in major theatres.

Copeau wrote, “... a large room with two windows opening over the Ano... almost bare,

furnished with a table, some books and half a dozen Javanese puppets made from cut leather.”

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Craig's Wayang Kulit puppets travelled from house to house with him, and were included 123

in the major 1914 exhibition of Craig's work in Zurich. This exhibition embodied the

'principles' that were important for Craig in the exchange between East and West. Wary of 124

fetishising the East, as he had seen in the impact of Japanese prints on European painting, and

a European craze for Cambodian dancers, Craig's interest followed a particular path searching

for the spirit of theatre. He wrote,

We have nothing to gain as some would claim, by a mere imitation of this or any other ancient form of drama, of its masks, its symbolism, its conventions, its costumes: it is rather in tracing the spirit of which those outwards forms and accessories were the expression that we may find something of value, either as a warning or encouragement, to aid us in shaping the mask, the symbols, and the laws of our own Theatre which is to be. 125

For Craig, the spirit of theatrical expression included the presence archetypes that

transcended social types, giving form to those forces that drive human action. These

archetypes were not necessarily limited to the cultural milieu in which they were expressed.

His encounter with masks from Nō theatre led him to suggest that they could be used as

masks were in Greek antiquity to express these psychological or moral qualities, “Craig

claimed that if one merely put them on and recited Sophocles or Aeschylus, one could revive

Greek theatre.” As with Theatre Anthropology Craig was interested in the spirit that was 126

able to renew and shape theatre rather than in the social interests of his own or another

cultural milieu. He said, “theatre should evoke in every person the nostalgia for what does not

123 Copeau in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 466. 124 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 466. 125 This statement is taken from The Mask, which Craig founded to publish his own work as well as the

work of Eastern scholars writing about their relationship with the West. Craig in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 467.

126 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468.

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really belong in this world”. His statement, not without some pathos, evokes the capacity 127

for theatre to evolve social types. Moving through and beyond archetypical forms the fixed

appearance of social reality is mobilised. Its movement creates space for unforeseeable forces.

The mask and the puppet stand in for the materiality of social life, that become agents of its

transformation when animated by the presence of the actor.

Masks and marionettes were essential symbols for Craig's expression of his

philosophy of theatre, as well as practical scenic elements of his work. Craig had designed

and used his own masks in his early productions, though his encounter with Nō theatre, masks

made him more aware of the capacity to evoke moral and psychological states, rather than

social types as in Commedia dell'arte. For Craig's philosophy, masks marked his break with

naturalism and the psychologically trained actors of his time whose constantly varying facial

expressions could not interpret life as faithfully as these materials could, according to Innes

“...individual emotion and egotism... made ordinary actors unsuitable for Craig's concept of

art.” In keeping with his interest in theatrical archetypes Craig said, “instead of six 128

hundred... six expressions shall appear on the face.” Innes notes, “simplicity and intensity 129

replaced variety”. The mask allowed the actor to portray these psychological and spiritual 130

forms “the visible expression of the mind... the only right medium for portraying the

expression of the soul”. At this time the marionette was already figuring in the Viennese 131

Symbolist imagination. Kleist's famous essay One the Marionette Theatre had been

recognised by Hofmannsthal and others for its philosophical significance. The puppet theatre,

which had subsisted as an impoverished form, was beginning to receive new attention with

127 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 467. 128 Innes in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468. 129 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468. 130 Innes in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468. 131 Innes in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 467.

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the advent of touring Asian marionette theatres. Marotti says, rigorous and flourishing oriental

traditions of the shadow theatre such as Wayang Kulit , Chinese Jingxi and Japanese Bunraku ,

along with new movements of figuration in European art, revived the puppet theatre as a

dignified art form at this time. 132

European theatres searched for forms beyond socialised behaviour, that would animate

matter from psychic and social life, in the way an actor worked with a mask. Their search

reflects the vital impulse that resists the projection of everyday life that is embedded in the

creative act. Similarly, the origins of puppet theatre were themselves contested in the early

Twentieth Century. Savarese refers to the historic debate that was taking place at the time of

Craig's work on the Greek origins of Indian theatres. Pischel, writing in 1902 had mounted a

successful and well received argument that marionette theatre originated in India, refuting the

suggestion that Indian theatre had been influenced by the Greeks. Savarese supports this 133

suggestion observing that the relationships between Greek and Indian theatre are a reflection

of trade and travel connections and do not indicate the kind of artistic relationship that might

constitute influence. This also suggests the common impulse to explore the biological

resistance to matter between cultures, forms and locations manifested in linked though

distinctive ways. Savarese describes Pischel's argument which is etymological as well as

historical. He notes the theatre director in Indian theatre was called sutradhara , thread holder,

the person who pulls the strings. He explores the many connotations to this word 134

sutradhara, which also resonates with the role of the architect who used string to make their

measurements. As a director who was first a designer, this role of the architect – director 135

132 Marotti in Innes in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468. 133 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 469. 134 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 468. 135 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 469.

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appealed to Craig, creating dramas that were spatial and material rather than humanistic.

Savarese continues with the observation that the word sutra (string) can also be used to mean

text, as in the yoga sutra s, and so could apply to the text that is memorised by the performer.

In this sense sutra as text can also be used to refer to the guiding principles, or technical

knowledge, of any discipline or profession. In this sense the conventions of a discipline

become part of its threading. Theatre anthropology's interest in the principles of theatre 136

rather than their cultural contexts could be described as an interest in these strings or sutras

that animate the field of theatre. They connect between social spaces (as in architecture)

spiritual practice (as in yoga) and storytelling in theatre. The technical knowhow of the

theatre director, Dhalang , or actor, acts on these strings. The tension applied to this string

allows intentionality (conscious or unconscious) to meet with circumstance and human action

in the production of luck.

The actions of the performer are decided by the tension of this string. In Theatre

Anthropology's 'Decided Body' Barba describes the actor's body as active passivity in action,

receptive, activated by a line of force. In acrobatics also learning to lift the hips in a press to

handstand is taught by imagining a string attached to the lower back that lifts the hips. In

ballet or Feldenkrais technique, the string is imagined pulling the body vertically from the top.

Imagining this external line of force allows the body to be receptive to a new centre of

gravity, or levity. A logic no longer its own. It replaces the materiality of intellect with

external matter, allowing vitality to encounter an unforeseeable force. Collaborating with this

force the subject is no longer delineated from the object, but opened onto another plane of

movement.

136 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 469.

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Impressed by the dignity of seeing the Indian director as the one who pulls the strings,

Edward Gordon Craig published his treatise on the Übermarionette in The Mask in 1907. 137

This treaties reflected the interaction between physics and matter in the puppet that bypassed

the rational projections of the human mind in acting. This was the paradox of acting. The

actor's own emotion could only imitate life and not rise to the level of art that the limbs of the

marionette could achieve. At the time, Savarese notes, Craig's suggestion was viewed as

proposing a tyranny for the director, an inhumane art form, rather than a form through which

humanity could ultimately be expressed. By using technical means Craig hoped to find an

equivalent movement onstage that could correspond to and evoke that emotion off stage, so

that like in Diderot's paradox, the actor could convey an emotion without necessarily being

subject to that emotion themselves, even though they were able to express intense and

complicated feelings, they were in a sense protected from them. Like the Dhalang the actor 138

converses with dark forces, technical know how also protected the actor from the forces they

evoked, understanding there was a dynamic line of tension that animated forms, without being

bound by identification. As the Dhalang knows his material and the forces that animate it

intimately, so Craig's actor had a depth of knowledge of his own materiality, “a master of his

own emotions and a skilled instrument of his own self.” 139

For Craig, the living embodiment of his philosophy of acting was Henry Irving who

he considered to be a model to all actors. Craig comments that Irving's face was the greatest

book ever written about acting. The expression of Irving's mouth was as definite as a line

drawn by a draughtsman or a chord in music. Each movement of his face was a mask. The

137 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 469. 138 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 470. 139 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 469.

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movements of his eyes a lesson in composition. Savarese observes that Craig's interest in the

technical vocabulary of acting is mirrored by the rasa-bhava, the physical principles of Indian

theatre. In 1913 Ananda Coomaraswamy published Notes on Indian Dramatic Technique in 140

Craig's journal The Mask, which was the first publication of first hand information about the

practice and theory of Indian theatre in Europe. In this article he described the practice and

theory of Indian theatre, Coomaraswamy demonstrating the human body was capable of the

kinds of expression that Craig had attributed to the marionette. He described the technical

training in Classical Indian dramatic arts, a composed body, where no aspect of expression

was left to the vagaries of human behaviour. He described the actor – dancer's training in

these actions, either via apprenticeship or independent study of texts, where the meanings of

the gestures had remained fixed for two thousand years and were relatively uniform

throughout India, in plastic arts and painting as well as theatre, “the movement of a single

finger, the elevation of an eyebrow, the direction of a glance...express the intentions of the

soul”. 141

Savarese suggests that the 'new' problems facing Craig's theatre had been solved by

ancient traditions, moreover using the human body as an instrument. Quoting

Coomaraswamy:

I have never seen better acting... than I once saw in Lucknow when an old man... a poet and a dancer and a teacher of many many dancing girls... sang a Heard Girl's

140 Coomaraswarmy, an Anglo-Ceylonese theatre historian from Sri-Lanka initially trained in geology in London in 1900 and then used his scientific knowledge of minerals to study Indian cultural life. His work drew on ancient Indian art forms, which alongside his political actions portray a “post-colonial” dedication to the cultural voice of India. He was appointed as the director of the Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the most significant centre for Asian Arts in the United States of America. Coomaraswamy's work, based on a devoted philological research of artistic, religious, philosophical aspects of Indian culture was the major primary source of information of Indian history and culture between the wars, informing the Oriental immersion of European culture in that period. 141 Coomaraswamy in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 472.

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Complaint to the Mother of Krishna … Picking up a scarf, he used it as a veil... nobody could have remembered he was anything but a shy and graceful young girl, telling a story with every sort of dramatic gesture of the eyes and hands. She told how Krishna had stolen the butter and curds, what pranks he played, of his love making and every sort of naughtiness. Every feature of the face, every movement of the body and hands was intentional, controlled, hieratic; not all his own devotion for Krishna spoiled his art to the least degree. It is true that Binda Deen is a man of genius and great personal character, and so the better to be able to identify himself with his art, not the art with himself. But such an action-song as this did not belong to him, or depend on his genius for its being, even though he may have composed the particular words of it; it belonged to the race, and its old vision of a cow-herd god.

142

Despite the accord between the approach to theatre described by Coomaraswarmy and

Craig's own philosophy of acting, the systemic discipline presented Craig with an

unimaginable reality, one that he couldn't conceive of within the discourses of theatre that

were familiar to him. Not even Craig, who drew on Indian dramatic art in the formulation the

Übermarionette was able to comprehend Coomaraswamy's descriptions of how performers

were trained at the time his article was published, commenting, “it was wrong for human

beings to submit to such severe discipline”. Commaraswamy's writing provided detail 143

reflecting on the cultural complexity of theatrical forms Craig drew on without much

knowledge of their practice. His writing reflects the resonance of these forms with the

interests of European theatrical culture at the time and yet the difficulty in creating a cultural

dialogue between these theatres.

Coomarawarmy's comments on the role of the audience in theatre provide an

interesting reflection on how to establish a cultural receptive to theatre, and therefore increase

its capacity for producing luck. He notes how vital it is for the audience to be educated in an

art form as thoroughly as the actor. “Art, as distinguished from 'slices of life',” he says,

142 Coomaraswamy in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 473. 143 Craig in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 472.

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“demands not only a trained artist but also a trained audience, and demands also that the artist

and audience should share a common faith. Is not perhaps the audience in a modern theatre a

greater failure than the play itself?” His comment reflects the nature of the human will 144

which has to be cultivated as a mutual understanding to be mobilised in art. In the context of

Java we saw that the Ramayana was able to produce luck partly because it was so central to

the lives of its audience. In this way the sutra , or strings of the story are threaded throughout

daily life, and the greater the extent of this, weather it is from codified performance traditions

(South Pole traditions in Barba's terminology) or the “spontaneous” desire of performers to

reflect life on stage (North Pole traditions), the more profoundly it is able to move its

audience. This connection is the common faith of the artist and the audience. We can trace

these common threads through the historic and archetypical lives of epics, through religious

and cultural traditions. We can also trace this common thread through the work of Theatre

Anthropology as a discipline, which like international relations or comparative literature,

attempts a cross cultural exchange based on principles that although already present have to

be cultivated as a system for spectators. Perhaps this notion of common faith could describe

what was missing in the dialogue between Craig and Coomaraswamy. The detail of the

cultural program Coomaraswamy contributed was too overwhelming for Craig. The principles

Craig had developed were not sufficient for him to navigate his way through.

In 1915 Coomaraswamy wrote to inform Craig that the The Mirror of Gesture a

Thirteenth Century manual for the actor-dancer has been translated into English. Craig

responded with trepidation. He saw the influence of other Eastern forms on European painting

and dance as an infatuation with the novelty of these traditions. He valued the technical rigour

144 Coomaraswamy in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 473.

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of the Indian dance manual that demonstrated technique as essential to the presentation of

theatre on stage, and encouraged Coomaraswamy to send him copies. He commented,

however, on how reluctant he believed the other theatre reformers would be to acknowledge

the magnitude of the task that faced them, training the body with such depth. He was also

afraid for himself. He saw the book as dangerous, posing the threat to himself and others

similar to what he perceived in the craze over other art forms from the East. He feared the

popular response might be to unquestioningly follow the forms of these traditions without

apprehending principles from them themselves, going blindly to see “God's face”, “even as

there is no returning for a true lover, by the pains of Hell itself, so is there no returning from

India.” His comment also reflects the fear of going beyond the limits of his knowledge, 145

producing luck. Rather than fetishising the East art forms, Craig turned back to investigate the

roots of his own traditions. Savarese writes, “Respectful of differences, Craig wanted to be

himself.” Alongside William Butler Yeats, who delved into Celtic mythology to renew his 146

concept of dramaturgy, Craig developed his revolutionary concept of direction by

investigating the roots of Greek theatrical traditions and Commedia dell'Arte. In this way 147

Craig's contribution was to build a foundation upon which exchange might become possible.

None the less Craig's relationships with leading theorists of Eastern theatre traditions and his

appreciation of the conventional modes of Indian dance-theatre aided him in appreciating

conventions closer to home. An exchange that allowed him to become a more educated

spectator to the values of these traditions based on his encounter with the rigour and values of

theatre elsewhere.

145 Craig in Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 484. 146 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 484. 147 Savarese, Eurasian Theatre , 485.

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Craig's thought developed from his research between cultures, captured the paradox of

action that is important to this thesis' concept of luck. To overcome the automatisms of the

mind the body had to approach the limit of matter, a puppet like state. This is the process of

working with the body's determinism to create a system that will make free action possible.

Approaching automatism, consciousness is freed to encounter the unknown. The will is able

to find its realisation obliquely in relationship with matter, it is free to choose its course,

rather than being tied to the direction of matter. This free action is possible for actors from

Craig's tradition who approach theatre “spontaneously” and head towards a resolved form,

such as Henry Irving, and for the actors trained in Indian Classical dance – theatres who begin

with the resolved form, and head towards freedom of expression. Craig's work with puppets

and masks from Indonesian, Japanese and Indian, as well as European theatres, also reflects

the creative act as the vital resistance to matter. Pidd's discussion of this work with Wayang

Kulit puppets and the Snuff Puppet Ramayana in Indonesia reflects social narratives as the

materiality of thought that is mobilised in this act of resistance. His work strikes a chord with

the comments of Ananda Coomaraswamy who speaks about the understanding that must be

shared with the spectators for the performance to function, to produce luck. The production of

luck is an ancient practice that resists the projection of meaning and is important for the

construction and transformation of cultures in the present day. It is a process of discovery that

bypasses the linguistic level of meaning, an exchange shared between artists and also with

spectators through their performances. It is an ambivalent force that must be mediated by

technical knowhow. The next chapter, “Chapter Two: Theatre As Resistance at Odin Week

Festival 2012” is a document of primary research, a piece of auto – ethnographic research that

describes a student's encounter with technical knowledge developed by Odin Teatret. It

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documents the production of luck through the disorientation and recognition that form part of

a spectator's experience of encountering the unknown, in the performance Judith , as well as

describing the work between theoretical, practical and administrative work that prepares a

spectator as well as an actor for the production of luck.

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C hapter Two: Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week Festival 2012

Luck is produced by action within the context of the unknown. As such, it challenges

the projection of pre – conceived meanings. It is an encounter between action and perception

that allows new forms of being to emerge. “Chapter Two: Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week

Festival 2012” is an account of the resistance that prepares the spectator's attention for the

production of luck. I begin with an experience of luck, which occurred as a spectator during

the performance Judith , performed by Roberta Carreri at Odin Week 2012. This experience

documents the perceptual space in which realities are formed, between distinct orders of

being, in the production of luck. In the moment of luck, the performance’s dynamics mirrored

characteristics of my own experience. I have observed the education of my body through

training, reflection, observation and performance that prepared me for this experience as a

spectator at the festival. Thematically, this performance reflected resistance to self limiting

projections of love that would allow me to encounter a broader experience of the world. This

resonated with the theme of resistance that recurred throughout the festival. My

documentation is recorded here as an auto – ethnographic piece of field research, a piece of

“Theatre Anthropology”, researching the nature of training developed at Odin Teatret. It

includes my impressions of Barba's presentations, practical training with Odin artists, and the

work of Odin Teatret's administrative team, commenting on the combined effect of these

actions that allow Odin Teatret's theatrical culture to continually transform. The experience

documented in this chapter is necessarily embryonic. It is a document of the limits brought by

a student to their first encounter with an unknown theatrical tradition. These limits become

part of this thesis' analysis of Theatre Anthropology as a cultural system, outlining a

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methodology of producing luck. This chapter documents the encounter with practices that

assisted my perception to overcome these limits, and the luck produced in this process. It

concludes with an analysis of Judith , a case study of the performance as an example of

resistance in theatre, and the luck that is produced by this act.

Unsent letter written to Roberta Carreri following her performance of Judith at Odin

Week 2012:

Dear Roberta, I wanted to write you a quick note about the response I had to your performance of

Judith. I realise this is my response and may not have much to do with your understanding of the piece. However, I never – the – less wanted to write to you because there was something about the work that took me out of the feeling of being a subjective spectator and made it possible for me to experience something else. The response I had was very particular. I did not understand any of the language of the performance. I had not read the blurb about the story beforehand. (Often I feel it bears little resemblance to my experience of a work though in the case of pieces spoken entirely in another language I'm coming to understand it can sometimes be useful). I still have not read the play of Judith so excuse my ignorance of the actual text. I was captivated from the beginning by this piece of text you have used a few times as an example in our workshops, its decidedness, concrete life, and atmospheric creation of a place. Of course I could not know what that place was, but I could tell that you were setting the scene to tell us a story. The quality I have most often experienced in your workshops is the capacity to transport us somewhere entirely else, the bottom of the sea, outer space, the moon, the body of a snake. I feel a precious gift from this. It gives me the experience of possibilities, of being other than I am – in a way that is missing in both contemporary performance and traditional theatre. By taking it as an absolute fact that you do real things, and not gesture towards them, I feel like you have rekindled in me a belief in the methodology of theatre - > that promise as children we see in it to let us transform into something else, a promise intuitively correct but that all of our adult lives are designed to help us forget. Watching Judith I experienced this transformation with a sense of incredulity and disbelief. I will try to explain my experience of viewing the work. Though the main thing I wanted to communicate to you was my experience afterwards – though I don't think that one would make sense without the other. Of course not knowing the story or the language my experience was coloured by my own assumptions, personal stories and theatrical interests. I saw you fitfully sleeping and dreaming of death, a hand, inorganic, seemingly not your own, creeping towards you. I saw the love in your voice and the shadow of violence. I saw this violence as an impulse to kill (rather than the rehearsed necessity

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that it may have been). The work with the hair clips became a kind of double fold where beauty and violence were part of the same object → beauty its playful decorative function and violence its traction with the world → the hairpin needs a sharp end to hold the hair beautifully in place → but at the same time needs to be able to penetrate to decorate. For me this is the function of your performance – like you said the other day when we were lining up to train, “ready to fight”? I see the vitality of performance as a kind of warfare for freedom, a kind of battle that has to be fought precisely without violence. I saw the lover who has pleasure and tenderness with the one she kills as carrying through this double vitality – though of course for me, not knowing the story there was not a second where I thought she might not want to kill the person – always seeing it as a source of freedom. This is stated in a very solid and inaccurate way, because all of these things were happening beneath the surface, below any threshold of intention or thought – like you say, in the world of theatrical close up for example – where I feel the touch of the hand is both close and far, tender and violent necessarily at the same time. For me this connected to the violence of a particular conception of femininity – associated with beauty, a temptress or seduction. Perhaps erroneously I felt the persona, butterfly, Judith to be free at the end, delivered to her own beauty, beautiful like Nina at the end of The Seagull, beauty born of violence, a new kind of strength. Perhaps this association came from the experience I think most people or perhaps females have had of being united with something they love through its death. The reaction I had to the work was quite particular. I felt its progression like silent blows to my abdomen and to my heart. It continued past the place where I would have assumed it ended – as is the case with a few Odin shows. This quality extends shows that could be anecdotal into something more operatic, where the roles dematerialise beyond elements into a micro examination of being. They make me feel as though I were being vaporised, or that the materiality of my sense of self were being disintegrated in order to be able to be returned to a more essential form of self or non self. → past tiredness? This is the experience I had after watching this play of Judith in which you performed. I had one or two tears at the end of the work, but more a feeling of mute shock that propelled me out of the gates of the theatre and into the field next door. My legs needed to walk and so they took me walking very fast and very far. I had to be in nature. I had a feeling that I was camping. I realised my body was convulsing with crying in a way that had not happened since I was a child, though I was not sad. I was simply taken apart. I felt like your performance of this play was like a set of forceps that acted on the whole of my experience, lifting it apart and returning it to itself in a way that (was) beyond me, a self beyond and before self. In this moment I felt comforted by the presence of the ground, its smell, the freshness of the earth. The freshness and age of dirt. While I was having this experience my neighbour from the B&B, a Danish electrician walked by me, where I was hiding crouched in the bushes covered in tears and snot from weeping with a blue plastic frisby in the half darkness. Very kindly he said hello and nothing more that would make a fuss about the strange behaviour I was doing → for example crying and howling quite loud, and also smelling the

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ground. This, to me, was very very funny and hilarious. I kept wondering to myself what was wrong → though I seemed not to be unhappy. My mind suggested certain causes – perhaps an association with a past love etc etc, but none of them seemed to fit, so my mind let it slide to accept that I was standing in the field and that it seemed like I was at the ocean in the rain, though I could feel the presence of the earth as never before, and it felt like I had been there for a very long time, timelessly, though in fact very little time had passed while I was there at all. I came back to the theatre covered in grass seeds. I'm not telling you this to embarrass you with my personal feelings, but rather as an anecdote of the restorative, transformative power of your performance, its essential quality that went beyond beauty, beyond the surface of the earth to something more essential that we are from that is not from us. It was a moment that followed the logic of performance, or rather demonstrated the truth of performance that we do not know what our bodies can tell us. Often in your class I have been reminded of the feeling of Tarkovski's Solaris – that vegetation, water, gas and space beyond space. Thankyou for this restorative moment of concrete magic that with the precision of a master surgeon, you performed on my experience. All the best, x Alice. 148

Misconceptions like this are unavoidable," he said, "now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back. 149

Heinrich von Kleist On the Marionette Theatre

This draft letter to Roberta Carreri, which was written in my notebook, though never

sent, indicates the powerful transformative experience I had watching Judith wasn't possible

to articulate in the rational intellectual mode. Rather its transformation had to be expressed

like the character Nina mentioned in the letter, in a way that was not yet understood. In this

thesis I progress towards understanding. I record my experiences based on first impressions,

documenting the limits of perception, and their ongoing transformation. This is in keeping

148 Alice Williams, Field Research Notes , Sydney: Private Collection (2012), unnumbered. 149 Heinrich von Kleist and Thomas G. Neumiller, “On the Marionette Theatre”, Theatre Drama Review 16 No. 3 (1972), 24.

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with Theatre Anthropology's methodology of thinking through action, discussed in Chapter

Three. My field research progresses from limited embryonic descriptions towards a discursive

theory of theatrical experience, the production of luck. This chapter reflects the most

rudimentary level of this evolution. In 2012 I didn't know much about Odin Teatret. I was a

young artist who had run out of “resistance” to the demands of production tasks, and the

constant need to cater to external funding requirements and fashions. I felt unable to

safeguard my creativity. As Kleist implies in his words taken from On the Marionette Theatre

it was not possible to go through the main entrance of rational knowledge to understand what

had happened when I was watching Judith, through rational knowledge, but must be entered

stealthily through the unlikely chink. This chapter traces, in a snaking motion, the relationship

between physical action, observation and theoretical reflection at Odin Week Festival 2012

that altered the body's rhythms and disoriented its attention, allowing the lucky event to take

place in my perception. I take Carreri's writing about her performance both from her

autobiography Traces and in her interview with Christoffersen published in English in 1991

(as well as Christoffersen's description of the performance scenario) as a discontinuous reply

that answers many of the questions posed by my unsent letter from 2012, particularly

commenting on the topic of resistance that allows lucky transformations to take place.

An Introduction to Odin Week

Odin Week Festival is a ten – day workshop introducing up to sixty participants from five

continents to the artistic, pedagogic, theoretical, social, and day to day administration of Odin

Teatret. Odin Teatret needs no introduction as an historically significant theatre laboratory

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famously based in Holstebro on the Jutland of Denmark founding the “third theatre”

movement, of theatres neither conventional nor oppositional but opening an unknown third

space, as well as the discipline of Theatre Anthropology. When I went to Odin week 150

however I knew little beyond information from Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese's

foundational text A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer and

Julia Varley' professional autobiography Stones of Water: Notes of an Odin Actress about the

theatre. Odin Week includes workshops, rehearsal observation, performances, work

demonstrations (all those currently performed by the theatre) films, lectures and meetings

with the theatre's director Eugenio Barba. It is currently held in two separate iterations,

English and Spanish. The festival introduces the “Odin Tradition” via sessions with the

theatres' actors, director and musicians, including specific methodologies developed by each

artist, artistic ideas and values shared by the group. The festival is unique not just for the

variety and depth of practices it introduces through each actor's individual and collective work

but also through the practical insights it gives into the theatre's management, both from Barba

as director, pedagogue and founder, and from the team of administrators, producers,

archivists, technicians and others who contribute to the theatre's constantly evolving

relationships with local and international communities over the past fifty five years. There are

many more performances, work demonstrations, workshops, presentations and discussions

than I can document here. Notably I've left out the workshop with Tage Larsen where we

worked on the performer's presence using the metaphor of varying densities of mineral rock,

Jan Ferslev's moving and instructive work demonstration Quasi Orpheus about his work with

musical instruments as an extension of the body, and the opera we made from poems, directed

150 For more information on Odin Week see Turner, Barba , 25-5, 39, 111, 146 – 7, 154.

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by Frans Winter. I have not talked about the warm group of sixty participants from various

countries in Europe, South and North America, Asia and Australia and the lasting

relationships formed between us, nor have I mentioned the community Barter where each 151

participant had an opportunity to perform a short presentation. I haven't mentioned Kai

Bredholt's introduction to the Holstebro Festuge where I was able to return in 2014 and 2017,

developing the character I presented in this Odin Week Barter in 2014 and another in 2017,

which has been important for the evolution of my work.

Instead I've focused on the various orders of being activated by Odin Week's program

of training and discussions and observation. I consider the relationship of resistance between

these orders to have prepared my body and mind as spectator to be receptive to

transformation. The nature of this transformation is explored through the process and

dramaturgy of Roberta Carreri's Judith . Although both Jane Turner and Adam Ledger have

commented on Odin Week in Barba and Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century , this account

is unique as it speaks from practical experience about the process of producing luck. I've used

the present tense to begin with (in the first paragraph) which reflects the presence described in

the theory of luck as the condition of the creative act, slipping into the past (from the second

paragraph on) where memory and will weave materials towards the development of my

argument.

First meeting with Eugenio Barba

We're sitting in a circle on the grass outside the White Room of Odin Teatret to avoid its

151 A form of theatrical exchange between participants and local townspeople

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claustrophobia. It's a beautiful early August day, at the end of the Northern Summer. It is early

evening. Roberta has already warned us about the constricted atmosphere of the White Room.

She says in her gregarious, engaging way that the room was built as a cow shed, there is no

circulation of air. Even with the doors wide open, she often notes people begin to nod off

during work demonstrations of more than an hour, she starts speaking extremely loudly in

ORDER TO WAKE THEM UP. She says, if our brains still run on oxygen, in a sceptical tone

which seems to imply that there are other ways in which the contemporary brain might work,

that we should remember to go for a walk in our break and to leave the barn door open. We

have also been warned that Eugenio is a passionate human and that we are running on a tight

schedule. There is a timekeeper to flag when he has five minutes left, because, as she says,

once he begins, time moves, in a different way.

Barba asked the circle of expectant young faces on the lawn outside the theatre, “who

has seen a performance by Odin Teatret?” Only a very few people raised their hands, Barba

laughed. The rest of you here then, are the faithful, he said. It dawned on me that the theatre

I'd rushed halfway across the world to see having read Barba and Varley's books might have

performances as well as books, which I in fact knew nothing about. Barba began to chat about

the history of theatre. I'm reminding the reader this text is a document of the learning

experience of a young artist and not necessarily a representation of Eugenio Barba's speech. I

have used inverted commas for a literary effect only.

In 1535 the first travelling theatre troupes emerged in Europe with the reformation as an economic venture. Bands of illiterate performers moved from place to place making entertainment for a living. Roles were interchangeable, actors dancing, acting, singing and making scenarios directly relevant to social life wherever they went. There were stock roles based on mythological themes, animism and death. Performers and groups were transient, unspecialised, and work was contingent on the bankability of their shows. Theatre was a means of

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survival, this is the root of contemporary Western professional theatre. In the late 19 th Century Ibsen's realism made a break with stock characters marking the period of the Great Reforms. Theatre attained the status of art through the work of Edward Gordon Craig's Towards a New Theatre . 152

He described the resistance of theatre to circumstance.

No longer merely a necessity it began to perform a wider range of theatrical functions, social, psychological, aesthetic a kind of cultural artefact. This cultural artefact was accompanied by books that could circulate knowledge, producing new possibilities for theatrical life. 153

This fact was reflected in the importance of Odin Teatret's books in my own life.

The 20 th Century blossomed as a golden age of theatre, with the experiments of Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Copeau, Dullin's Teatre de l'Atelier and Artaud, theatre laboratories that were designed not only to entertain, but also to produce a residue that remained part of the personal, spiritual, ethical fabric of society, evolving new ways of being. These figures became totems of theatre, developing the ethics of the profession, in addition to making rentable theatre. The work of intellectuals and of the theatre avant garde was to give theatre a task, to develop its possibilities. With the rise of authoritarian regimens, of Nazism and Stalinism, many artists and intellectuals fled Europe to South America where they found a thriving theatre culture. After the Second World War the students of this theatre rose in the Living Theatre in North America and with Grotowski in Poland, whose Towards a Poor Theatre was “a book with wheels”, taking theatre in a new direction, something that gave meaning to the profession. 154

Barba reminded us there was an important role for amateurs in this tradition, “the work of the

great writers and directors could not have happened without people who chose freely to do

theatre.” Barba described the many anonymous people working for Brecht and other artists in

152 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2012), unnumbered. 153 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2012), unnumbered. 154 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2012), unnumbered.

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the European tradition. He questioned, “how has our world changed since then?” 155

Over the next ten days we were offered a banquet, of culture, and time. As Barba

suggested on the first day, our timetable was very spacious. We began physical training at

seven each morning, which, for some, meant a six o'clock walk from their accommodation.

Our days were filled with workshops, work demonstrations, performance exchanges, and

most nights we watched two performances, finishing at ten or eleven. Barba pointed out, this

left us all evening, from ten until twelve to digest and discuss, and the whole night from

twelve until six to party together in the theatre. Roberta assured us that if we needed, we

should take the day off, to go into the town, to the swimming pool or sit in the sun. From

Barba's introduction we began practical exercises the next morning, where the resistance he

had spoken about to theatre as a mere means of survival manifested in technical exercises

using resistance to produce the theatrical body.

Training with Iben Rasmussen 156

The first workshop we did was with Iben Nagel Rasmussen. Born in Copenhagen in 1945

Rasmussen joined Odin Teatret after it arrived in Holstebro in 1966. She is an actor, director

teacher and writer who has founded her own theatre groups Farfa and the Bridge of Winds in

1983 and 1989, based on the training she developed as an actress at Odin Teatret. Her 157

professional work has been documented by Erik Exe Christoffersen in the Actor's Way , as

155 Williams, Field Research (2012), Unnumbered. For Barba's actual writing see his books listed in the bibliography of this thesis.

156 More information on each actor's training and pedagogy can be found in Christoffersen, The Actors Way . What appears here is recorded notes from a young artist's impressions of training.

157 “Iben Rasmussen”, Odin Teatret, accessed September 19 2019, https://odinteatret.dk/about-us/actors/iben-nagel-rasmussen/ .

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well as in two films by Claudio Coloberti and Torgeir Wethal. Her work is published in two

books Brev i en veninde (Letter to a friend) and Den blinde hest (The blind horse), that appear

in Danish and Italian, as well as publishing in Teatro e Storia and the Open Page . 158

Rasmussen joined Odin Teatret in her early twenties, impacted by the countercultural

lifestyles of the early nineteen sixties, and appears in the theatre's early training videos. Her

group Farfa was the first autonomous group to continue adjunct to the theatre. Barba stated

about Iben, now a mature aged woman of 70, that he couldn't see her leave the theatre to

establish an autonomous group, saying, not this “little girl” who worked so hard at the theatre

since the beginning. Rasmussen's biography details she was awarded Best Actress at Belgrade

International Theatre Festival (1991) and the Danish Håbets Pris (the Prize of Hope). 159

The workshop with Iben, our first at Odin Week, was a challenge to my mental

projections. We worked with a partner to build resistance while walking. Each foot hovered

an inch off the floor as it glided smoothly forwards, parallel to the ground, and placed heel to

toe as in Nō Theatre, while the partner restrained our hips with a ribbon. The energy of the

body had to drop, propulsion coming from the lower core. It produced the sensation of

something glowing inside my body, the same sensation of presence I experienced later during

Roberta's performance. The resistance was applied to the chest then repeated without the

ribbon, maintaining the resistance without tension. We were later instructed to make three

different actions of pushing, pulling and embracing with our partner. I could not find a way to

engage with what seemed like incomprehensibly dry technique in this exercise, though I

invested as much as possible and began to learn. We repeated each action without contact,

maintaining the same muscular actions as in real action, without replacing them with artificial

158 “Iben Rasmussen”, Odin Teatret. 159 “Iben Rasmussen”, Odin Teatret.

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tensions. I was surprised by the supple physical imagination of my partner, I was stuck in my

head thinking of different kinds of intentions, while he turned and made shapes with a fluid

physical intelligence. Each time we repeated I had more faith in the simple shapes generated

by my partner and I, and the intentions they produced. We increased and decreased the degree

to which we physicalised these movements, pulling with only fifty percent of the intensity, ten

percent, two percent. I began to feel the relationship between opposition, tension and

intention. As the intensity of the action changed, so did the affective qualities of the action.

The exercise had begun to generate the very first elements of intention through its resistance,

which I learned more about from Roberta Carreri in 2017. 160

In the second workshop, Rasmussen taught us the 'out of balance' exercise. In this

exercise, the body resisted gravity on the precipice of falling, fell, generating momentum, and

redirected energy in various directions. We rose to our toes, feeling on a precipice, and fell

suspending the flight before landing and reacting by changing the direction of the body's

weight. Iben was not satisfied with our falling, pushing us to see real crisis and disorientation

in our bodies before landing with precision to redirect the energy. She asked us to repeat the

exercise without making any noise on the floor when we landed. I found it satisfying to do

this exercise I could understand from gymnastics training, though I walked like a cowboy for

a few days afterwards. Iben's bone grinding discipline and strength reminded me of the handle

of the axe she used in the work demonstration the Whispering Winds, an unrelenting stick that

allowed her to flow. The next form of resistance we worked with was resisting the fall of

matter. We used a chair which Iben asked us to suspend above our heads, supported by a

finger or two to maintain its state of precarious balance. We passed the chair from one person

160 See Chapter Five of this thesis.

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to the next, resisting the fall of the chair. We repeated these actions without the chair,

maintaining the resistance. Resisting the fall, the body became the biological inverse of

matter, passing the pulse of vitality from one hand to another, which, without the chair,

became a kind of inscrutable dance. These exercises reflect action as vital resistance to matter,

whether that matter is the weight of another person, the force of their resistance or the

precarious balance of a chair suspended above our heads. They develop sensory motor

centres, the hips' co – ordination with the legs and spinal column. They develop a body that is

acting with force on another body. Whether this body is seen or unseen it generates energy, a

line of intention, an act of resistance. Although we do not know what this resistance is to, we

know this is the condition of life and of growth, the vital relationship of resistance to matter.

Working with the materiality we approached that state of automaton that was mentioned in

relation to the puppet theatre in Chapter One and also by Kleist. Approaching this limit, the

body's constant interruption by thought is removed, allowing it to choose between actions,

and navigate a new path through this moment of choice. As resistance to the necessity for

base survival allowed theatre to choose another path in the contribution it made to society and

ethics, physical resistance carries the action beyond the projected limits of the performer's

mind, allowing it to transform their own and the spectator's perception.

Second meeting with Eugenio Barba

Barba described the situation that led him to create theatre. He began to speak about theatre as

a complication, a knot or interlinking of elements, that provokes each spectator to ask

themselves what it says. He described theatre as a technique that can be transmitted,

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explaining the circumstances that induced him to create these knots that provoke the spectator

into dialogue with themselves, immigrating from Italy to Norway as a young person. Without

language, the sounds and actions of human behaviour appeared heightened, abstract and

absurd, tone and intonation taking on heightened significance. When Odin Teatret relocated

from Norway to Denmark in 1966, a country with welfare, and, in the public library, a world

of cultural anthropology, the theatre's work developed as a meeting point between cultures.

This was necessary as they did not share a common spoken language with their audience.

Like the Latin mass that speaks through its incomprehensibility, the theatre's performances

met the inner world of the spectator, who encountered themselves in the theatre's work.

The Chronic Life, a 2011 performance by Odin Teatret which we saw at Odin Week

2012 and which is discussed more fully in Chapter Six of this thesis, is a performance in

which spectators are brought into a close relationship with themselves. In this performance,

spectators sit in the dark. This is possible in Odin Teatret's theatre in Holstebro, but often

impossible when the theatre is on tour. Sitting in the dark, spectators experience their own

estrangement through the performance's resistance to interpretability. Experiencing their own

estrangement in everyday life is an action that allows spectators to make and unmake the

relationship with themselves simultaneously, a free action of resistance to false knowledge or

total incomprehension. After the performance, the actors often do not want to come out and

spectators often don't want to applaud. In this way the performance transcends or resists its

role as a piece of theatre. It is a performance without a “subject” that speaks to the body,

rather than speaking with words alone. The notion of a performance without a subject reminds

me of the exercise I have described from our workshop with Iben. Passing the absent chair

between our bodies created a dance in resistance to what was no longer there. The spatial,

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muscular element of memory activated by the performance allows the spectator to witness

themselves acting in relationship with what is no longer there. Barba explained the reaction of

local school students to the performance The Chronic Life . When they were invited to write

about the performance many were moved, although they did not understand what they had

seen. Other spectators asked why they had seen such a violent performance. Barba explained

that the group works without a fixed outcome, creating a montage of actions and

compositions. He asked himself why this performance emerged? He reflected, the post World

War II generation had to struggle violently against despair. He asked the present generation,

what we have to fight for. Perhaps the answer to this may be more obvious in 2019 than it was

in 2012.

Training with Roberta Carreri

“Ready to fight?” asked Roberta Carreri, the organiser of Odin Week and our chaperone

throughout the festival, as we lined up against the back wall of the Odin Teatret's Red Room

to begin her workshop. Roberta Carreri is an actor, teacher, writer and organiser who joined

Odin Teatret in 1974 after seeing the performance My Father's House in Milan, where she

participated in a workshop led by the group. Her work with the International School of 161

Theatre Anthropology and masters of Nihon Buyo and Butoh dance has influenced her

training, teaching and writing. Her professional biography is presented in the work

demonstration Traces in the Snow and published in the book Traces in Italian, Portuguese,

Spanish and English. Teaching and directing internationally she has also published in New

161 “Roberta Carreri”, Odin Teatret.

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Theatre Quarterly , Teatro e Storia , M á scara , Peripeti , The Open Page and Performance

Research . I asked Roberta during Odin Week if theatre had produced luck in her everyday 162

life. She gave an example of riding her bike to the theatre, when she was hit by a car.

According to nearby workers even when she shot up into the air they said she fell in slow

motion. Trained to resist the fall and to work in slow motion, she was able to slow down the

accident, perhaps producing the greater capacity for choice between actions, of how to fall.

The first exercise we did with Roberta was called balancing the raft. Lined up against

the back wall of the theatre we entered the space one by one until the group was evenly

spaced throughout the room. Dismayed with our inability to walk soundlessly, Roberta broke

the exercise to practice landing soundlessly from a jump, preparing the sats, movement in the

opposite direction. We squatted then extended fully into the air landing soundlessly again in

the squat. Our feet learnt to resist, landing toe tip first. Awareness of the mechanics allowed

us to resist with each step. We elaborated resistance taking extended steps as though under

water, resisting the water in slow motion. The action originated in the hips and spine, finding

expression in the arms, legs and head. We allowed the leg to rise through the resistance arms

in opposition to the legs, rotating the torso, hips and chest through this opposition. We

continued to work on resistance to the fall of gravity, finding three ways of sitting and

standing without using the arms, transferring the weight between the two sides of the body.

An uncontrolled movement is a fall, Roberta told us, even if you're already touching the

ground with your buttocks a fall of a centimetre is still a fall. Elaborating this work on

resistance, we worked with actions , channelling energy in different directions, we threw 163

162 “Roberta Carreri”, Odin Teatret. 163 also described in Carreri's work demonstration Traces in the Snow and later in Chapter Five of this

thesis.

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invisible balls, the eyes reflecting the intensity of the throw. This was the first exercise Carreri

developed within her training, as she described in her work demonstration Traces in the Snow ,

and was based on the game Patonc. The throw is a real action with a beginning, middle and

end that changes the relationships within the torso, using the whole body to hit a specific

mark. We rolled, threw, hurled, scattered, chucked the invisible Patonc balls. The more

detailed the action, the more concrete the variations we found. We continued to work with the

hands and feet, channeling energy in varying directions, with varying intensities and speeds.

The next line of force or resistance we found was within the performer's body. Carreri

introduced us to the “snake” an invisible muscle that runs along the inside of the spine. This

snake could be compared to the chain of matter Bergson uses to describe consciousness. It is

tensioned and released to produce the performer's presence, or their relationship with

materials in the space. To find the tip of the snake we bent our knees and let the tail drop

downwards. The fullest extension and tensioning of the performer's snake was the cobra. To

make the cobra, the knees bend, the back of the neck draws up, and the pit of the belly draws

in firmly enlivening the performer's eyes as a reflection of their presence. The cobra moves

forwards with a lowered centre using steps similar to those we had developed with resistance

in Iben's workshop. We varied the performer's presence between the forms of the snake. We

danced with the snake on the spot, and then worked with its actions through the room, arcing

in circular motions, contracting and lengthening, coiling. The presence of the snake extended

into the room through the eyes, flickering extensions and contractions of the snake's tongue.

Doing push ups with the eyes, we focused the vision with burning intensity across the room

and retracted it back into the eye sockets. Roberta suggested Marlon Brando acted with his

eyes in his death scene in Mutiny on the Bounty . We worked with the vocal presence,

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projecting the voice through its resonators and retracting the sound as a hum into the belly,

chest, mouth, forehead and top of the head. Working with text the voice again travelled across

the room and retracted back into the body. We added text to the actions with the hands and

feet, exploring composition between speech and action.

Carreri's work with resistance reflects that it can be used to produce an internal space

of presence. This presence, described as the snake can grow in size, varying its actions and

their directions in space, intensities and speeds. The intentional space created through

resistance is able to act on the external world or retract into the body, transforming the

dynamics of space and time with its various actions, throwing, burning, or releasing tension

for example. This line of force produces new relationships between vectors in the body and

space, allowing us to have a greater capacity for choice in how we act, our relationship with

the body, voice, text and space as an evolving whole.

Training with Julia Varley

My first introduction to Odin Teatret, beyond Barba's The Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology

was Julia Varley's Stones of Water: Notes From an Odin Actress . It gave, among other things,

a moving account of Varley's discovery of her vulnerability through her vocal training, and

through this, her strength as an actress. It considers the particular challenges of women as

actresses and questions how we're able to speak. Resisting a role call of male theatre

practitioners as history, Varley emphasises the importance of women writing about our work.

The book spoke to my sense of inadequacy as a young artist, my need for a sensate basis of

expression and struggle with the means of speech I had gravitated towards. Giving practical

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insights into her working methods, the book also made me aware of the existence of Odin

Teatret as a living entity, where Varley plays a key organisational and administrative role,

between acting, directing, teaching, writing and organising in many languages. At Odin Week

Varley performed two work demonstrations, T he Echo of Silence and The Dead Brother . 164

Varley joined Odin Teatret in 1976. Born in England and raised in Milan, she has been an

organiser of the International School of Theatre Anthropology as well as the Magdalena

Project, a network of women in theatre. Artistic director of Transit International Festival and

editor of the Open Page a journal devoted to women's work in theatre, Varley's Stones of

Water: Notes From and Odin Actress has been published in seven countries. Her writing also

appears in The Mime Journal , New Theatre Quarterly , Teatro e Storia , Conjunto , Lapis ,

Performance Research , Teatro XXI and M á scara . 165

Varley asked us to walk about the room. When we began walking with resistance in

every step as we had been taught in the previous workshops, Varley asked us to stop and to

start walking like normal people, in less than a week at the Odin, she laughed, it seemed as

though we’d forgotten how to walk. Her voice didn't seem to bare that trace of vulnerability

as it broke down our assumptions. She said having been the bad example at the Odin for over

twenty years she was not afraid of finding bad examples in us. Her request demonstrated the

presence she sought walked between theatrical and everyday life. She asked us to run, skip,

jump, move in slow motion, allowing the voice to follow the movement. We worked on how

to create these movements without excess vocal tension. Varley described how inexperienced

actors carry vocal tension, which is also visible in the tension of the shoulders, face and

hands. In Notes From An Odin Actress Varley writes about her process of learning to think

164 The Echo of Silence discussed further in chapter Four of this thesis. 165 “Julia Varley”, Odin Teatret.

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with her feet. We worked on pulling and pushing in pairs, speaking text and noticing the effect

of resistance in the feet on how we spoke. We tried to reproduce this effect without the

weight. We lifted one another and again noticed the effect of resistance on the voice. Again

we attempted to produce the resistance without the weight of the partner. We attempted to re –

produce the resistance without vocal tensions. We used the text to speak to another person in

the room varying their distance from us. We swapped the text for everyday speech, watching

the volume and tone shift easily to communicate, where it was less straightforward with

theatrical text. We were able to see the mental automatisms that inhibit the performer's voice.

The everyday actions of communicating and reacting were inhibited by the mental projections

of theatricality. Working with the voice was a journey of allowing ourselves to consciously

express what we already knew.

Varley's work with the voice has an important social and political function. Resisting

projected narratives enables other forms of experience to speak. Varley is a founding member

of the Magdalena Project, a network of women in contemporary theatre which meets

intermittently for the Transit Festival in Holstebro and around the world. At Odin Week we

attended a lunch time meeting of women and other participants interested in the Magdalena

Project. The meeting began with a brief explanation of the Magdalena network, where events

can be organised by any member to exchange training, ideas, political and theatrical events.

Women from the network contribute to the project's journal The Open Page . During the

meeting participants were invited to speak about a project or vision they had not yet realised.

It was moving to hear the stories of others as we acknowledged situations we were in and the

vulnerability of sharing a hope that was yet to become part of our work. Speaking aloud

within the group made these hopes more concrete, reflecting the purpose of the network, to

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connect members with resources, and to create new possibilities for the realisations of visions

members may not been previously aware of. Listening to these potential realities emerge

motivated me to attend Transit Festival 13 Risk, Crisis, Invention in Holstebro 2013.

Hearing from the Administration

Ulrik Skeel, former actor with Odin Teatret now the group's producer described the initial

scepticism of Holstebro residents towards Odin Teatret who, overwhelmingly, didn't speak

Danish when the theatre moved to this regional town. Despite the progressive mayor's support

(who also acquired a Giacometti sculpture Maren ), when the group moved to Holstebro in

1966, locals didn't understand the theatre's practice. He explained the work ethic of the theatre

earned the respect of the town. Tradespeople could see the theatre working from 7 am, even if

they couldn't be sure what the theatre was working on. The theatre strengthened its

relationship with the community through collaborative practices such as performance Barter,

in which social groups exchanged performances with one another, and the Holstebro Festuge,

a festival of large scale works developed collaboratively between various social milieux. The

festival invited the participation of military, police, agricultural workers, dance schools,

nursing homes, churches (peeling their bells), stilt walkers, car manufactures, people with

horses, animals and circus performers, the lighthouse, boats crossing the fjords, each group

offering their unique skills to the performance. It was an opportunity for theatricality to create

new relationships between divergent social groups. Although Odin Teatret are famed

internationally, Ulrik continued, they are less so in Denmark. He described their work with

the local community as a means of local visibility that promoted their work to the

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townspeople, alongside international programs hosted at the theatre. He described the diverse

cultural activities hosted by the theatre. The film archive amassed by Torgeir Wethal had led

to regular local film nights. Similarly, poetry nights had become a local institution. They drew

local, national and international poets to the town, including the Danish Prince Henry who has

read his own poetry at the theatre. As a result, the local bookshop has become a leading

national poetry selling bookshop, an unlikely accolade for a municipal town. The funding of

the theatre (now changed since 2012) was approximately 40% grants (though now less) and

was 60% supported through performances, workshops and work demonstrations on tour.

Speaking on a panel with the theatre's administrators, Skeel described how the theatre

had grown physically as well as administratively since 1964. Initially, the municipality had

given a local pigsty to the group, who had renovated the building to create the theatre. They

gradually added the theatre's three working rooms, a smaller working room upstairs, offices,

accommodation for guests, including a room set aside to house Grotowski as a guest visiting

the theatre, a props store, two kitchens, an archive, and a tower built in memory of Sanjukta

Panigrahi, all maintained by the theatre's workers and its guests. Since this time the theatre

has grown through necessity and interest, adding to its ranks. Its staff receive equal

remuneration for their work. Rina Skeel, married to Ulrik Skeel, described joining the group

from Brazil when she found the scientific research she was doing was embodied by the

theatre's work in its practice. She described the creative work involved in managing the

theatre's production tasks, planning its many local and international events. The theatre's

weekly meetings delegate these tasks to its members. Odin Teatret Archives have also grown

over time, from a collection of books donated by Halfdan Rasmussen to the archive of

scholarly texts written about the theatre, also housing the presentations written by Barba, the

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writing of Odin actresses and actors, documents of the International School of Theatre

Anthropology, and reviews that were being digitised by historians and artists learning on the

job.

Ulrik Skeel writes, in “Dancing Without Light” a chapter of Odin Teatret 2000, self

deprecating about the many varied tasks of the administrative staff of Odin Teatret,

When the paper is changed in the photocopier, the head of the observer hardly buzzes with a multitude of associations. The fascinating discharge of energy of an actor's well – trained body is totally missing in the tired administrative employee, sitting bent over the reply to the day's tenth letter asking when the next course at Odin Teatret will take place. Secondly the administrative staff has neither formulated revolutionary new ways of applying to the minister, nor developed new and different types of contract formulas. 166

The exhaustive list of actions that he goes on to list performed by the administrative team,

however, reflect the art of the impossible that is programatically enacted by these staff every

day,

This group of persons who, among other things, must keep up contact with the authorities and other financial sources on several levels, in order to ensure the operational – and other means for productions, projects, festivals, visits, trips, meetings, publications, film, various arrangements, courses and guest performances. They must keep the accounts, transfer salaries, collect accounts owing, answer telephones, emails, letters, faxes. Order flight tickets, send presents, thank yous, telegrams, flowers and arrange insurance. Translate books, programmes, leaflets, articles, lists. Collect articles, produce magazines, write contracts, keep up the clippings, film, library, article, dissertation, address, and other archives and indexes. Send out invitations, information, advertisements, programs. Procure contacts, organise tours, book hotel reservations, accommodate. Take care of the maintenance and cleaning of the theatre, cultivate contacts and carry out lobbying activities, phrase invitations, write reports, sell books, films and posters, as well as catalogues, systematise and pass on information.

166 Ulrik Skeel, “Dancing Without Light” in John Andreasen and Annelis Kuhlmann eds. Odin Teatret 2000 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000), 228

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Afterwards they will have to inform about the theatre, order equipment, find texts, cultivate networks, write recommendations, be responsible for the sale of tickets and reservations, hold long planning meetings, look after logistics and copy all sorts of material. All this must be carried out locally, nationally and internationally. Over several continents and in a good many languages. A member of the administrative staff must be kind, extrovert, helpful and obliging in character. 167

He observes the work of the theatre is a mixture of routine, the challenge of insoluble

problems, and unpredictable surprises. His comment “The art of administration of Odin

Teatret consists in avoiding drowning in the routine or being paralysed by the insoluble

problems, and in learning to treat surprises as though they were the routine.” shows the

actions performed by those dancers in the office are as much a part of the logic of theatre's

resistance as the work inside the studio, creating an environment in which growth is possible,

the production of luck. Systematic without being calcified, the administration allows new

levels of awareness to form on a social and practical level. Skeel commented that steering the

theatre through the treacherous depths of the ocean is indeed a game of luck and skill. 168

This chapter has considered the role of resistance in producing the conditions for luck.

This luck is a seemingly automatic lightening strike between different levels of being. It

works with the determinism of the body to overcome the automatism of human action and the

projections of the rational mind. Through action it encounters the unforeseeable or the

unknown. The production of luck increases the capacity for choice and free action due to the

new configurations that appear between different orders of being. In this chapter we have

considered this force of resistance in the history of theatre, as the resistance of theatre

reformers to mere survival from theatre. Their resistance produced a space in which theatres

167 Skeel, “Dancing Without Light” in Andreasen and Kuhlmann eds. Odin Teatret 2000 , 228-9. 168 Skeel, “Dancing Without Light”, 229.

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could develop other actions for their work, contributing to the aesthetic, psychic and spiritual

evolution of their cultural environments. We have understood resistance as a physical

principle in theatre training that forces the body to encounter another body or force. It

challenges rational projections. That can engender a sense of loss, but ultimately produces the

capacity for free action and the formation of internationality. This intentionality formed

through resistance produces a space in which artists and spectators are able to encounter

themselves, the web of actions and intentions they weave that can be made and unmade in

theatre and in life. These intentions can be shaped through theatre between the physical,

mental and social bodies. The resonance of these intentions can produce the capacity for

speech for those who may be deprived of a social voice. At Odin Teatret this speech is

supported by the administration of an effective team. Their work within the theatre's local and

international milieus creates a culture in which the production of luck functions as an ethos. It

is a form of social and artistic evolution within and outside of the theatre's creative

environment. The co – ordination between these various levels of resistance at Odin Week

prepared the body of the spectator for the experience of luck that was produced by Roberta

Carreri's performance of Judith . The final section of this chapter considers this performance

of Judith . It continues to explore the relationship between levels of being through the account

Carreri provides of her work, in interview with Christoffersen, and through Christoffersen's

description of the performance scenario. I consider the resistance of the performance to

linguistic and narrative interpretability for an Anglophone spectator, and its role producing the

luck described in my unsent letter to Carreri. Her documentation of the performance with

Christoffersen forms a reply. The performance's dramaturgy, for actress and spectator, reflects

the process of making meaning between various levels of being that resist rational projection,

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nurturing growth and producing luck.

Judith

Carreri gives an account of her training and composition in Traces, as well as in conversation

with Erik Exe Christoffersen. These texts, along with Christoffersen's description of Judith's

dramaturgy are the most informative texts on the performance in English, although some of

this material first appeared in Danish in Christoffersen's The Actor's Way . The article “The

Actor's Journey: 'Judith' From Training to Performance” includes some details of Carreri's

process that are not included in her autobiography Traces, as well as the description of the

scenario by Christoffersen. I give an account of this performance from these and other 169

secondary texts on the performance, connecting their insights with the spectator's dramaturgy

I experienced at Odin Week. I concentrate on relationships of resistance between various

levels of matter, biology and thought that produce the performance's transformative effect.

This effect is linked to performance's thematic and formal work with resistance, and its

capacity to produce luck

There is a short review “'Judith' at the Project” by Gerry Colgan in The Irish Times

1989 who remarks on “Carrrera's” (sic) virtuosity and the revelatory effect of the performance

despite mourning the loss of the linguistic level of meaning. This observation perhaps elides 170

the fact that the performance's revelatory effect may be partially due to its resistance to

linguistic comprehension. There is an engagement with Judith in a review of Odin

169 Roberta Carreri, “The Actor's Journey: 'Judith' From Training to Performance'', New Theatre Quarterly 7 No. 26 (1991), 137 – 146.

170 Gerry Colgan, “'Judith' at the Project”, The Irish Times September 29 1989, no page number listed see Odin Teatret Archives, Roberta Carreri.

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performances at New York's La Mama theatre in 1999, “Ode to Progress, Judith, Dona

Musica's Butterflies, Castle of Holstebro II, Itsi Bitsi” in Performance Review by Seth

Baumrin, who describes the linguistic level as secondary to the performance's intensity,

sonority and composition. He describes the performance operating between recollection and 171

action in its staging of Judith 's murder of the biblical Holofernes. Baumrin's review centres on

the performance's work with scale, including the epic scale of the biblical battle enacted in the

palm of Carreri's hand. He observes the performance as a magnification of Judith's

preparation for the act of killing, which itself is relatively brief and after which the

performance ends, he says, abruptly. This preparation could be compared to the preparation of

the performance through labour over thirteen years, and the relatively instantaneous rehearsal

and enactment of the piece, producing luck between various theatrical levels. His observations

resonate with Carreri's work with segmentation and theatrical close up to magnify and

compose segmented actions within the body. Baumrin refers to Judith's “seductive cruelty”, a

particular interpretation of the character's ambivalence. He suggests Jan Ferslev's score

imbues her violence with grace. He isolates the moment Judith fans her combed hair to 172

frame her head. This moment evoked the image of “a fiend flying through the air on the way

to perform some evil deed”, for Baumrin. For him this distinguished Carreri as a master of her

craft. In 2007 Vicki Ann Cremona, who has written about Odin Teatret, as Professor of 173

Theatre Studies and Chair of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta, wrote

in the Maltese Sunday Times about Odin Teatret's presence at the Malta Arts Festival, briefly

mentioning Judith as a new interpretation of the biblical figure . She introduced Carreri's

171 “Seth Baumrin, “Ode to Progress, Judith, Dona Musica's Butterflies, Castle of Holstebro II, Itsi Bitsi”, Performance Review Vol. 52 No. 3 (2000), 412. 172 Baumrin, “Ode to Progress”, Performance Review, 412. 173 Baumrin, “Ode to Progress”, Performance Review, 412.

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recently published professional autobiography Traces in the article . Following the 174

performance Paul Xuereb reviewed Judith for the same paper, describing the performance

subject as the Old Testament siege on a town of Israelites led by Holofernes, slain by Jewish

widow, Judith. He comments on the tension between violence and love in the performance 175

and the virtuosic effect of Carreri's training. Where Barba reflects on the open subject matter

of the performance, Xuereb perceived the performance to have a clear historical subject. 176

Carreri describes the development of Judith in her autobiography Traces and in an

interview with Christoffersen . Both accounts trace the personal and technical roots of the 177

performance. Carreri describes working with Nihon – Buyo dancer Katsuko Azuma at ISTA

in 1980, learning about the internal presence of the actor in training, and the radiation that is

accumulated through the process of training each day. She continued accumulating presence 178

through her work with segmentation at Odin Teatret from 1981, recording the images that

developed from her explorations. The images that were developed through segmentation

included Lucia Joyce on the Lido island in Venice with her hair down, referencing the

Japanese Kabuki tradition where loose hair signifies madness in female characters, Penelope

on the beach waiting for Odysseus, Molly Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses, and cinematic

images from Apocalypse Now, flames in the jungle that flickered before her eyes. Carreri 179

describes the impact of seeing Butoh for the first time in 1984 at the Avignon Festival, in

Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach. This led Carreri to pursue training with Natsu

Nakjima, travelling to Japan in Summer 1986. This time of intercultural training was also a

174 Vicki Ann Cremona, “Eugenio Barba and Odin at Malta Arts Festival”, The Sunday Times , July 22 (2007), 61.

175 Paul Xuereb, “The Severed Head”, The Sunday Times August 12 (2007), 43. 176 Xuereb, “The Severed Head”, Sunday Times, 43. 177 Carreri, Traces , 111 – 117. 178 Carreri, “The Actor's Journey”, 140. 179 Carreri, “The Actor's Journey”, 140.

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time of personal crisis for Carreri in which she struggled with her desire to have another child.

Natsu Nakajima told Carreri that in Butoh one dances their joys and their sorrows. Carreri's 180

theme of the unborn child was interpreted by Nakajima along the lines of the Virgin birth and

metamorphosed between various female characters when Carreri worked on the performance

with Barba at Odin. The tension of resistance to instinct and its development of another kind

of growth transcended Carreri's personal predicament through her performance process.

Carreri speaks about the multiplicity of her ambivalent character, who can be seen as a

holy woman executing a ritual, or a calculating temptress who can't resist Holofernes, each

persona melting into a single character that retains characteristics from each. She writes about

her technical interest in creating a theatrical closeup, acting with one part of the body, which

was magnified when she cast her gaze downwards. When magnified in cinema, the closeup

dramatises the smallest movement. Carreri states this is also possible in theatre, “In fact, it is

possible for an audience to feel the smallest of changes in tension just as if they were being

shown on a huge movie screen.” In theatre this magnification is caused by taking away the 181

visual reference point of the performer's gaze. In her training in Butoh, Carreri describes, 182

the eyes became unfocused holes, like the eyes of dead people that did not try to see. From

this practice she began to see internally. She felt herself to be suspended inside of a crystal, a

space where she could be entirely safe, allowing another nervous system to become visible.

Carerri comments her work with Katsuko Azuma, Natsu Nakajima and Kazuo Ohno allowed

her to find something previously hidden to even herself in this internal body. Her work with

these masters became part of the performance Judith . Viewing these materials, Barba gave 183

180 Carreri, Traces , 111. 181 Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 141. 182 Carreri, Carreri, “The Actor's Journey”, 141. 183 Carreri, Traces , 112.

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Carreri the catalogue of The Magdalene Between the Sacred and the Profane: From Giotto to

de Chirico to compose images for the piece. Carreri composed images of Mary Magdalene 184

at the cross, a profane Mary contrasting with the image of the Holy Mother. Barba suggested

she work in relation to another figure, suggesting Salome, who was another profane figure,

introducing a love poem to the performance. Carreri contributed fragments from Paul Eluard.

The biblical figure 'Judith' solidified as a character who was both sacred and profane,

speaking to Holofernes' decapitated head. From the historiography of Judith, Barba drew on

Friedrich Hebbel's account of Judith, in which the figure fell in love with Holofernes before

killing him, which she had to do to save her people. The Old Testament account included in

the performance's program concludes with the line “...the women of Betulia gathered and

composed a dance in her honour and Judith, singing a song of gratitude led the dance.” A 185

scene from C ome! And the Day Will Be Ours , was added. Carreri played the subject and the 186

object of this scene, telling its story of resistance to colonial conquest, which was transposed

onto Carreri's body. This reflects the theme of resistance that is repeated on many levels

throughout the performance, resistance to military invasion, resistance to a lover, resistance to

the relationship with an unborn child. Contested through the body of the performer and the

materials they work with, each act of resistance is ambivalent, reflecting the dual action of

making and unmaking the performance for the actress and the spectator with each breath.

Carreri has performed Judith for over thirty years. She describes its evolution over time as

like the growth of a person, the same and yet different throughout its many repetitions. 187

184 Exhibition at Palazzo Pitti, Florence 1986. 185 Judith , program, Odin Teatret, 2. 186 A 1978 performance by Odin Teatret. 187 Carreri, Traces, 117.

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As I commented in my letter to Carreri, I saw a woman possessed with love at the same time

as having to terminate that love, in an act of violence, killing what had become part of her

own flesh . The resistance becomes a source of freedom. The actress lies on a deck chair 188

with striated slats, her warm body supported by the striated structure of theatrical technique.

There is a bonsai tree on stage, reflecting the theatrical scale of the performance, it is a

miniature. In his account Christoffersen doesn't describe the performance's prologue where

Carreri's eyes flicker, with, what we later learnt was her vision of the choppers approaching

from Apocalypse Now, a filmic image from Carreri's improvisation. The choppers approach

overhead. Her voice arcs across the space intoning back within her body, an incantation, we

are being inducted into a mystery. Carreri lies in a flowing white satin gown, the 'white

woman' as she called her initial composition (is it a night gown, a wedding dress, a virginal

shroud?) and red velvet jacket, (“the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of

her menses” ), on the reclining chair. Carreri's white night gown could have been drawn 189

from the white satin curtain, the backdrop to the space, where her shadow dances during the

performance. Lying in a restless sleep, she stirs to the intensities of Jan Feslev's musical

composition, shadows passing fitfully across her sleeping body. The warm light inflects the

body with the sensual stickiness of afternoon sleep. Re-settling the body, Carreri's head is

back, her neck exposed. Her hand grips the arm of the chair. Acting with her hand in theatrical

close up, the hand moves automatically fingers like talons, snaking towards her throat. Its

segmented action appears to be a foreign invader disturbing the order of the body, which

spasms and doubles over the side of the chair. The body hangs like a lifeless doll. The voice

188 Christoffersen begins by acknowledging the presence of a severed head on the stage (wrapped in a black cloth) from the beginning, perhaps signalling re-enactment. 189 Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves , in Chapter Five of this thesis.

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recommences its narration from within this figure. What Christoffersen describes as out of

balance, also appears to me to approach automaton. Carreri states in her interview, that it's 190

not only a marionette, but the cold theatrical technique awakens landscapes within her. She

moves in a waking dream. Turning her eyes inwards, her face becomes a mask, set with a

wooden grin, the first in a series of masks and teeth that repeat in variations throughout the

performance. Carreri demonstrated to us during Odin week, the mask kills the face, allowing

something else to come to life. Not understanding the language of the performance, also

removed the capacity for recognition, allowing another kinaesthetic response to the

performance to come to life. Awakened by the mask, the automaticity of the dancer or doll

haunts the performance. Resisting the fleshiness of everyday life, this body allows the

performer's vitality to come to life. Carreri's vitality resists the heavy death mask of

Holofernes which Carerri's character dances with through the performance.

With this automaticity, Carreri unties her plat link by link, she brushes her hair, then

her eyebrows, an animalistic act of grooming. Christoffsersen observes, her hand passes

through the shadow of her face on the backdrop with her brush, creating the shadow of a knife

passing through her throat. She acts as if she is haunted by a memory, although preparing 191

for her act. Her hair hangs like a curtain, neither living nor dead, obscuring her head.

Christoffersen observes Carreri says, “Took a hold of his hair and because she twice swung

with all her might, she cut off his head and removed it from its body”, signalling a change in

the performance rhythm. She takes a fan below her hair which is blown upwards by the

beating fan. She fans her hair with impulsive rhythms. Its beat could be the adrenaline 192

190 Christoffersen in Carreri, “The Actor's Journey”, 142. 191 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 143. 192 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 144.

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coursing through her blood. The actress navigates levels of matter and vitality in her act of

resistance, which is both individual and geopolitical. It is a battle enacted in her body that acts

as a miniature for military conflict. The fan raises her hair in a sheet around her head. This

could be an image of the wind on the cliffs as Holofernes' boats arrive, resisting the fall from

a great height, or being blown by a chopper. Her open mouth seems unable to speak over its

deafening sounds. The performance connects between the microbiological and geopolitical,

small and large, in its activation of multiple associations within the pictogram like frame of

the performance, telling the story of an individual's conflict with desire within the context of

military invasion. Christoffersen observes that Carreri sinks exhausted back into the deck

chair, then to the floor. On her knees she beats at the floor, beats herself, and sinks backwards

where the shadow of the bonsai tree seems to grow, between her knees enlarged in its shadow

on the back drop. The magnified form of the miniature tree mirrors the magnification of the 193

actress' biology, which itself is the miniature representation of a conflict.

The death mask of Holofernes is a wooden sculpture made by Balinese sculptor I

Wayan Sukarya. It is present on stage, although wrapped in a veil of lace, from the beginning

of the performance. Christoffersen observes that Dvorak plays while Carreri unwraps the

head, caressing it while her red jacket frames it's severed form. He observes that she repeats a

number of positions to Bach's 'Passacaglia' before approaching the head with a silent scream.

Carreri's floating dress and grace in this sequence contrast with the tiger like hands or 194

claws she forms with her fists that she alternately kisses, sucks, and bites in sensuosity, or is it

terror, figuring nervous psychic states we deny. Christoffersen gives a comprehensive account

of Carreri's work with her hair combs, which metamorphose through Carreri's use in this

193 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 144. 194 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 144.

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sequence. He observes them first as a fan, then as a veil, spitting into one hand Carreri brings

the fans together to form a cup from which she drinks, they separate and flap as the wings of a

butterfly, landing on her slip, sitting on her shoulder. Tearing the wings apart she places them

under her own arms, a warped angel (one of many angel images formed by Carreri noted in

this thesis) that hobbles forwards, combs becoming claws which she licks. The combs migrate

to her head to become a sovereign crown seen in her shadow. They become talons, interlaced,

they migrate again from her head to her hips as claws then scuttle conjoined at the centre as a

crab across her body, forming teeth at her crotch. He also notes the various resonances of the

sculptured mask, as Christ, blindfolded, as Ecce Homo. Carrei's work with the hair combs 195

signals Judith's multiplicity, passing between levels of biology and matter, evoking sovereign

violence, beauty and death. Seated over the sculpted head, Carreri approaches her lover/

captor/ prey with two pearl tipped hair pins, now asymmetrical earrings, now The Girl with

the Pearl Earring, eyes, ovaries, testicles. At the moment of ecstasy she uses the instruments

to pierce her lover's throat. The performance builds towards this moment in a fitful dream,

through images more distinct than reality. Its order is more cellular, as though we were seeing

the growth processes of a plant in extreme close up, in extreme slow motion. Multiple levels

are present at the same time, as is described in the theory of luck that brings multiple time

frames into the present. These levels establish a continuum between bodies, the attacker and

the victim as well as between materials images and stories. Christoffersen also notes that

Holofernes has also become part of Judith, the act of resistance is played out within the flesh

of the performer. 196

The performance took me out of the conscious role of spectator. While I had watched

195 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 144. 196 Christoffersen in Carreri,“The Actor's Journey”, 146.

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previous performances at Odin Week with interest, despite their opacity, an association took

hold in this performance. It caused the performance to unfold within my own experience. It

revealed what was unknown to me, blow by blow, from within my flesh as though it was

reenacting events within my own life. This could be described as kinaesthetic empathy or the

“psycho – physical” experience. As mentioned in this chapter, the performance was resistant

to linguistic interpretation. Because I could not understand the text, I had to experience the

performance in another way, through its actions and their activation of my own experience

stored as physical memory in my body. The context of the unknown, or unforeseeable,

allowed the performance to connect between matter, thought and action. It connected Carreri's

personal exploration, the theme of the unborn child, with the intention of the character, who

resisted the attraction to an enemy, as in Hebbel's version of Judith. It connected this theme of

personal resistance to the narrative context of military conflict, as well as to artistic resistance

we had learnt about at Odin Week, which connected with theatre history, training, activism

and administration. As the association took hold I registered physiological shifts. The visual

field illuminated and started to glow. The experience was neither inward nor outward but both

at the same time, multiple time frames simultaneously entered the present moment. I was still

while this experience took place. The performance amplified my physiological response, an

almost automatic response that affected the most basic level of vital resistance to matter. I had

commented in my letter to Carreri, “My mind suggested certain causes – perhaps an

association with a past love...”, a situation where there had been an unborn child, as I later

learned was a starting point for Carreri's performance. Through the performance, the theme of

resistance on a biological and experiential level became artistic and political. It reflected the

formation of being or the growth of its organism through resistance to instinct. Reflecting on

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the instinctual drives that had impacted my work as a young artist when I arrived to Odin

Week, this experience was a kind of lucky encounter with the notion of resistance to these

demands. This experience of luck was my first awareness of a body more capable of resisting

external demands, capable of risking incoherence to produce choice between actions. It has

produced the capacity for growth and increased the capacity for choice between actions

within my practice and everyday life. Stepping into the unknown, this performance increases

my awareness of how, through resistance, a body could become capable of producing luck.

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Chapter Three: Snakes and ladders: an historiography of Theatre Anthropology

This chapter “Snakes and Ladders: an historiography of Theatre Anthropology”

considers luck in relation to discursive thought. Although I have already begun to act within

an auto – ethnographic frame in the thesis, this work on definitions is important now as the

thesis approaches research at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA),

discussed in Chapters Four and Five. This chapter, “Chapter Three: Snakes and Ladders: an

historiography of Theatre Anthropology”, traces the genesis of Theatre Anthropology as the

study of human action that overcomes the limits of projected thought in theatre. It follows this

definition through the Secret Art of the Performer's description of 'learning to learn' as an

encounter with the unknown. It acknowledges the difficulties of pursuing this notion of

theatre between cultures, and the vulnerability it requires from performers of diverse origins

to contribute to Theatre Anthropological research. It considers key debates in this field about

if the performer's body can speak. I contest that the body speaks, and that discourse acts. This

differs from the semiotic interpretive framework that has developed through Patrice Pavis'

engagement with ISTA, that limits the readability of theatre in relation to cultural systems.

Where Pavis perceives action as the snake that has wriggled away leaving its dead skin of

signification behind, this chapter prepares the reader for engaging with the body of the snake

through action, at ISTA, and in other contexts. On one hand this chapter follows the luck that

snakes between orders of being, transforming knowledge in unforeseeable ways. On the other

hand, it considers the categorical bounds of Theatre Anthropology as a discipline, and the

rational modes of enquiry that have been used to interpret it. Drawing on canonical and recent

figures in anthropology, this chapter demonstrates that thought also relies on the type of

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action that snakes its way between matter, biology and consciousness, to speak. Through the

image of the snake, this chapter creates a continuum between thought in diverse contexts as

an encounter with the unknown. Reflecting on developments in anthropology and theatre, it

creates the potential for Theatre Anthropology to perform new actions in the production of

luck.

Since its origins in Barba's early work, Theatre Anthropology has been a discipline of

action within the unknown, a form of thought in action. “Knowing with the Mind and

Understanding with the Body” was a lecture given by Barba in Palermo in 1980, and was

published in the most recent anthology of Baba's writing, The Moon Rises From the Ganges:

My Journey Through Asian Acting Techniques (published in Polish in 1981 “Theatre

Anthropology: First Hypotheses”). Barba speaks about the 'robust spirit of geometry' he 197

bought to theatre as a young person. Knowing but not understanding, Barba writes that he

knew how to understand with the mind but he didn't know how to understand with the body. 198

This spirit of geometry can be understood as the mind's pleasure when reality conforms to its

assumptions, a rational mode of knowledge, the mind finding itself again in things. Bergson

contrasts geometric projection with philosophy as action, taking a leap into the unknown.

Barba's first use of the word anthropology seems to imply coming into action as an encounter

with the unknown, not applied to other cultures, but to the way the mind negotiates its own

limits. He first used the word Anthropology to describe Grotowski's theatre in Opole.

It was in Orpole that I used the word 'anthropology' in an attempt to explain to those who had never seen Grotowski and Flaszen's performances, how they should imagine what was happening in their Theatre of the 13 Rows, which was just half the

197 Eugenio Barba, “Knowing with the Mind and Understanding with the Body”, The Moon Rises From the Ganges: My Journey Through Asian Acting Techniques , Holstebro: Icarus (2015), 114 – 124.

198 Barba, “Knowing with the Mind and Understanding with the Body”, 116.

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size of the room we are sitting in now. I came upon the formula 'Anthropological Theatre'. I envisaged theatre like an anthropological investigation penetrating into unknown territory and confronting individuals, societies and histories. At that time, I thought that Anthropological Theatre was just a suggestive image to illuminate this new way of seeing, practicing, living the theatre and linking it to the life of other people. 199

From this starting point in the imagination, Barba describes the development of Theatre

Anthropology. It was linked to the discipline of Social Anthropology, but relating to

performance. He says Social Anthropology is “the study of human behaviour both at a

biological and socio – cultural level. Theatre Anthropology is the study of a man in a

performing situation on a biological and social – cultural level. Is such a science possible?” 200

Forming this discipline, Barba described the various levels at which theatrical technique

operates, biological, linguistic, neurological. He hoped that his discipline of Theatre

Anthropology would evolve, developing its own life beyond a “bastard scientific – theatrical

terminology” As Barba drew a parallel between Theatre Anthropology and Social 201

Anthropology in the 1980s, this thesis draws a parallel between an expanded idea of Theatre

Anthropology and Cultural Theory in the 2010s. Barba's articulation of the relationship

between biological, linguistic, neurological fields within theatrical technique is extended

through interdisciplinary research, where Theatre Anthropology can contribute to our

understanding of transformation between fields.

A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: Secret Art of the Performer

199 Barba, “Knowing with the Mind and Understanding with the Body”, 115. 200 Barba, “Knowing with the Mind and Understanding with the Body”, 117. 201 Barba, “Knowing with the Mind and Understanding with the Body”, 124.

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Barba's first thoughts on Theatre Anthropology, as has been discussed, described the way his

reliance on rational knowledge prevented him from stepping into the unknown. This idea of

encountering the unknown through action is expanded in Theatre Anthropology under the title

'learning to learn' discussed in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the

Performer. First published in 1991 and re released in 1995 A Dictionary of Theatre

Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer is the basic text of Theatre Anthropology

containing principles observed by Barba with Savarese through the International School of

Theatre Anthropology. The concept of 'learning to learn' elaborates on the action taken by a

performer to understand their craft and the vulnerability required to transform within it. The

chapter “Training: from 'learning' to 'learning to learn'” in The Secret Art is introduced by

Zeami's words, he says, “When it comes to observing the Nō, those who truly understand 202

the art watch it with the spirit, while those who do not, merely watch it with their eyes. To see

with the spirit is to grasp the substance; to see with the eyes is to merely observe the effect.

Thus, it is that beginning actors merely grasp the effect and try to imitate that.” Zeami's 203

spirit is like the snake that connects between various levels of conscious matter, biology and

mind, allowing them to see how the act transforms, rather than the effects of its

transformation. Like Barba, Zeami teaches us there is a reality outside the projection of ideas,

which we meet in action. Through training, this capacity for transformation grows.

Barba describes the way the actors' training at Odin Teatret transformed through their

process of 'learning to learn'. Initially, he says, the actors acquired skills and techniques in

their training process. They believed in the myth of technique, the body of the virtuosic actor

that, like the Rosetta stone, would unlock language. “The aim was to attain consciously, by

202 An actor and the earliest known philosopher of Nō Theatre. 203 Zeami in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology , 276.

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cold calculation, something that is warm and that obliges the spectator to believe with all their

senses.” This equipped the actors with an interesting shell of invulnerable technical 204

proficiency. Despite the value and the results of this accumulation of technique, Barba says a

'decisive phase' for Odin Teatret was the realisation of the subjective rhythm of training,

where each actor's vulnerability became active in their training, a training that could only be

personal. Training every day was not something that would guarantee artistic results but had a

meaning and logic that belonged to that actor alone, where their intentions could become

coherent. This reflects that stepping into the unknown is the basis of development between 205

different levels of being. This capacity for difference within the 'extra-daily' body is

elaborated by Odin Teatret actors who write about their own work, describe their training as

their own tradition. Based on common principles, their work preserves the direction of

distinct artists within a collective experience, offering new possibilities to the form of group

theatre. Barba describes the actor's training as a difficult process, like learning to walk as a

child, but this time performed by the adult through conscious repetition. He adds that this

training of the sensorium leaves the body with a new acculturation, which has to be disrupted

for the actor to continue to develop in relation with the forms they encounter. Here we see 206

the system of knowledge developed by a performer becomes inert if it is not opened onto the

unknown, allowing the relationships to form for the actor and their discipline alike. Rather

than simply escaping automatic behaviour for an instant, Barba aims to create a practice of

training that resists determinism as an ongoing process of producing luck.

In the section 'Pragmatic Laws' from The Secret Art of the Performer , Grotowski

204 Barba in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology , 276. 205 Barba in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 276. 206 Barba in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 277.

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observes that training could be discussed from many perspectives, for example biological,

psychological, sociological, cultural. He describes the actor's work as a technique of 207

amplification. Their work amplifies both what is culturally present in an action but also what

is biologically possible within the performer's body. He draws on walking to describe this . In

Nō theatre, for example, the actor drags their feet, amplifying a cultural quality of Japanese

walking. Though, this amplification is also biological, made possible by opposition within

each movement. This level of amplification that makes a special use of the actor's biology

according to the training of their theatre culture is referred to in Theatre Anthropology as the

performer's bios . Grotowski gestures towards a third level of amplification beyond the

cultural and biological, which is temporal. He speaks about the silent pause or moment before

before action, referred to in Theatre Anthropology as sats, in which the performer builds up

kinetic energy beneath their skin. This energy is elaborated within the body, which he

describes as the kinetic flow of energy expressed in time. “The body is alive, it is doing

something which is extremely precise, but the river is flowing in the realm of time: kinetics in

space passes to a second level. This is energy in time.” These terms reflect the way Theatre 208

Anthropology develops principles between cultures of theatre inventing a system of

knowledge that allows us to go beyond what is known, studying the physical process of

thought. Theatre Anthropology refers to these principles as the pre-expressive level of the

actor's work. Barba shorthands pre-expressivity as the relationship between the performer's

weight and their spinal column, which effects balance and opposition allowing the spectator

to perceive a “space – time” in the modulation of these relationships. This is a technical

relationship within the body that allows the performer's actions to transform the spectator's

207 Grotowski in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 269. 208 Grotowski in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 269.

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perception. It could also be seen as a relationship between various levels of consciousness,

transformed by the snaking actions of the performer's work to produce luck. Barba says pre -

expressivity is a yardstick for measuring the actor's work in diverse social, physical and

psychological conditions. Their capacity for action within the body transforms the 209

relationships between these fields. Limiting the projection of logos onto the actor's body

allows the performers' bios or actions to speak. 210

Intercultural debates

The relationship between these levels of cultural, biological and physical work between

theatre cultures has transformed through debates within Theatre Anthropology and in

response to discursive shifts since 1980. While Barba's initial conception connected the actor's

biological and cultural work, his ideas received criticism that this may objectify theatre

cultures in his study. Concerns over the links this would have to histories of Social Darwinism

led Barba to explicitly separate these levels of discussion . At the XV session of ISTA in

Albino Italy, Barba explained (speaking casually in the Quasi – luna break time) the

separation between the socio – cultural level of performance and pre – expressivity was a

precaution to avoid echoes of Social Darwinism, European Fascist and colonial histories. This

comes at the cost of explicitly discussing the relationship between action and thought, though

those relationships were implicit. Since this time, debates have shifted to the separation of

socio – cultural and biological levels of discussion in Theatre Anthropology. The separation

of these levels has led to the suggestion that cultures are unable to speak in this discourse. In

209 Barba in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 276. 210 Grotowski in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 269.

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Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate Ian Watson describes

Rustum Barucha's critique of Barba's notion of pre-expressivity in this way, inventing a

category that cannot be separated from culture. While Barucha offers a valuable response to

the homogenisation of discourse in a global economy, Watson observes his critique is not

informed by primary experience of Barba's work at ISTA. Watson compares Barba's 211

separation of biological and socio – cultural levels to Clifford Geertz 'stratiographic' concept

of humankind operating on distinct biological, psychological, social, cultural levels. In this

sense speech takes place on the level of physical actions and does not concern 'cultures' as

much as theatrical / performance disciplines.. The 'stratiographic' notion of humankind is a 212

kind of frame through which transformations can take place between levels, producing luck,

without one being confused with another. Within this stratiographic structure Barba

acknowledges it is the individual's own culture with which they are in dialogue when he

writes, “Theatre is a relationship, which is not based on a union, does not create communion,

but rather ritualises the reciprocal foreignness and the laceration of the body social hidden

beneath the uniform skin of dead myth and values”. The form of reflection he describes takes

place in the space opened by Theatre Anthropology, or by the idea of luck that is resistant to

knowledge, but that allows the relationship of each person with themselves to transform.

The difficulty of observing one's own transformation however can be compounded by

colonialism through which practitioners from various theatre cultures at ISTA manage to

speak. In his article on Theatre Anthropology Adam Ledger gives an instructive summary of

the arguments from Zarrilli, Watson, and Chamberlain that speak about the

decontextualisation of theatre from its cultural roots at ISTA, the authoritarianism of a

211 Watson, Negotiating Cultures , 14. 212 Watson, Negotiating Cultures , 15 – 16.

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meeting dominated by the organiser's philosophy, and the opacity of the term 'anthropology'

when it is applied to theatre and performance. In a short article responding to ISTA in 213

Lovanger, Sweden, 1995 Jane Turner observes scant space was given to discussion in her

experience of ISTA though De Marinis' questions of 'decontextualising comparitivism'

between pre – expressivity and expression persisted. My understanding from Ledger, 214

Watson and Turner is that Barba's notion of Theatre Anthropology has developed over time,

responding to criticism from intercultural theatre makers with adjustments being made to the

relationship between pre – expressivity and cultural discussion as discourses surrounding

these ideas have transformed. At the XV session of ISTA I attended presenters spoke about

the relationship between their work and their socio – cultural contexts in “Memory and

Discontinuity: Actor's Biographies”, a series of presentations that will be discussed in Chapter

Four of this thesis. It is also valuable to remember exchanges between theatre cultures have

also historically been platforms for Asian reformers, including Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda

Coomaraswamy and others to articulate resistance to cultural imperialism and create and

educate an intercultural audience in their forms. Challenges to this speech can come from

within these platforms, such as the inability of Edward Gordon Craig's to accept the technical

rigour of Indian theatre training described in Chapter One of this thesis. The work of

practitioners from diverse theatre traditions within these platforms to further their aims, is a

testament to the skills and capacities of these artists as well as to the value of the platforms for

speech. An example of this capacity for resistance and for the capacity to choose between

sensory motor actions within this contexts can be found in the work of Sanjukta Panigrahi

213 Ledger, “Looking up secrets”, 150. 214 Jane Turner, “Theatre Anthropology”, Anthropology Today Vol. 11 # 5, (1995), 21 – 22.

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who documented her initial discomfort and her capacity to persist through it at ISTA in an

interview with Ron Jenkins in Watson's Negotiating Cultures :

Sanjukta Panigrahi: ...We had the first ISTA meeting in Bonn, in 1980. Actually I was a little afraid because I was not acquainted with this kind of work. At first I thought I had made a mistake by coming because I was asked questions I could not answer. I was very upset. You see, in India we start learning dance when we are four or five years old. You don't know what your body is, you cannot feel your body, you don't know your mind. You learn from a guru, I won't call him a teacher, he is a guru... a master teacher. You just follow him like a parrot, you imitate what he does. You do not understand the meaning of the dance, where you are bending, where you are taking the stress, or where the tensions are in your body. You merely repeat the same positions exactly every time you do them. You follow as if you were blind. We call it guru-shishya parampara , to hand down from teacher to pupil. It's been like this for ages. We do not ask our teachers how much tension here? How much should this bend? We just follow. 215

… SP: ...When I first worked with Eugenio I was often confused about things.

When he told me to do something, I would do the opposite. If it was something that was not part of my form, I would draw a total blank. I was often upset, and sometimes he was also upset. One day after working with Eugenio I was very angry. I returned to my room and I said to my husband, 'I don't know why he wants me to try these things.' My husband asked me, 'But why didn't you try it, why didn't you at least explore it and see what was there?' I began thinking about what my husband had said, and slowly, I began to accept Eugenio's suggestions. To understand my initial reactions you must realise that when you attain a certain level of performance and you are recognised as a famous dancer, no one dares offer suggestions to you. So the first time it happened to me it was a shock. My attitude changed entirely after that. I was willing to try things. I was willing to explore ideas and see where they would lead me. Prior to ISTA I was not open to new suggestions. This openness has helped me a great deal.

Ron Jenkins: How? SP: It has helped me with my teaching. When I first came to ISTA Eugenio

asked me questions like, 'When you are in such and such a position, how much do you bend, how much tension is involved?' As I said earlier, I didn't understand his questions at first, but they gradually began to make sense as I reflected on exactly what my body was doing during the dance. I found I could feel each part of my body. I could define the role each part played in the formation of the dance. I was a little wary because I did not want to go out of my tradition. It was only later that I became secure in the knowledge I could

215 Sanjukta Panigrahi in Watson, Negotiating Cultures , 67.

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work with artists from other cultures without losing my artistic identity. 216

… RJ: Has ISTA changed the way that you perform? SP: No, not at all. 217

Panigrahi describes her social status as leading artist responsible for reviving a

classical art form, an important part of the nationalist movements following Indian

independence and her affront at being given instructions. The threat to cultural identity, in

Panirahi's case may be amplified by legacies of colonialism and the male gaze she negotiated

as a participant at ISTA. Her interview also reflects the process of 'learning to learn' which

applies to a master teacher as to students at ISTA. We can see Panigrahi's formidable

knowledge as a dancer became vulnerable. She describes the possibilities for teaching and the

directions of this work that opened from this vulnerability. Her tradition remained unchanged

though she had to risk incoherence for something to emerge from this exchange. Panigrahi

was able to face the unknown, discovering it was not a threat to her identity, but a source of

knowledge that allowed her to interact with others without having to abandon herself. This

suggests ISTA can strengthen artists within their respective forms. Although it is participants'

negotiation of this process with its attendant challenges that produces a greater range of

actions for theatre or luck.

Reading the body or allowing it to speak

The body becomes able to speak through this vulnerability. Vulnerability allows the body's

knowledge to take on a new configuration in the present moment. This shift, the snaking

216 Sanjukta Panigrahi in Watson, Negotiating Cultures , 69. 217 Sanjukta Panigrahi in Watson, Negotiating Cultures , 70.

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motion that produces luck, reflects the conditions of thought. Approaching Theatre

Anthropology as a spectator it is important to consider the dynamic relationships between

levels of consciousness that affect perception. This makes it possible for the spectator to

experience and reflect on their transformation through the performances, rather than

projecting their cultural assumptions. The literature responding to Theatre Anthropology's

performances has questioned the relationship between these two approaches. This literature is

predominantly centred on a semiotic approach. I suggest there are other ways we may begin

to think about the relationship between Theatre Anthropology and thought. One of the major

theorists on ISTA has been Patrice Pavis. His 1995 semiotic exploration ''Dancing with Faust:

reflections on an intercultural mise en scène by Eugenio Barba”, appeared in Theatre at the

Cross Roads of Culture. Following this publication Pavis continued to develop his theory of

performance analysis for Barba's work at ISTA. His method was applied by Jane Turner in her

analysis of Ego Faust, part of Barba, her guide to the Odin director's work. Pavis' discussion

of Faust resonates with the relationship between knowledge, and the 'soul' derived from the

story of Faust, which are key questions for Theatre Anthropology as a discipline. 'Soul' recalls

Zeami's notion of the spirit, that snaking agent of transformation, produced by action within

the unknown. The relationship between this force and knowledge questions the relationship

between vulnerability in action, and the mind. It is interesting to read Pavis' initial work in

1995 and his performance analysis used by Turner in 2003 as a reflection of how his thought

developed through his interaction with ISTA, tracking the movement of this thought, not only

its meaning.

In 1995 Patrice Pavis was invited to Salento by Barba who questioned if it was

possible to speak about the actor's bios through semiotics. Pavis , took up the challenge using

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lexis, or 'telling', as a cultural structural principle. Pavis dismisses the possibility of the 218

body 'telling' without entering into the semiotic level of culturally specific signage. He

considers Faust to be exclusively Western in its philosophical content. Pavis is not able to see

language as only one form of speech. He acknowledges the difficulty of semiotics to describe

action, opposing his semiotics, that of St Thomas that deals with signs, to the semiotics of

Lyotard or Barba. He says “ in other words it has to choose, between a western semiotics

following St. Thomas, which believes only what it sees, or an 'energetic' semiotics (as Lyotard

would say) that attempts to 'produce the greatest intensity (by excess or default) of what is

there, without intention', i.e. to imagine the direction of choreographic and cultural

reinterpretation of the signs, which are themselves only the superficial traces, the discarded

skin of a vanished snake.” Here again we have the image of a snake. This thesis traces the 219

snaking line between levels of action and thought that shift the meanings Pavis perceives,

rather than focusing only on its dead skin. Pavis goes on to describe the possibility of

following a performance energetically but remains tied to St. Thomas' semiotic discourse,

“We ought to imagine this energetic semiotics that Barba and Lyotard dream of, a semiotics

that would concern itself not with results and visible signs, but with their cultural

re-interpretation in which we can still see the old under the new...”. Here Pavis speaks about 220

tracing the shifts in understanding as a series of substitutions, though he is not able to

consider thought as a leap in the unknown.

Like Faust, Pavis is placing knowledge before action, affects before causes. He

describes spectatorship that follows action and thought, rather than meanings as 'ideal'. “In

218 Pavis, “Dancing with Faust ”, 167. 219 Pavis, “Dancing with Faust ”, 163 – 4. 220 Pavis, “Dancing with Faust ”, 164.

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order to read this kind of semiotics, one would have to be an 'ideal' spectator, he says, who

should be, according to Barba (1982), capable of following or accompanying the performer in

the dance of 'thinking in action': a moving subject par excellence who has to describe an

evolving object.” It could be suggested that the limit on cultural discussion ISTA aims to 221

develop this kind of perception in spectators, sensing with their bodies rather than interpreting

through speech. Through this kind of spectatorship, we enter the logic of actions, learning to

dance with the performers, and being informed by the snaking logic of their thought as action.

Pavis says it is “perhaps the new challenge to semiotics: to shift perspective on an object itself

in motion, without giving up the notion of sign and pertinence, but allowing sufficient play

and fluctuation.” Although an eventual relationship with meaning is inevitable, Pavis' interest

in signs is not congruent with the notion of producing luck. Though he continues to stretch the

chain of determinism, he is unable to escape the projected logic of linguistic speech.

Working with Pavis' revised interpretive model in 2003 Turner extends this work on

the performance of Ego Faust. Describing her initial impression of the performance, she

recalls her initial impression Odin Teatret's 1977 Anabasis had on her in Wales when she was

eighteen. She comments that both the performances affected her deeply, though she didn't

necessarily understand them. This is an important starting point for beginning to observe the

relationship between action and sensation, including the sensation she describes of being

disaffected by the performances' opacity at times as well. Turner describes the structure of 222

Pavis' model which contains elements of both descriptive and structural analysis, and is

separated into four levels, condensation or 'formal readability', displacement or 'narrative

221 Pavis, “Dancing with Faust ”, 164. 222 Turner, Barba , 83.

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readability', sectors or 'anti – narrative readability', shifters or 'ideological readability'. 223

Although these categories engage with various kinds of thought they limit the capacity of the

performance to speak only in terms of what is already known. The most promising category is

Anti – Narrative readability but even from here any transformations that take place are

already considered to be ideological. Condensation and Displacement are taken from Freudian

analysis as the accumulation and linkage of images. Condensation filters images through

recognition and Displacement substitutes a familiar association for an unfamiliar action

allowing the spectator to read the performance, through association, consensus or as a

hieroglyph, again reflecting the limits placed on perception by this system of knowledge. 224

Turner considers the performance actions that are familiar and unfamiliar in performance and

its score, and narrative readability. Through research she is able to include the story of

Goethe's Faust and the role of Garuda, a bird of ill omen from the Balinese dance tradition of

Gambu. She asks if the intercultural performers are exoticised, which is a fair point, though 225

perhaps all performing bodies are exoticised at Odin Teatret, which can compound colonial

experiences. At the level of anti – narrative readability, Turner focuses on what disrupts the

narrative thematically, rhythmically or culturally, suggesting Barba composes a montage

through rhythmic ruptures, juxtaposing one tradition with another. Turner consider's Barba's 226

intertextual links with Grotowski's Dr. Faustus as well as ideas of Ego and Self in Goethe's

Faust and Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre. She describes Torgier Wethal work with his legs

which enact the desires of his ID and his introverted head, which reflects his Ego which

Turner describes as 'vectorisation '. She notes the role of masculinity and femininity in 227

223 Turner, Barba , 86 - 7. 224 Turner, Barba , 87. 225 Turner, Barba , 92 – 3. 226 Turner, Barba , 95. 227 Turner, Barba , 96. Pavis' term for the use of separate parts of the body to act.

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Goethe's parable and within the piece. This anti – narrative level allows Turner to engage with

the structure of the performance, including its use of repetition, its use of cruelty and the role

of the parable in enacting a transformation. On the fourth level of shifters or “ideological 228

readability” Turner describes Pavis' idea of montage at ISTA as federative intercultural theatre

where different forms appear within a single frame. This ideological “shift” centres on a

known idea from Watson about the nature of theatre at ISTA. Turner suggests, however, there

is more complexity to the disorientation of performers and spectators alike than this idea

allows. Although Pavis' structure allows for shifts, the nature of these is limited by the 229

frames of knowledge he brings to perception. Turner discusses the intercultural musical scores

which included Subo el Triquete, a Walt Witman poem sung in Spanish to a melody of

different tonal registers and Tomorrow is a Long Time by Bob Dylan that accompanies

Margherita’s action in the performance. 230

Although Pavis' thought evolved with ISTA, between 1995 and 2003, from static idea

of cultural signification to an interplay between action and thought he none the less stays

within a western semiotic framework. Given the wealth of insight Turner is able to give “non

– narrative readability” this category could be the basis of a study between material,

biological and intellectual levels of perception, though it is trapped in projection of readability

that originates in the intellect. Risking incoherence we have to take that leap into the unknown

at ISTA to find other ways of speaking about the relationship between action and thought.

This risk is the only way to encounter luck.

228 Turner, Barba , 97 - 103. 229 Turner, Barba , 103. 230 Turner, Barba , 105.

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Anthropological intermezzo

What is the relationship between cultures of theatre, and cultures of thought in Anthropology

as a discipline? Barba's choice of the word Anthropology to describe his work has puzzled

theorists of Theatre Anthropology, some wishing Barba had chosen another way to describe

his ideas. Anthropology has been known to rationalise violence, projecting ideas onto other 231

cultures. However it is also necessary to view Anthropology through the lens of how the

discipline has evolved. In this evolution the projection of knowledge by Anthropology is an

object of study. This study shows how discourse is based in action between matter, biology

and thought, that is in an endless process of encountering the unknown to overturn its own

values. Approaching this field it is useful to start with British Anthropologist Mary Douglas

whose work was key to the shift between Social Anthropology and Cultural Theory. In her

introduction to James Frazer's The Golden Bough , a canonical comparative study of religions,

Douglas reflects on the origins of Social Anthropology. She describes the fantastical tales of

other cultures reported by British Anthropologists that were part of popular literary

entertainment as well as intellectual thought in the late Nineteenth Century, writers populating

their work with sensational stories of animal beings, bestial cruelties, tales of demon worship,

ghosts, cannibalism and blood smeared idols. They justified their work as investigating the 232

“dawn of human thought”, the sacred, at the cost of the cultural truths of the people they were

researching. Douglas sees this search for an original unity of religious thought as a 233

reflection of the slain Western European god of the 1890's.

231 Ledger, “Looking up 'secrets'”, 150. 232 Mary Douglas in James Frazer The Illustrated Golden Bough, New York: Doubleday (1978), 12. 233 Douglas in Frazer The Illustrated Golden Bough, 13.

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In this context we can see Western Europe searching for a limit, an unknown in

relation to which knowledge could be contextualised. Anthropologists were unable to

schematise this unknown in relation to their own thought, but projected their inventions onto

other cultures. Douglas suggests this work is a relic of a society that believed cruelty to be in

the past, a belief that sheltered scholars from the horrors of the present. Their writing 234

appeared as an attempt to crack the code of life on other planets. During his own lifetime

Frazer's work was derided as savage, although it established Social Anthropology as a

discipline, for which he received a British Knighthood in 1907 and Order of Merit in 1925.

His work had a notable impact on Henry James' The Golden Bow l, Sigmund Freud's Totem

and Taboo and many others. Frazer attempted to apply an evolutionary schema to cultural

development in his work that implied a teleological progression from magic, through religion

to scientific belief. Although Douglas acknowledges Frazer's science was superficial and

cynical, she suggests Frazer was less superficial in the way he connected Christianity to the

myths and religions he explored. He was aware of myth making as a common human 235

practice within religion, though was unable to see this as the basis of human sciences.

Through Douglas' work the common practice of creating myths as biological and cultural

systems throughout the arts and sciences has become the cornerstone of Cultural Theory.

Writing about luck could be seen as a form of myth making that opens up the material

process of thought, through action. It relies on its relationship with the unknown as a point of

reference as do many anthropological theories of transformation. Australian Anthropologist

Michael Taussig uses archival documents from the history of Social Anthropology to

articulate the culture of mysticism in early Anthropological studies of magic in “Viscerality,

234 Douglas in Frazer The Illustrated Golden Bough, 15. 235 Douglas in Frazer The Illustrated Golden Bough, 16.

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Faith, Scepticism: Another Theory of Magic”. His work reflects that rational discourse is a 236

system of superstitions that is continually overturned by practice. Although we know that

these systems of knowledge are incomplete, we adhere to them as though they were final. As

with any system of knowledge, developments are made by the simultaneous adherence to the

determinism of their limits, and the exposure of these limits through action that moves beyond

them. Taussig writes about this mode of action that transforms knowledge, drawing on early

Anthropological texts. These texts describe the relationship between a shaman and their

apprentice that develops their discipline. By using these texts Taussig puts himself in an

analogous relationship to the shaman's apprentice, engaging with canonical texts from

Anthropology to go beyond the limits of this discipline.

The limits of the shamanic discipline and Anthropology are, much like the study of

luck, at once resistant to knowledge and a system of thought that reflects how humans create

systems of transformation. Taussig begins with a founder of Anthropology Sir Burnett Taylor

who could be talking about the anthropologist when he says, “The sorcerer generally learns

his time-honoured profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first

to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a

hypocrite.” Taussig says, “Taylor puts his finger on something timeless here, fascinating 237

and timeless, which is that faith seems to require that one be taken in by what one professes

while at the same time suspecting it is a lot of hooey.” Taussig articulates that not only faith 238

but also discourse depends on our adherence to a system that we know to be incomplete. His

discussion of shamanism mirrors the conditions described in the production of luck, through

236 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 121 – 155. 237 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 123. 238 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 123.

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which humans are able to create systems by engaging with the determinism of our natures,

that overcome our determinism. These systems, however, often outlive the moment of their

creation and must themselves be transformed by action within the context of the unknown.

Taussig continues on to discuss early anthropologists E.B. Taylor and E.E. Prichard's

work in Africa in the 1930's creating a lineage of anthropologists as he does so, E.E. Prichard

for example supervised Mary Douglas' early work in Anthropology. He also speaks about

Franz Boaz's collaboration with George Hunt, or Giving-Potlatches-In-The-World, who

became an apprentice to a famous Kwakiutl shaman, Indigenous to North West of Canada,

and published his experiences in I Desired to Learn the Ways of the Shaman. This book was

used by Claude Levi-Strass to write his founding text in Structural Anthropology The

Sorcerer and His Magic. Taussig describes Levi – Strauss's essay as more an expression of

faith in structuralism than an examination of faith as it sets out to be. In this comment, he

observes the evolution of a discipline as a matter of belief, playing out the role of myth

making in the name of rational analysis. In this way, Taussig observes Anthropology is built

on the same relationship between trickery and scepticism as the magical subjects it deals with.

Through the exploration of luck, we understand this as the condition of any system of 239

thought. He describes the paradox at the heart of knowledge. The shaman was well known

and highly regarded for their capacity to deceive the audience or the patient, and yet could be

killed if they somehow made a mistake that revealed their work to be a trick. This system that

is resistant to knowledge is highly regulated to prevent exposure, except in the case of the

apprentice who surpassed a shaman, or another shaman who saw how the first performed their

tricks. In this situation, the observer could become the recipient of the shaman's secret or

239 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 135.

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sacred knowledge. The system of knowledge advanced through being incomplete, an inert

fragment of knowledge in the context of the unknown.

Taussig describes the origin of the idea of shamanism we have today, taken from the

Tungus word, an Indigenous culture from Siberia, for one of the several classes of their

healers. The Western European explorers of the Eighteenth Century who gained access to

Siberia during the reign of Catherine the Great first termed the magical healers they

encountered jugglers, as in conjurors. Their healing techniques were considered tricks by the

explorers, who linked them to popular performances of ventriloquism, curtained chambers,

disappearing acts, semi-secret trapdoors, knife tricks and sex changes also found in Western

Europe. The term shaman became widespread in Western languages following the

ethnography of Siberia in the late nineteenth century, and in the last quarter of the twentieth

century has been used to describe mystical practices conducted throughout the world. The

“trickery” observed by the early explorers in these practices has become a discussion of

medical practices and healing. 240

These healing practices have a dramaturgy that connects between various levels of

consciousness, material, biological, cultural and spiritual, characterised by action in the

unknown. The opening between thresholds of understanding is described by Taussig in Louis

Bridges' work with Ona groups in Tierra del Fuego,

The medicine man's wife, one of the rare women healers, took off her outer garment, and the three of them huddled and produced something Bridges thought was of the lightest grey down, shaped like a puppy and about four inches long with pointed ears. It had the semblance of life, perhaps due to the handlers' breathing and the trembling of their hands. There was a particular scent as the “puppy” was placed by the three pairs of hands to his chest, where, without any sudden movement, it disappeared. Three times this was repeated, and then after a solemn pause Tininisk asked whether

240 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 129.

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Bridges felt anything moving in his heart or if he could see something strange in his mind, like in a dream? 241

Here Taussig begins to approach the conditions of thought, weaving between animate life

and its vital resistance to matter. The slippage between these categories becomes a

dramaturgical contestation of knowledge. He compares this liminal space of the vital

object – animal – thought, to a character in Franz Kafka's story The Cares of a Family

Man called Odradek. Taussig says,

Odradek seems like a person in some ways, can speak and respond to questions, for

instance, and can move fairly nimbly, like an animal. Yet it is nothing but an old star shaped cotton reel with different bits of coloured thread and a couple of little sticks poking out either end. 242

This odd assemblage can speak and seems to know something, however, it is assembled from

various odds and ends. It reflects the status of a discipline of knowledge, seemingly

intelligent, but somehow made from a meeting of natural and cultural elements in action. We

can find out more about the lifespan of this creature by quoting from Kafka's Odradek,

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful. 243

This odd little creature of knowledge is somehow passed between us from generation to

241 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 124. 242 Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 127. 243 Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man”, The Complete Stories of Franz Kaftka , trans. Will and

Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Shoken Books (1988), 143.

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generation, partial, incomplete, but always mocking at the fleeting nature of human vitality.

Taussig says,

Kafka did not employ sleight of hand, his writing was sufficient. Odradek was an extension of Kafka, his body no less than his mind, similar to the “puppy” of white feathers of newborn birds emerging from Tininsk to enter the body of his patients or victims. Kafka's stories are not stories at all. They rely on gesture, the bodily equivalent of words, that suddenly shoot out of syntax and take on a life of their own, like the Selknam revolving dough emergent from the shaman's mouth.

The limits of Odradek's vitality draws attention to the incomplete nature of our systems of

knowledge, allowing the vital impulse to find a new relationship between its parts, as does

the gesture of the shaman that mobilises matter and thought, biology and consciousness

through its mysterious actions.

Taussig asks, “Could it follow therefore, that magic is efficacious not despite the trick

but on account of its exposure?” His comment could be understood as suggesting the moment

of transformation when the unforeseeable event of luck brings meaning to a discourse. His

interest in secrets recalls the negotiation of secrets in theatre discourse, for example in the

subtitle of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer , in

response to which Peter Brook published his 1995 text There Are No Secrets . Taussig notes

Irving Goldman, a student of Franz Boaz, commented that Boaz often translated the Kwakiutl

word for the winter festival tsetseqa as sacred, which could also be taken to mean secret.

Taussig suggests “a world without trickery is the most problematic trick of all”, this is a world

where we have lost the ability to expose the trick and so transform knowledge, we lose the

technical ability to reinvent our actions. He quotes Nietzsche's the Gay Science,

We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veil is withdrawn from it: we have

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lived long enough to believe this. At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and "know" everything. "Is it true that the good God is everywhere present? " asked a little girl of her mother: "I think that is indecent": a hint to philosophers! One should have more reverence for the shame-facedness with which nature has concealed herself behind enigmas and motley uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? Perhaps her name is Baubo, to speak in Greek?... Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that purpose it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface... Are we not precisely in this respect Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones, and of words? And precisely on that account artists? 244

Ruta, near Genoa, Autumn, 1886. Here Nietzsche demonstrates what philosophy learns from

theatre, how not to know. In constituting a discipline, is it not best to understand knowledge is

incomplete within the unknown and that the conditions of its transformation are offered by

this very unknown quality. This is also the paradox that Grotowski expressed, when he said,

in Towards a Poor Theatre that he was aware of the 'quackery' of his methods, choosing these

techniques rather than the illusion of knowledge,

All this may sound strange and bring to mind some form of “quackery”. If we are to stick to scientific formulas, we can say that it is a particular use of suggestion, aiming at an ideoplastic realisation. Personally, I must admit that we do not shrink from using these “quack” formulas. Anything that has an unusual or magical ring stimulates the imagination of both actor and producer. 245

The unknown is essential to the creative act. It is implicit in any free action that

produces luck and reflects the conditions of thought. Knowledge is transformed by this action

in the unknown, it advances through the production of luck. The resistance of luck, which we

recognise but cannot see in advance, to projected knowledge, as well as its snaking capacity

to connect between various levels of consciousness, is the basis of its capacity for this

244 Nietzche in Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, Scepticism”, 147. 245 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre , London: Routledge (2002), 38.

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transformation. The discussion of Anthropology and Cultural Theory has reflected that these

are the conditions for the transformation of thought between disciplines. I begin the next

chapter with my observations and experiences of the XV session of International School of

Theatre Anthropology in Albino Italy, 2016. I ask, can theatrical action function in a way that

is analogous to but distinct from discourse? Is it possible to trace the relationships between

the two, through their work with matter, action and thought? These questions allow theatrical

action and thought to speak between disciplines, producing luck. Luck is considered as a form

of evolution increasing the capacity for choice between actions for the performer and their

tradition.

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Chapter Four: Actions and Evolutions at ISTA 2016

Luck is produced through action, which breaks the cycle of mental projection. It is an

act of resistance, produced in the unknown. This action, realising conscious and unconscious

intentions unintentionally, within its particular material circumstances, produces luck. Chapter

One: “Pulling Strings, the Snuff Puppet Ramayana” explored the production of luck as the

meeting between technical knowhow and human intention, common to theatre contexts.

Chapter Two: “Theatre and Resistance: Odin Week Festival 2012” developed resistance as a

physical and ethical principle that creates the conditions for luck in theatre. Chapter Three:

“Snakes and Ladders: An Historiography of Theatre Anthropology” reflected that action in

the unknown transforms theoretical thought, as well as action in theatre. This chapter, Chapter

Four: “Actions and Evolutions at ISTA 2016” focuses on how these steps into the unknown

are taken between theatre traditions. It traces the evolutionary function of theatre. Evolution

here is not a teleological or Darwinist notion, but is the increased capacity for choice between

sensory motor actions within the performing body. The particular construction of this

performing body is its bios. The body's bios develops complexity through theatre training. Its

training is an increasingly complex montage of less complex actions. The varying directions

in which the performer's energy can be channelled contributes to the capacity for choice

within these actions for performers. This capacity is enhanced by working between traditions.

Overcoming the determinist limits placed on actions can produce greater freedom for

performers within their respective traditions.

ISTA 2016, The Actors Know How: Personal Paths, Techniques and Visions was a ten

day workshop. It was structured between early morning training sessions titled 'Learning to

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learn', the presentation of professional biographies from highly trained performers, masters,

'Memory and Discontinuity: Professional Biographies' in various fields of theatre, and

seminar sessions in which Barba worked with actors, 'The School of Seeing: the Performer's

Action and the Spectator's Perception'. This daily program was punctuated with performances,

workshops organised by participants, and informal conversations with masters. I have

structured my discussion according to the observation of master's demonstrations on the first

day of the ISTA, participation in their workshops with discussion of their biographical

presentations and reflection on Barba's work with actors. I focus on elaborating my original

research rather than reviewing performances staged in Albino's town centre during the

session, The Chronic Life by Odin Teatret, Yashima by Keiin Yoshimura and So Sugiura,

Achin Pakhi (The unknown Bird), based on the life story of Lalon Fakir by Parvathy Baul,

Rosso Angelico by Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo, or exchanges between participants in the

'balaganchik'. The discussion begins with an introduction to the event, to each tradition and 246

initial observations of the energy used by performers in the opening session of ISTA where

each performer presented a fragment of their craft.

Introduction to ISTA, Albino Italy 2016

Julia Varley wrote an open letter to participants of ISTA, 2016 The performer's know how:

personal paths, techniques and visions , saying that this session of ISTA returned to the basic

principles of Theatre Anthropology. She describes, “In 2016 after a ten year break, Eugenio

Barba has decided to concentrate again on the know how of the actor, to return to the basic

246 The program of XV ISTA can be found in Odin Teatret archives.

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personal and transcultural principles that actors and directors can refer to as techniques to be

translated into their own work language.” In her letter Varley observed how ISTA had 247

developed over time from a forum for research between Barba and his international peers to a

dialogue between theatre cultures, including between members of Odin Teatret. She described

the early ISTA sessions (in Brazil, Denmark, Portugal and Germany) where the masters' stage

presence and the impact of ensemble performances marked the events, with full a Nihon Buyo

performance for example, transporting performers and musicians from Japan, with their wigs

and costumes, and an ensemble of Balinese Gambuh performers. In the early two thousands

the ISTA focus shifted towards training and work demonstrations, focusing on exchange and

development between theatre traditions. She noted the reciprocal nature of ISTA's 248

exchanges. I Nyoman Catra from Bali's National Institute of the Arts (STSI) and Ron Jenkins

form Wesleyan University also speak, in Negotiating Cultures , about the collaboration

between their universities as a result of ISTA. I Made Bandem, who is the director of STSI

and a collaborator of Barba since 1977, developed a cross cultural theatre program at STSI to

compliment the traditional performance after ISTA. I Nyoman Catra also writes in “Dynamic

equilibrium: preservation and evolution of traditional performance technique” about the

importance of exchange at ISTA for the development of theatre cultures in Bali. Varley 249

considers the heart of ISTA to be the pre-expressive relationships on which Theatre

Anthropology is founded as a discipline. 250

Barba introduced the 2016 session of ISTA also noting that the session returned to

247 Julia Varley, ISTA – A Tale of Transitions: open letter to the Participants and Staff of the 15 th ISTA, Albino 2016 , participant information, Odin Teatret, (2016), 6.

248 Varley, ISTA – A Tale of Transitions, Odin Teatret, 1. 249 Watson, Negotiating Cultures, 60 - 63. 250 Varley, ISTA – A Tale of Transitions, Odin Teatret, 5.

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the performer's process of learning to learn. He reiterated this was a painful process of 251

detaching from acculturated behaviour. His comment reminded me of my experience as an

unteachable young adult, when my clown teacher had yelled, “You don't know, I know, one

thousand actors later, I know! Bend your knees.” At ISTA I was uncomfortable being

observed in early morning training sessions, reflecting my perfectionism, like Turner I felt the

pinch of sitting at times through discussions with my hand up, though this also meant that the

practical demonstrations gained resonance for me as a spectator they otherwise would not. I

felt disquiet hearing So Sugiura play Shamisen wondering how I could transmit fine cultural

experience to others with the working class experience I inherited. I was also quite

uncomfortable, coming from a colonial context, learning the songs and dances of other

cultures, which is often tied to colonial violence in our context. I approached Parvathy Baul

about this, asking how she felt about non – Indian students learning her work. She replied that

it was an important part of one culture showing their willingness to understand another. Barba

acknowledged it was the masters who would answer the questions we had brought with us to

ISTA. He traced the word discipline to its latin root discere , to learn. 'Learning to learn' is an

ongoing process that transcends limits imprinted on the subject in daily life. Barba reflected

his own knowledge had come from observing Odin actors, and, despite having seen the

morning training exercises many times, watching each time, he learnt something new. Barba

described that Theatre Anthropology had originated from his confusion when Odin actors

returned from sabbatical in 1971 having learnt rudimentary steps in different traditions.

Seeing a living textbook of actions, he struggled to learn how these could be used. Noticing

the actors' bodies adapted their centre of balance to each style, a scenic behaviour, or an extra

251 My observations of ISTA are taken as a primary source though they can be checked through Odin Teatret's video archives of the ISTA sessions.

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– daily body began to emerge that, in the construction of its specific bios , distinguished

performers' actions from everyday life. Theatre Anthropology amplifies this extra – daily

body, its pre – expressive principles, and highlights the construction of its scenic bios. It is a

practical and theoretical discourse that advances the discipline of theatre by studying how

performers create their theatrical impact. It evolves theatre by working between traditions.

Working in this discipline allows the spectator to learn how action and perception are

reciprocally informed.

The ISTA began with a short presentation by each of the masters introducing their

traditions. I introduce each tradition through observation of the performance fragment 252

presented by its master, noting the effect of this fragment on my spectator's perception and its

implications for thought. I follow this with information supplied to participants at ISTA on

each tradition that indicates how each tradition has developed or evolved. Italicised sections

quote my notes on the live presentation with further commentary to follow. Traditions

represented at this session included Balinese Gambuh taught by I Wayan Bawa, Kamigata –

mai with Keiin Yoshimura and So Sugiura, Flamenco, Kathakali and Orissi dance with Teatro

Tascabile di Bergamo's actors Tiziana Barbiero, Caterina Scotti and Alessandro Rigoletti (a

pupil of Beppe Chierichetti who was unable to teach at ISTA), Baul with Parvathy Baul, and

Group Theatre (body and voice) with Odin Teatret actresses Julia Varley and Roberta Carreri.

Discussing observations of each tradition contributes to an evolving discourse of the

relationship between theatrical action and diverse disciplines of thought.

Watching Parvathy Baul I saw circular movements coordinated through her performing body, the centrifugal movement of her hair away from the body in a continuous arc, the turning pattern of her feet. Her finger moved in short syncopated

252 Video recordings of these introductory presentations can be found in Odin Teatret archives.

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lines on the string of her Ektara (one stringed instrument), co – ordinated with the beat on her duggi (a small round kettle drum strapped to the waist), punctuating the flow of her voice. Her turning dilated to follow the circumference of a circle. From these circular motions something seemed to be working its way upwards on a vertical axis. There was a texture in her voice, as though she was lifting a stone, something real...When she closed the circle it seemed as though she was throwing the stone, it became attached to the point she threw towards, she made the sign namaste. Something is drawn up and something in changed, in Parvathy's work of stepping into the moment. 253

The coordination between circular movements on different scales persisted

between theatrical bodies at ISTA. The limit of the circle provided a form in relationship to

which the performer could elaborate the space-time of their performance. It required them to

coordinate between different speeds. Completing cycles of varying sizes at the same time,

they enter into multiple simultaneous time scales, as Baul does when Parvathy sings songs

that have developed over centuries, through daily repetition, in the present with the audience

to transmit her transformation.

Baul is a syncretic physical/ poetic, devotional music practice. It doesn't subscribe

to a deity but seeks the unity of the body and the divine. It is sung, danced, and played on the

Ektara, a one stringed instrument, and a metal drum. It is a tradition of “madness” breaking

with rhythmic structures of classical Indian music and dance. Bauls travel within or between

villages, surviving from their songs. The exact origins of Baul are obscured by its orality

which adapts the tradition to the present day. It was influenced by Vaishnavism and Sufi Islam

in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Jayadeva (12 th C CE) is important for Baul, expressing the

union of heavenly and earthly loves. Lalon Fakir (1772 - 1890) is a revered poet of this

tradition, which had a marked influence on the great reformer of Bengali art and literature

Rabindranath Tagore in his break with the rigidity of many classical Indian artistic traditions

253 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered.

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(1861 – 1941). 254

The flamenco caught my eye with its serpentine line. I saw the hyperbolic ripple between skirt and fan that allowed opposing sides of fan, inside and outside of the dress to become part of a continuous line, montaged, like a film strip slicing open the body. The rhythms of Caterina Scotti's feet dictated the patterns of thought or attention. 255

In the continuous line of a Mobius strip modelled in Euclidean or hyperbolic

geometry, two opposing sides are arranged on a continuous plane rotated through one hundred

and eighty degrees, connecting opposing planes. The analogy of a film strip comments on

discontinuous surfaces montaged on the same plane. Although theorised by Lobachevsky in

the Nineteenth Century, hyperbolic space was considered impossible until 1997 when Daina

Taimina a mathematician from Cornell University constructed hyperbolic space using a

crochet model. Like the rippled body of a sea slug, the fringe of a flamenco dress or the stance

in flamenco, hyperbolic space continually curves away from itself. This naturally occurring

line, seen also in sea sponges, lettuces and seed pods has a surface area that expands

exponentially from the centre, which allows the form to float on water or air. This bios is also

represented in materials, creating a continuum between biology, matter, and culture. As Barba

later indicated, the flamenco dancer's turned out pose (in which her body, through her femur

bones rotated in the hip sockets, rotates towards 180 degrees) allows the fabric of her dress to

flare, revealing the largest possible surface area of her body. This continuity between the

inside and outside could be understood as eros, or another kind of reproductive relationship

between human biology, organic and non-organic forms. This form of reproduction is 256

254 Parvathy Baul, accessed on 26 th September 2019, https://parvathybaul.com 255 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered. 256 Taken from Deleuzean film Theory to describe a third category between organic and inorganic life.

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shared between theatre disciplines and linguistic systems, meaning rippling away from the

biological and material centre. Although the systems transform, the production of luck in

which they're based has this hyperbolic quality, is the continuity between seemingly distinct

frames that allows a new quality of being to emerge.

“The Kathakali dancers mirror one another like amoebas, cells, butterflies,

becoming part of one organism, dancing from different sides of the cell's divide.” 257

In this fragment the two actors mirrored one another's actions. Their bodies

became like cells or parts of a single organism. This observation reflects the actor's body is

part of a larger organism. This collective 'identity' was re-enforced in our Kathakali class

where we were encouraged to move through the exercises as though the group was one

extra-daily body, transcending subjectivity.

Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo (TTB) from Bergamo, works in the tradition of Group

Theatre. Their group was founded in 1973. After the International Workshop of Theatre 258

Groups (AITG),1977, influenced by Theatre Anthropological exchanges hosted by Odin the

actors of TTB began specialising in Kathakali, and Odissi dance (as well as Bharata Natyam

and Kuchipudi). At XV ISTA members of the group taught Kathakali, Odissi and Flamenco.

TTB's Kathakali teacher Beppe Chierichetti studied at the Kalatharamigini Centre for

Performing Arts with Kalamandalam John, who was a pupil of the gurus C. Padamanabhan

Nair and Vilaya Kumar. The Kathakali tradition is native to Kerala in South Western India

where it was conceived by the Rajah of Kottarakkara in the 1700s, inspired by the Hindu

epics, its costume may have been influenced by Eighteenth Century Spanish nobility visiting

the prosperous coastal region. The practice is revered for the technical rigour of its training,

257 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered. 258 Information on ISTA, Odin Teatret, 3.

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sophisticated vocal and percussive music, costume and makeup. Following British East India

Company's rule of India in the early Eighteen Hundreds, Kathakali practice declined. Like

other classical Indian traditions, it experienced a resurgence after Indian independence From

Britain in 1947. In 1991 and 1992 Kerala Kathakali Troupe and Kalatharamgini Troupe

toured Europe, supported by TTB. Tiziana Barbiero specialised in Odissi dance, training in

Delhi with Aloka Anikar who was a pupil of Guru Maya Dhar Raut one of the four

re-founders of Odissi after the tradition declined under Islamic and British rule. The dance

originated from Odisha in North Eastern India. It is dedicated to Jagannath, the deity

worshiped in Vaishnavism. It uses Batu and Pallavi , pure dance elements, and Abhinaya

(gesture), translating stories from the Gita Govinda in dance. TTB's 1996 performance Holy

and Profane Love drew on the erotic metaphors of spiritual mysticism, from Bharata Natyam

to the Christian Biblical Song of Songs. It used Flamenco as a “secular transmutation” of the

devadasi (temple dancers) dancers of Classical Hindu traditions. At ISTA, Flamenco was

taught by Christina Scotti who trained with Andalusian Flamenco dancers. The dance

inherited its body language and the zapateado , the tip-heel step, from Roma people who

immigrated to Spain from Northern India. Flamenco style is traced to the second half of the

Eighteenth Century when Islamic Moriscan dance in Andalusia blended with Roma dance

traditions, adding the ballet arms of Seville, Andelusian music and percussion. 259

I Wayan Bawa's performance played with status, a King, who was cocky, but guarded. He also connected between the inside and outside of his sleeve, a contestation of the boundaries of power. I asked I Wayan Bawa about luck at lunch. He confirmed it could be produced by his Gambuh performances because of the high status of this traditional form. 260

259 Teatro Tascabile Di Bergamo, accessed on 26 th September 2019, https://www.teatrotascabile.org 260 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered.

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Bawa was performing a fragment from the adventures of Prince Panji. Prince Panji is

challenged from the inside, from his family, and from the outside, from neighbouring

kingdoms. The contestation of power moves between the inside and the outside of the

performance itself, negotiated for the audience members through allegorical cultural forms.

The ancient Javanese lineage connects with the present day, to produce luck. The actor's bios

speaks to culture and geopolitics through these forms.

Gambuh is the oldest surviving Balinese dance tradition. According to the information

provided by the Gambuh Desa Batuan ensemble, the form originated in Java during the

Majapahit era (1292-1527), as court performance, migrating to Bali with the Hindu-Javanese

aristocracy when Islam arrived to the Indonesian archipelago. It is an oral tradition, spoken 261

in Kawi, an ancient literary language, rote learned by performers, and translated into Balinese

during the performance. Its drumming patterns and musical structure, which uses gongs,

flutes and other percussion instruments, forms the basis of other Balinese music traditions

including gamelan orchestral performance. Gambuh was threatened by the 1908 Dutch

occupation of Bali, and is now practiced in only a few villages. It was the subject of the

Gambuh Preservation Project supported by the Ford Foundation. The Gambuh Desa Batuan

Ensemble is now supported by Odin Teatret and the Danish Interkulturelt Centre through the

Gambuh Fund. 262

Kane San swanned (by which I meant it appeared she was floating gracefully), with the fan, her division of space seemed to imply a division of time, such as when she looked at the closed fan and divided it into three. It had a specific weight when she handled it, the relationship shifting in distinct ways, at times it seemed to be the object that performed, at times it framed her gaze. 263

261 Information on ISTA, Masters and Performances, XV ISTA, Odin Teatret, 3. 262 Gambuh Desa Batuan ensemble, Odin Teatret. 263 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered.

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It was possible to see the continuum between the actress and the fan or Obe (fan) as a

continuum between biology and matter. Folded up, the fan could function as a stick, and like

the pre-expressivity of the actor's relationship with their spinal column, became the means by

which she entered into the particular space-time of the performance. The fan spiralled open

from its centre, the kaname, the heaviest point where its ribs join, held by a hollow cylindrical

pin. The paper spiralled away from itself within the parallel wooden frame. Working within

the frame established continuity between distinct planes between the fan and performer.

Yoshimura's gestures, their tension and weight shifted her relationship with this object. It

became the subject and she the object. Shifting the relationship between the performer and

Obe . The body became material and material animated thought, vitalised by the performer.

The fan framed her for the spectator.

Kamigata-mai originally developed in the Kamigata (Osaka-Kyoto) region of Japan in

the Edo period, 1603 – 1868, during which Ikebana flower arrangement, Haiku poetry,

Chanoyu tea ceremony and Ukiyoe woodblock printing also flourished. Drawing on dance 264

and puppetry traditions of Nō theatre, Kyogen, Kabuki and Bunraku, Kamigata-mai creates a

micro cosmos of the natural world. It is performed mainly by women, and is characterised by

its sensitivity, delicacy and strength. Performed in a small chamber, rather than a traditional

theatre, it manifests internal sentiment and is accompanied by the Juita, the oldest form of

Shamisen, or three stringed instrument, traditionally played by a blind person. 265

The first impressions of these traditions revealed the performers' bios as a meeting

264 Information on ISTA, Odin Teatret, 8. 265 Keiin Yoshimura, accessed 26 th September 2019.

http://www.kamigatamaitomonokai.org/english/english.html

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point between biology, matter and vitality. Their work with the materiality and biology of the

performing body created a continuum between times scales and states of being. They

transcend human subjectivity, developing varying directions for non – organic theatrical

energy to follow. Through the circular motions of Baul, or the hyperbolic motions of

flamenco this continuum could be seen as the body of a snake coiling through space and time,

conjuring the continuity that appears discontinuous to the limited perception of a human

mind, augmented by the multiplicity of theatrical perception. Theatre Anthropology gives us a

language for the dialogue between these levels. Transformation on and between these levels

produces luck. ISTA provided a powerful series of case studies of the performer's bios .

Discussing these cases expands the argument about how the performer's bios creates a

continuum between apparently distinct levels of matter, biology, thought. It reveals the

common relational dynamics not only between theatrical languages but also between theatre

and other disciplines. Discussing the dynamic actions and relationships at the basis of thought

suggests awareness moves between these layers, revealing the role of theatrical action in

advancing thought, or producing luck.

Thinking through the extra – daily body: evolutions and actions at ISTA 2016

Training in the first steps of these traditions was a meeting between my body in action and

their form, creating the extra – daily body of each tradition. Documenting the workshops

crystallised the thoughts of these extra – daily bodies. Unlike other writers (Pavis, and to a

lesser extent Ledger), I do not see my participation at ISTA as a compromise of “objectivity”,

but as the basis of my work. I draw on the primary experience of training between traditions,

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linking this writing with observations from the biographical presentations of the masters who

were teaching. In this way I link the action of my body in training, with the direction each

masters' practice has brought to their tradition. This reflects the learning process I

encountered as a participant of the workshops connecting between the sensate and social

bodies. I have structured my discussion based on the order in which our workshop group,

“Green Caravanserail” participated in workshops with each of the masters. I include

observations of the master's biographical presentation after each workshop experience.

Moving between primary experience and an account of the master's work within their

tradition, the text creates a continuum of aesthetic transformation. During Odin actress Iben

Rasmussen's biographical presentation, Barba observed an action could be divided into

“DNA” and “anecdote”. DNA is shorthanded as the pre - expressive displacement of weight

between the legs and spinal column. “Anecdote” is how the actor expresses the form with

their upper limbs. Drawing on Barba's analogy of “DNA” to refer to an action, and

“anecdote” as its expression, this section extends the metaphor. Extending this metaphor,

“DNA” and “anecdote” can describe the specific theatrical tradition each performer is

working with, and the expression of the tradition within their biography, a form of evolution.

Again this is not a teleological or Darwinist notion of evolution, but the increased capacity for

choice within a tradition. Vicki Ann Cremona has also written in “Drawing Back the Curtains

on the actor's 'private place': a personal journey into ISTA 2016”, about the breath between

traditions of training at this ISTA. My discussion focuses on the extra – daily body developed

by each tradition and its relationship with social actions described by masters in their

biographies. This section considers both the evolution of awareness I received from training 266

266 Vicki Ann Cremona, “Drawing Back the Curtains on the actor's 'private place': a personal journey into ISTA 2016”, Theatre Dance and Performance Training Vol. 8 No. 1, 2017, 40.

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with masters between traditions at ISTA, and the development of the traditions recounted in

each performer's biographical presentation. I consider the directions in which energy is

mobilised by the work of each master in the bios of their tradition as the evolution, or

increased choice between sensory motor actions that masters have offered their chosen

traditions, their own specific accounts of producing luck.

Learning to create the hyperbolic movements of Flamenco we started moving from

one side of the body to the other, stepping in a rhythm of threes. Barba later noted the rhythm

of threes activates the spectator's perception as it transcends the body's dualism, wrong

footing the spectator's expectations. Making these steps it was important to know where to put

the weight. Our hands turned from one side to the other through one hundred and eighty

degrees, the fingers became a fluid continuous hyperbolic arc. We moved between opposing

sides of the body, left and right, inside and outside, creating an extra daily body with an

uneven number of legs and a continuous extroverted surface area. Wrong footing the

audience's expectations is another way of describing the estrangement of the extra – daily

body from daily life. The performer works between the sides of the body, and the

performance works between extra-daily body and the naturalised perception of the spectator.

Through the extra – daily body's activation of the spectator's perception it liquifies the

distinction between self and other, subject and object, matter and biology, one temporality and

another, joining apparently discontinuous planes in new ways.

The extra-daily body of Kathakali was composed with our hips weighted towards the

ground, knees deeply bent, weight on the outside edges of the feet, big toe of the left foot

raised, chest open, chin retracted. The deep stance and precarious balance limited the range of

movement. Surrender to available vectors made the body's movements immediately

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puppet-like. We coordinated circles between different parts of the body, head, torso, and eyes

moving on different scales at the same time. We made circles with the whole upper body, head

torso and arms and eyes moving as one piece. The eyes accompanied this movement with a

dilated gaze. Using the entire upper body as one meant the differentiation of one part was

amplified, becoming an actor. One part could also amplify the effect of another. When the

eyes travelled together with the torso, then fixed their gaze when the foot stomped,

synchronising the gaze with the sound, the eyes were able to strike, and the stomp dilated the

gaze. Barba later pointed out that the parts are never neatly synchronised in performance,

proceeding unevenly. We also learnt to coordinate eye movements with the mudra , a gesture

with a specific meaning. The mudra became the focus, it acquired the capacity to look, and

through its look, to speak, or sing, in a way the expert can hear through their eyes. The

transfer of sensation between one sense and another was the basis of the extra-daily body's

synaesthetic function, that, Barba later described, allowed it to establish an analogy with daily

life.

In Odissi the extra daily body was based on demanding stances that transmitted a soft

organic energy. Within these stances movements coordinated between the head, eyes, spine,

hips, and shoulders. Hands on the hips we changed the direction of the spine's curve and the

placement of feet. The tempo for the changes was given by a stick beating against granite.The

body responded directly to the sound. The stick could imprint the impulses on the actor's body

through a haptic connection, the body formed as a material itself. As the tempo increased, the

impulse absorbed in the actor's body began to flow. Its flow is transferred to the spectator's

body kinaesthetically in performance. The spectator's perception is informed by the actor's

body. The concrete impression of the stick's rhythm can give another pulse to the materiality

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of everyday perception, a new relationship between matter, perception and action.

Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo, who specialised in Flamenco, Kathakali and Odissi at

ISTA is a collective workshop running social projects and teaching alongside its theatrical

productions. Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo members trained in circus and street performance.

Following the Nineteen Seventy Seven International Meeting of Group Theatres in Bergamo,

TTB began training between theatre cultures, establishing the Instituto de Cultura Scenica

Orientale, IXO that contributed to exchange between theatre cultures. Caterina Scotti

described her work in flamenco training with gitanos (Romani people of Spain) who told her

true Flamenco erupts spontaneously as an expression of their culture, panos (non-Romani

people) can't truly dance flamenco but they could teach her technique, which could perhaps be

said for all theatre practices. Flamenco's formal DNA weaves anecdotal moments from life

into culture, crystallising these moments through its work, an eruption beyond form that

creates a pattern of stones and pearls. Scotti demonstrated her work in street performance

waltzing on high stilts. Barba commented on the extreme luxury balance of moving in threes

at this height, breaking the body's duality.

Beppe Chicerichetti, was unable to teach at this session of ISTA though described his

training in Kathakali with Kalamandalam John at the Kalatharamingini Centre for Performing

Arts in Kerala, India in 1978. He waited a month before training under the new moon,

Kathakali's formal DNA is timed through astronomy. Alessandro Rigoletti taught Kathakali at

ISTA. He trained with Bepe for ten years before Bepe commented he was on the right track,

reflecting the ontogenetic duration of training. When Rigoletti and Chierichetti demonstrated

the Kathakali rasa or expression for 'Joy', the duration of the practice was visible in each

actor's eyebrows movements. Barba noted Kathakali's deep stance, exposing the performer's

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vulnerability. This form is covered with many costume layers, striking the spectator obliquely.

Theatrical DNA, the 'secret' of an action, animates many layers of expression. Since Renzo

Vescovi's death in 2005 Tiziana Barbiero has directed TTB. Barbiero described her training in

Odissi dance. Barba commented on the use of montage within the body in Odissi, for example

the hands narrate, the torso enacts, and the face commentates, comparing the form to Dario

Fo's 'one man storytelling'. This resonates with the idea of the collective body of a group

theatre company, where anecdotal roles shift within the whole. Drawing on its theatrical DNA

of Group Theatre, TTB's collective body continues to develop new means of expression.

The extra daily body in Kamigatamai with Kane Yoshimura created a micro – cosmos.

Sliding the left foot back, we lowered to the knees, bowing to the gods, Obe (fan) folded in

front of us, not lowering the head because it could be cut off in the warrior tradition of Nō.

We coordinated movements with the breath, voluntarily directing this involuntary function to

cultivate a “second nature”. The anus was held tight while the upper diaphragm and chest

remained soft, concentrating power in the tantien , centre of the lower belly. We 'caught' the

earth, inhaling drawing energy upwards. We 'caught' the cosmos overhead, exhaling energy

to the tantien from which it shone outwards all over the world. Opposing directions of

movement reflected the extra-daily body's use of natural forces, earth and cosmos,

transmitting a 'third' quality to 'the world'. This third quality could be also seen in the

relationship between the body and the Obe (fan) in Kamigatamai. Opposing sides of the Obe

concertina towards its centre, the kaname. An equivalence between kaname and tantien

allows analogies to develop between body and materiality. This bios is the basis of material

analogies drawn by the spectator between their social experience and the performance.

Kane Yoshimura's biography also reflected a background in diverse artistic disciplines.

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Born in post World War Two Japan she began Kabuki training and classical piano at age five,

though stopped Kabuki a few years later in an era of declining Japanese nationalism and the

Westernisation of Japanese art. She continued studying piano and opera, flamenco and

classical ballet. At Musashino creative arts university in Tokyo 1974, however, she was

influenced by Eishi Kikkawa, a scholar of Japanese music. Kikkawa identified specific values

of Japanese art forms, their relevance to Japan's geography and biology. He wrote about Zen

Buddhist and Shinto philosophies in daily Japanese life and Japanese music, the sensorial

aesthetics in many Japanese art forms, including Nō theatre . Yoshimura began to work in 267

267 In his article The Musical Sense of the Japanese, 1984 Kikkawa describes the relationship between particular pieces of music from the Edo period (of Japan's isolation) to the nature found in their locations, the sound of the wind, sea and insects built into the music that was played in these landscapes with the sound of nature as a backdrop. He comments on the Zen philosophy of fusoku – furi meaning neither together nor separate that influences the intersection of sound, text, melody and action in the performance of Japanese music, an intersecting flow of elements that are not fixed in relation to one another, though harmonise through juxtaposition. He describes the significance placed on timbre as an exact measure of sound, the function of popular music traditions in daily life and the temporality of Shamisen playing that makes time an active part of its form. From interest in the resonance of The Noh play described by Kikkawa with the themes of Kamigatamai performances I have included his description of a Noh play that influenced the composition of many Edo period pieces of music,

“For example, in the Edo-period nagauta piece "Aki no irokusa" ("The grasses of autumn", composed in 1845) the phrase "matsumushi no ne zo tanoshiki" ("the sound of the matsumushi [a kind of cricket] is pleasant") is split into two, and a fairly substantial musical interlude is inserted which expresses the sound of the cricket's chirp onomatopoeically by using the fixed pattern "chinchirorin" in the shamisen part. This "chinchirorin" is said to have been taken from the piece "Mushi no ne" ("The sound of insects") which is a piece in the jiuta repertoire. This piece is in turn based on the no play "Matsumushi" ("The chirp of the crickets"), a drama that was written in the Muromachi period. It offers evidence of the extent to which the sounds of insects were appreciated by the Japanese during that period. The story behind this no play is as follows.

“Once, on the outskirts of what is now Osaka, two men were walking through a pine grove near a place called Abeno. The sounds of the chirping insects were so captivating that one of the men, leaving the path, ventured deep into the pine grove in order to hear them better. The second man, waiting for a long time, became anxious when his friend did not return, and searching for him found him lying dead on the ground. Overcome with sadness for the fate of his friend, he later fell into the habit of returning to the place, compelled to do so by the sounds of the insects. In the actual Nō play itself, the spirits of these two men have appeared in the guise of villagers, who in the autumn season of singing insects have made a custom of drinking sake at the shop of a sake merchant in the village of Abeno. The sake merchant, finding unusual a remark made by one of the men about being reminded of a friend by the sounds of insects, asks them for an explanation, which one of them readily gives. Later, after the sake merchant has prayed, the spirit of the dead man reappears, and dances to the accompaniment of a song listing the names and calls of a number of different insects. Omoshiroya, chigusa ni sudaku mushi no ne no, hatoru oto wa, kirihatari ch,  kirihatari ch6, tsuzurisase ch~, kirigirisu higurashi . . . .  

“How interesting! The sounds of the insects singing in the grass. The sound of weaving [hataoru, which  

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these forms. Her work is embedded in these aesthetics, their relationship with the natural

environment and seasonal change. She trained in Gidayu Bushi (the storytelling of Bunraku

puppet theatre), Shamisen music, Chanoyu (Tea Ceremony) Kendo (Martial arts with a

sword), Kyudo (martial arts with a bow and arrow), Ikebana (flower arrangement), Shodo

(Japanese calligraphy), Waka (traditional poetry in 31 syllables), and Haiku (traditional poetry

in 17 syllables), Nō Theatre, and Kyogen theatre as well as Kamigatamai. Her two 268

Kamigatamai masters were Yukio Yoshimura and Kisho Yoshimura, as well as Nō Masters

Hideo Kanze, and Izumi Mikawa, a living treasure of Japan. As well as working with

Japanese aesthetics, she developed dialogue between Asian forms, through reciprocal

exchange with Kudhiyattam Master G. Venu in Irinjalakuda, Kerala, India, graduating from

International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre, Kerala and as well as teacher of Motoyama

Meridian Ki exercises from Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama in Japan. Her work reflects the importance

of the aesthetics of her national context as the basis for exchange between forms.

At ISTA Yoshimura demonstrated Chanoyu , a tea ceremony composed of actions from

daily life, stirring, waiting, pouring, holding, looking, showing, drinking, wiping, with a

specific temporality. The duration of actions reflect Eishi Kikkawa's suggestion Japanese

aesthetics compose adding elements to time, as opposed to within time in Western traditions.

This can be observed in shamisen and also Kamigatamai. Yoshimura presented an excerpt of

Yashima, the story of a monk meeting the ghost of a general, who recounted the story of his

death on the ancient battle ground. Yoshimura used a double fan, Orgi, placing fans on top of

one another to signal the beginning of the general's tale, a material transition to the story

also forms the name of the hataorimushi, a type of grasshopper] kirihatari, kirihatari [an onomatopoeic  representation of this insect's call], tsuzurisase [another onomatopoeic representation, this time of the sound of  the kirigirisu, another type of grasshopper] kirigirisu, higurashi [a type of cicada].. .”Kikkawa Eishi, “The Musical Sense of the Japanese”, Contemporary Music Review 1:2 (1987), 86 – 88. 268 Yoshimura, kamigatamaitomonokai.org .

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within the story. Barba reminded us of Myerhold's relationship with Japanese scenography

where the actor is a material part of the mise-en-scene, bodies can become material and

materials, vital. The double Orgi framed Yoshimura's body as a ghost, recounting its battles,

its memory outlasting its lifetime. This is also true for theatrical DNA as a form that outlives

particular theatres. Yoshimura performed an excerpt of Tamatori Ama (Tide Jewels) a Seventh

Century story about a pearl diver Ama who strove to capture a pearl guarded by demons from

the ocean floor . Ama cut an incision near her ribs and brought the pearl back inside her 269

body scaring away the daemons with the smell of her blood. She carried the pearl to shore

where she died. The pearl outlived Ama like theatrical form, its DNA outlives the performer

who dives deep to capture its layered form, another crystalline of 'stone of water'.

Roberta Carreri's workshop in group theatre drew on her initial encounter with Odin

Teatret, following the group's performance in Milan in 1972, where she had taken part in an

Odin Teatret workshop which danced to rock and roll music exploring energy within a group.

Over a marathon number of hours, individual dancers drawn out and sent back to carry fresh

energy to the group. The exercise explored collective consciousness, and the role of

individuals' energy within that. In Carreri's workshop at ISTA we began dancing, covering

space, circulating energy within the group. The inter relationship of bodies began to transcend

naturalised subjectivity. We worked with segmentation the intra-relationship of body parts,

using arms, hands, head, spine, face and legs, in single cells of action, introverting and

extroverting these parts. For example, introverting the mouth while the eyes were extroverted,

extroverting both the mouth and eyes while the head was introverted, extroverting the head

while the spine was introverted, extroverting the spine while an arm was introverted,

269 Ama is a popular subject in Japanese woodblock prints and tattoos.

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extroverting a hand while the legs were introverted, introverting one leg and extroverting the

other while the hands were introverted, arms extroverted, spine introverted and head

extroverted, until we were crossing the space, using the legs, arms, head, spine and hands in

varying degrees between these internal and external limits. Roberta asked us to make a

sequence of thirty actions moving one segment at a time. Each segmented action affected the

nature of the whole, the sequence informed by each instant. Segmentation was that pair of

forceps that dilated time. It allowed us to observe the composition of action cell by cell. We

inflected the sequence, or its parts with varying textures, scales, and speeds, with and against

the music. Relations between parts transformed in each variation. The extra-daily body was a

state of flux, assembling and disassembling diverse relations from the same material. Like the

hyperbolic forms of flamenco its introversion and extroversion created a continuum between

disparate frames of action and thought.

Roberta Carreri's (of Odin Teatret) professional biography was anecdotally bound up

with TTB from her study at State University of Milan. Enrolled in 'The Holy Theatre: Artaud,

Grotowski, Barba', her lecturer and founder of TTB Renzo Vescovi advised her to attend Odin

Teatret's performance Min Fars Hus in Spring 1972. The performance had a profound effect

described in Carreri's published autobiography Traces . She attended Odin Teatret's 270

workshop in Bergamo the following day, dancing to rock and roll. In her biographical

presentation Carreri, performed part of work demonstration Traces in the Snow , periodising

the development of her training. She was given a heavy stick to begin her training that would

decide the movements of her body, later substituted for a smaller stick, recording images that

appeared in her improvisations. She developed her own training from the action of 'throwing'

270 Carreri, Traces , 8 – 9.

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from Bocci creating variations. The third season of training began with segmentation and her

work between theatre cultures, marked by the first session of ISTA in Bonn,1980 and her

introduction to Butoh through Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach described in Chapter

One of this thesis. Carreri learnt the theatrical body of Nihon Buyo from Katsuko Azuma at

ISTA in 1980, the relation between gravity, levity, pelvis and spine. She composed 'ISTA

dance' based on the shifting internal tensions of traditions, Balinese dance, Peking Opera, and

Odissi (training with Sanjukta Panigrahi). In 1984 the impact of Butoh in Einstein on the

Beach led Carreri to pursue training with Natsu Nakjima at the festival and then travelling to

Japan in Summer 1986. Perhaps her training in Nihon Buyo may have enabled her to perceive

the internal actions of Butoh, opaque for her colleagues at that time, leading her to pursue

training that contributed to the evolution of her form. Carreri demonstrated her training in

Butoh. Her eyes were unfocused holes, like the eyes of dead people that did not try to see, so

she could see internally, suspended inside of a crystal, a space where she could be entirely

safe. This crystal, like a transparent exoskeleton, allowed her body to be vulnerable within it,

like the DNA of dinosaurs trapped in resin in Jurassic Park , allowed something ancient, 271

another nervous system became visible. In her biography Traces Carerri comments her work

with Katsuko Azuma, Natsu Nakajima and Kazuo Ohno allowed her to find something

previously hidden from herself in this internal body. Her work with these masters became part

of the performance Judith , composed from the first thirteen years of her training.

Parvathy Baul's workshop began with meditation and yoga vinyāsas connecting the

breath, body, and thought. We worked on cyclic breathing between the lower stomach and

forehead, the lower and upper resonators, the body and the centre of thought. We added a hum

271 The 1993 Steven Spielberg movie where dinosaurs are brought back to life.

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like an insect that continued without as breath flowed in and out. Feet hip distance apart, hips

weighted towards the ground, upper body vertical and light, the hips moved in a wide circle

while we made the lowest 'ah' sound possible. The sound came through the feet and lower

body. The hands lightly mimed holding the Ektara , the one stringed instrument of this

tradition. The Ektara 's external structure is a light, cylindrical base with two light wooden

supports that tension its internal string. Parvathy recounted the lineage of Bauls who had used

this particular Ektara . The depth and lightness of the pose with its low sound touched a string

inside my body, that resonated with sensation, a mixture of pain, sadness and joy. The

experience of this pose and sensation made it possible for Parvathy's performance Achin

Pakhi (The Unknown Bird), to resonate with this string when she performed it in Albino.

Through the Baul workshop, the sensation moved from the lowest regions of the body

upward, as I had observed of Parvathy's initial performance fragment. We also worked on

spinning, perhaps originally influenced by the Sufi tradition. Left foot central, the right

stepped towards and around it, head in line with the body, gaze above the horizon. Arms

moved away from the centre, left above right, then spiralled back, right above left. Following

a continuous hyperbolic line the hands linked the two sides of the body, a converging and

diverging arc. As the spinning increased, arms suspended by centrifugal force, perpetuated the

loop without effort. There was a sense of stillness at the centre of this practice. Something

worked its way up on the vertical axis. It was my sensation of being inverted, hard on the

outside and soft on the inside, an awareness I gained from participating in this practice. This

was like the stone Parvathy had thrown to the spectators, knowledge drawn from the depths.

Parvathy Baul's professional biography also reflected a relationship between her

inherited tradition and its particular expression in her experience. The Baul tradition is highly

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revered in Bengali culture, though Bauls themselves live as social outcasts. Breaking the

musical structures of Classical Indian traditions, Parvathy described Baul as a “tradition of

madness”. She came to Baul while studying at West Bengal's Kala Bhawan, a university

founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Having heard a blind Baul singing on her journey to the

university, she later became a pupil of Phulmala Dashi, a Baul singer who visited the

university campus and for whom she began to collect the money. She repeated songs with

Dashi during her daily commute, for which she was expelled from the university, and

excluded by her peers. Dashi played Baul music for her basic living, the DNA of the mystic

tradition serving her essential needs. After she learnt Dashi's songs, Parvathi was encouraged

by Dashi to train with a guru. Parvathy described how she sat silently with her first guru

Santan Das Baul, for fifteen days before he spoke to her. Santan Das Baul taught her his

repertoire, the beginning of songs, that Parvathy later learnt the endings to, from her second

guru, Shashanko Goshai. The DNA of the form threaded between the two gurus' lives.

Shahanko Goshai Baul was ninety seven when Parvathy Baul became his gurukul. When he

died, Parvathy described his wife had called her to bring some water, she placed a single drop

on his tongue and it seemingly dissolved the bonds of his life and he passed away.

The dual veneration and marginalisation of Bauls in Bengali life reflects that theatrical

DNA is often essential to but set apart from everyday life. Parvathy described that in a

performance the Baul imagines a veil between herself and her spectators. The veil facilitates

connection between them. The moment of encounter elicits the performance, as with the extra

– daily body that allows spectators to connect with performers through the estrangement of

their behaviour. The Baul's long training can speak in the instant of performance to the

anecdotal circumstances of the spectator's everyday lives. The simultaneous durations of

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practice, the long practice of tradition and the immediacy of encountering spectators was

reflected in Parvathy Baul's performance The Unknown Bird. When Parvathy performed

Lalon Fakir's Eighteenth Century narrative of exile it formed an analogy with my experience

as a spectator. Another example of estrangement as the basis of connection, the 'unknown

bird' passed between thresholds of meaning on levels often distinct in everyday life. Parvathy

described the tradition of Baul as a river that flows upwards, at the twilight of language”.

Julia Varley's vocal workshop in group theatre composed an extra – daily body as the

sub score for text, spoken and sung. Varley's work demonstration The Echo of Silence 272

(included in the ISTA's quasiluna night time session) showed how the texture of vocal actions

impacts the spectator obliquely. She spoke about her struggle with a quavering voice in

training, which originated from straining to follow other voices at Odin Teatret. About her

published biography Stones of Water she writes, “My voice reveals the sense of insecurity that

always accompanies me even though I have learned that this vulnerability – and the capacity

to offer it as it is – is part of my strength as an actress.” Her voice began to recover in 273

Kerala, India where singing quavered between tones, allowing her voice to be part of the

song. She worked gently with vocal actions responding to concrete circumstances, calling to a

person for example, rather than shouting. In the workshop she used physical actions to

develop the vocal texture. Running, skipping, jumping, pushing, pulling, the text followed the

actions giving the voice a material base, disrupting our assumptions. We used images, a ball

thrown by the surf, the fog that covers Rio De Janeiro in the early morning, Brezhnev's

inaugural speech, for example, to create vocal scores that followed the images. The voice

performed the action from the feet, rather than the upper body. We worked with distance,

272 See Varley, Notes of An Odin Actress , 78 – 86. 273 Varley, Notes of An Odin Actress , 24.

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weight and resistance. Where a habitual tone for reciting text projected meanings, limiting the

text's potential, working with physical actions broke these habits. The scores could be used as

a sub score. In her written autobiography, Varley describes the difficulty of speaking about

voice. Language is strongly associated with meaning. Vocal actions show how the voice acts,

rather than focusing on what it says. The Echo of Silence also considered context, pretext and

subtext, alongside texture as the material conditions of speech, reflecting it is how the voice

speaks and what it does that creates meaning. Varley did not give a biographical presentation

at ISTA, but I have included a detailed discussion of her work with Barba at the event in

Chapter Five as well as further observations of her work as an actress in Chapter Seven.

Following her workshop I have included biographical information from Iben Rassmussen,

another Odin Teatret actress who presented her professional biography but did not teach a

workshop at ISTA.

Daughter of Danish poet laureate Halfdan Rasmussen and literary mother Esther

Rasmussen, Iben Rasmussen joined Odin Teatret in 1966 by workshop audition, suffering

withdrawal from heroin addiction. At ISTA Iben demonstrated her training shown in early

Odin Teatret videos where actors trained to fight with sticks, giving the impulse to their

partner to duck or jump. The sticks audibly cut the air. Drawing back the stick in a sats and 274

following through allowed the actors to transmit coherent impulses to their partner, impelling

the other actor to react. The material impulses prepared actors to transmit impulses to a

spectator at this first stage of their training. Rasmussen showed an excerpt of Itsy Bitsy , a

performance about early sixties counterculture movements, anti – nuclear activism,

hitchhiking to India with Danish Beat Poet Eik Skaløe (her partner who took his life before

274 The Danish word “clause or, to be about to”, used at Odin Teatret to refer to the movement that proceeds an action.

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she joined Odin Teatret), drugs. Her experience merged with the theatrical DNA or pre –

expressivity of her training to transcend subjectivity and become resonant as the story of a

generation in her performance. She recounted her experiences with drugs, smoking hash, to

searching across her skin for a vein. The softness of her actions that accompanied her text

gave the impression of a foetus gestating in a womb, contrasting with the harsh topic of her

narrative, the pre – history of her theatrical career. The rigour of her early training gave her

the capacity to transmit impulses which brought her senses back to life. Their development

over time gained the subtlety necessary for her experience to be transmitted. Rasmussen also

presented fragments of her characters from Odin Teatret. Barba asked us to watch her feet” as

she repeated each fragment with and without sound. Each time she 'stepped into' a role her

stance changed, marking a transformation. This was the relationship between the spine and

the legs, the DNA of the action. The essential information could be expressed with or without

the voice, arms, with a different scale, texture, orientation, the anecdotal expression of her

actions.

I have no notes from I Wayan Bawa's class, I was broken after participating. Perhaps it

was the most rigorous extra – daily body I had encountered. There are many elements I can

recall from the workshop, anima and animus energies, between the steps we learnt for

characters of different genders. We created a rigorous extra – daily body from its deep stance

with turned out lower limbs. The stance bent deep into one leg balancing on the ball of the

foot of the other, articulating that joint. The calf of that leg rotated forwards creating an

extended torque while the weight was pushed back and forwards between the legs, the uneven

gait replicating itself on either side of the body. The power of the stance came from its centre.

The shoulders elevated, extending the torso towards the head and extending the energy

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produced by the torque through the fingertips. The head and eyes moved in opposition with

the torso and legs. We also practiced the co – ordinated group rhythms of Kečak with Bawa in

the break, each learning a rhythmic part of the ritual chant. I was too exhausted to write

anything down. The internal sensations will have to remain a secret for the moment, an actual

example of overcoming subjectivity. I can say however, that it did fix the problem I had with

my shoulder.

As I Wayan Bawa described in his biography, he was one of twelve brothers born to I

Nyoman Sadeg, a renowned performer of Topeng, masked dance drama. His biography

reflected the role of diverse mediums in his theatrical DNA. As a child I Wayan Bawa was

interested in dance. At nine, his father taught him to sing. He studied painting, before being

apprenticed to I Made Djimat, one of Bali's foremost masters in Gambuh performance,

Topeng, Tjalonarang and the drama of magic. He started his apprenticeship as part of the

music ensemble, giving the impulses to actors. This laid the foundation for his acting when he

was asked to do the role of the horse following the lead actor, because of his father's work,

though he was also studying at the theatre school (STSI). Bawa's theatrical body was formed

through song, storytelling, painting and finally dancing, a process that reflects the relationship

between forms that created the synaesthetic impact of his form's DNA on a spectator. This

work could be compared to the Bauhaus conception of the artist as a gesamtkunstwerker

reflecting the way the forms condition experience and exceed subjectivity in everyday life.

His work between these various disciplines allowed Bawa to perceive analogies between

rhythm, tone, composition, action, melody. At ISTA I Wayan Bawa also demonstrated

Topeng. Topeng is a ritual temple performance played through a cycle of silent full masks and

speaking half masks. It begins with Topeng Tua (the old man) and ends with Sidya Kharya

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(the divinity) who sprinkles holy water, holding up a white cloth to protect spectators from

evil spirits. Despite my removal from Balinese cultural life these masked figures resonated as

recognisable types, as Gordon Craig observed of Nō masks' relationship to Greek archetypes.

The cycle denaturalised the fixed identity of each type, revealing them as variations on form.

Topeng's cycle restores a sense of the transformation possible within and between social types

through the form's DNA.

'Learning to learn' confronted my various vulnerabilities and tensions. Carreri

commented that my fingers and toes were stiff, reflecting fear. Varley suggested I was

studying rather than doing the action, perhaps reflections of my resistance to going into a dark

space of the unknown. This dark space could be compared to the central space inside the

kaname's cylindrical pin, the point towards which my research concertinas, and which allows

it to unfurl. The thesis itself is an organ of luck that produces a continuum between

discontinuous states of action and thought, knowledge and the unknown. I felt some

improvement when I focused on a very gentle attention towards the central part of my body,

difficult to coordinate with outwards awareness. I also felt improvement when I focused on

openness, expanding my awareness of others in space, though this was also difficult to

coordinate with the internal awareness. Moving between poles of internal and external

perception I record my body's thoughts as steps to create a textured continuum, luck I can

share with other people. This continuum has been considered within the context of the

master's biographical experiences and the evolution of their form. Both mark the actions

performed within the training of the extra – daily body, or the evolution of a tradition. The

particular theatrical composition of this body, or its “DNA” can resist colonial influence,

create relationships between cultures of theatre or both. The estrangement of the performer's

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extra – daily body from everyday life is the basis of the analogy it forms with spectators'

experiences. Its composition, observed through training and as a spectator at ISTA, develops a

continuum between distinct levels of matter, biology and thought, diverse spatio – temporal

frames, developing their energies in different directions. Its capacity to snake in hyperbolic

lines through matter, biology and social contexts reflects the value of theatrical action for

transformation and evolution, theatre's capacity to produce luck. The next section “Cases of

Luck” focuses on 'The School of Seeing: the Actor's Presence and Spectator's Perception'

where Barba directed a short composition with Julia Varley (Odin Teatret) and I Wayan Bawa

(Balinese theatre traditions). It explores the way pre – expressive actions transform

relationships between parts of the performer's bios , through which the performer's work

becomes as a form of speech analogous to language. This is the 'snake', a continuum between

orders of being, that semiotics can only grasp the skin of. The connection between matter,

biology, cognition and everyday life allows theatre to speak, through which it produces

specific evolutions within concrete circumstances as luck. Chapter Five identifies distinct

circumstances in which the modes of speech developed at ISTA resonate.

Cases of Luck

The previous sections recorded how the extra – daily body evolves as a montage between

functions within the performer's body. Through this evolution it develops hyperbolic links

between orders of being, matter, biology, consciousness, intellect, between social and

theatrical cultures. This continuum has been traced through the performer's bios as well as the

development of theatrical forms. 'Cases of Luck' identifies the plasticity of this continuum

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that allows the performing body to speak. The performing body speaks via relationships

between these orders of being. Its actions direct the continuum of the bios in ways that can be

compared to the dynamic actions at the basis of language, linguistic cases. I draw on the

analogy of linguistic cases because they are actions performed by language, rather than

linguistic signifiers. They explain how language enacts meaning, and describe the syntax of

action. This does not limit action to a linguistic mode. Language is simply another system

through which humans escape their determinism. Action connects these systems and is

already present within the natural world, the already intelligent direction of which we follow.

At ISTA Barba traced the development of his work to the DNA of his apprenticeship

with Grotowski, but also to his anecdotal experience as an Italian immigrant in Norway in the

Nineteen Fifties. Without language, the dynamics of expression dominated during his welding

apprenticeship. Barred from conventional theatre, he formed Odin Teatret with students

rejected from theatre school in Nineteen Sixty Four. In Nineteen Seventy Seven Odin actors

trained in basic steps from different traditions a living text book that led Barba to found ISTA

and the field of Theatre Anthropology in Nineteen Seventy Nine. Theatre Anthropology

became a language for theatre between cultures, elaborating pre – expressive principles.

Barba has directed Seventy Seven productions with Odin Teatret and Theatrum Mundi

Ensemble since Nineteen Sixty Four. As well as working on the advisory boards of The

Drama Review , Performance Research , New Theatre Quarterly , Teatro e Storia , Urdimento ,

his books include The Paper Canoe , Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, Land of Ashes and

Diamonds, My Apprenticeship in Poland followed by 26 letters from Jerzy Grotowski to

Eugenio Barba , On Dramaturgy and Directing: Burning the House , A Dictionary of Theatre

Anthropology with Nicola Savarese. Barba's work at ISTA since 1980 can be seen in Odin

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Teatret's video archives. At Cohabitation on theatrical structure 2015 Barba screened his

work with Sanjukta Panigrahi from Bonn session of ISTA in 1980. It's possible to see Barba

reducing the expression of actions to demonstrate the formal pre – expressive dynamics (or

DNA) within Odissi's theatrical language of actions.

In the afternoon sessions of ISTA XV 'The School of Seeing: the Actor's Presence and

Spectator's Perception' Barba demonstrated his work with actors on the pre – expressive level.

One afternoon Barba worked with text by Zeami written during his Fifteenth Century exile on

Sado Island, or so I thought from his introduction to the improvisation. As an aside, I mention

this was not the case, giving an anecdote of my fruitful misunderstanding. I took careful notes

from the improvisation, articulating the insights about the modulation of pre – expressivity

and plasticity of meaning, I wondered “Could the scene be speaking about Zeami's work

between classical and vernacular traditions, or Zen Budhist and Shinto traditions, how could I

reflect on the relationship between Judeo – Christian ethical – religious poetics in an

intercultural context?” During Holstebro Festuge in 2017 I asked Barba about the text.

Paraphrasing, he said, “Yes, but which Zeami text did I use? Did I say?” “No” I replied. “Very

likely then, I made it up.” Paraphrasing, creatively, from Barba's speech and reminding the

reader this is an account of a young artist's process, he said,

This is how we make an improvisation at Odin Teatret. When I give my actors material the words are a kind of energetic impulse, a way of transferring something very concrete to the actor. Something that will capture the actor's imagination. At this stage the director is not concerned with meanings. The director is looking for something that attracts him. I know that Julia has been reading a book about Zeami, so I give her a text, perhaps 'from Zeami' that will capture her imagination. I say to Bawa, a powerful king... magical books... Gambuh is full of powerful kings and magical books, these are all things that Bawa knows about. Julia is used to inventing things in this way because she has been training here, working in this way, so I give her something a little bit more complicated. I give something more simple to Bawa because he is totally not used to working in this way, he is used to working with set

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routines. But he translates it, using the tools of his tradition. To make it more or less his own. 275

Language is an energetic impulse, a concrete way of stimulating the actor and their

experience. The impulse becomes an energetic continuum that passes through the many orders

of being experienced by the director to actor and back again. Through this exchange the body

can begin to speak, as I observed at ISTA. To continue to describe Barba's work as ISTA, he

said “We take a text, perhaps belonging to the Nō theatre, perhaps written by Zeami,” or

something like that. “We begin by understanding the text.” He read line by line, ensuring

spectators understood the words in English. Julia Varley composed a sequence of actions as

Barba read. Her actions worked on the pre – expressive level equivalent to forms expressed in

the text. The text mentioned “a boat, arriving into a cove, it hoisted its mast, in the reflection

of the moon. The cove was covered with seaweed, crabs scuttled over the rocks. Ashore, the

figure found the island was already inhabited. The presence of a God, a benevolent spirit.” 276

The landscape in the text formed a material analogy with the material level of the body. There

was something that reminded me of the well known Romantic English Browning poem

Meeting at Night , the body and landscape forming a reciprocal analogy. Though this example

was animist. Varley worked with the body as landscape, the body as vital matter, and the

figure her body animated. The material link between body and landscape allowed Varley to

act as subject and object, the dual presence she describes in her autobiography, on a

geomorphic level. The layered presence of the body made it possible to discuss the

multiplicity of registers in which it speaks.

Watching Julia Varley's actions at ISTA, reacting to Barba's text I saw the shifting

275 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered. 276 Williams, Field Research , Private Collection (2016), unnumbered.

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relationships between her body, its matter, and the dynamic relationship between actions as a

very concrete series of transformations. They reminded me of an experience I had as a

teenager doing exams in Japanese where at times we were using characters that I didn't

understand, but that I could use with accuracy because of my concrete knowledge of how the

characters transformed to perform grammatical functions within a text, their pre – expressive

actions within the text. Her concrete actions transformed the conceptual parameters of the

body and space without necessarily engaging with meaning, bringing life to the pre –

expressive level of action of both the body and the text. Speaking about Judith, Carreri

describes how she portrayed subject and object successively. The actor can enact several

registers simultaneously as in Odissi, Dario Fo, or Peking Opera, where, creating a montage

within the body allows hands to speak, the face comments on the body that acts, for example.

These pre – expressive modes can be explored through an analogy with grammatical cases

that underlie expression in some languages. Although there are no grammatical cases in

English I know them from Russian. They are common in Indo – European and Asian

languages as a morphological notion, meaning words declined in cases often do not have to

obey a set order in a sentence. Although cases and their uses vary between languages, they are

a signal of the common functions words play or the actions they perform which are not

limited by particular expressions. Their transformation does not change the word, only its

expression. To demonstrate this analogy, I have described Varley's actions, then the relational

dynamics of the sequence using this analogy.

Varley looked over the edge of the boat. Her body straightened and, standing erect,

became the mast of the boat. Arching her body into a sail she also became a homonym with

the crescent moon shining above the boat. Her hands moved up to her face, that beheld and

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then became the moon. Her arms curved to either side, forming the enclave as the cove into

which the boat sailed. Her feet spoke to us about the surface of the island with a jagged walk

in segmented motion popping seaweed with the balls then heels of the feet. Her hands scuttled

as crabs over the rocks to the sides of her body. She turned about the island as in

Kamigatamai training we learned signifies 'an island', though dilated in space. Her torso

inclined upwards and knees bent towards the ground. Her face retracted, reflecting she

apprehended a presence inhabited the island. Her head and arms opened outwards as she

revealed it was a benevolent god.

Speaking through the analogy of cases to describe Varley's actions, she first inhabited

the role of subject as protagonist. She then became the object, the erect mast of the ship.

Arching to become the ship's sail her body modulated between anima and animus soft and

hard energies. Varley's curved line could be described as the genitive case, the sail of the ship,

or the instrumental the sail by which the boat is moved. Her body created a homonym or

visual rhyme between sail and moon, two images on the synchronic axes. Hands move to her

face again the subject who looks at the moon. Her hands be – held the face of the moon,

genitive case, the object that reflects the subject's gaze, an accusative designation of the

subject's face. The reflective ( anima ) surface of the moon illuminates ( animus ) the concave

cove ( anima ). The cove's shape directed attention to the unknown interior of the body, the

image was a curved genitive image, of a generative concave host. Head introverted, the feet

became actors, adverbs magnifying the uneven texture of seaweed as they walk across the

slippery rocks. The crabs are anecdotally mentioned, a sub-clause illustrated with the hands.

Her turn about the island, perhaps inspired by Kamigatamai, could also be expressed in the

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dative case about, as Varley walked about the island. She reacted to the presence of the 277

spirit gazing upwards, as subject speaking in the accusative case about the animate object of

its gaze. Knees bent, torso inclined, her vision and body dilated towards the benevolent spirit,

a subject speaking in the genitive case. Her reaction was 'decided'. As described by Barba in

The Secret Art of the Performer, the 'decided' body uses the middle voice between active and

passive that persists in some languages from Ancient Greek. Like the middle voice between

action and re – action, the decided body conveys pre – expressive action as a continuum

between modes of being.

Barba worked with I Wayan Bawa using text about a powerful king who stole magical

books from a neighbouring kingdom, and then between the actors, asking them to alternate

their actions. In the interaction the dynamic relationships between the actions changed, for

example contraction could become retraction, dilation, a challenge. Barba worked to re –

orient the actions and reactions with one another, reducing the number of steps, redirecting the

eyes, adding text with the actions which stopped in the actors' pauses. He described the

relationship between the actors as a 'wave' of changes in tension or impulses containing many

peripeteia, or turning points. This energetic wave animated the bodies, revealing meaning as

contingent on adapting the materiality of pre – expression. In this way theatricality disrupts

projected meanings allowing new potentials to emerge. This can be seen in Barba's comment

on how he works with the breath. He commented that actors automatically breathe according

to the punctuation of a text, which is not the way we speak in daily life, where a person

speaks until they need to breathe, the dominance of meaning over the body. Barba asks the

actor to learn their text disregarding punctuation, fixing the breath where the body dictates.

277 Or dative depending on the specific language.

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The body can help us to find new forms of speech. Barba asked the actors to perform the

actions at fifty percent, ten percent, the impulses of the actions, adding text, working at one

hundred percent with musical accompaniment, or at ten percent seated, at ten percent seated

with a text. The modulated improvisations and the vastly different functions they performed

were captured in Barba's comment that this capacity for transformation was what led Artaud

and Grotowski among others to suggest theatre could be a vehicle for something else, perhaps

speaking about this evolutionary function of producing luck.

Activated by the materiality of text, Varley's actions functioned between orders of

matter, biology, and consciousness, to speak, like the island's forms lit by the moon with its

benevolent gods, through their presence. Their speech reveals language and intellect to be

fragments of perception within the evolving organism, as the figure is one part of her

montage. Her work reflects dynamic actions are the common element between pre –

expression in theatre and in language. These actions are founded in relationships already

present in nature, and open thought, on one hand, onto the natural world, and on the other,

onto discourse. Discourse itself could also be understood as a form of human action, an

evolutionary tool for transformation. As Varley encounters the island, its matter, biology and

unseen forces through the actress' bios , action beyond rational projection informs thought. It

speaks through a dynamic (discontinuous) continuum between orders of being. This

continuum wriggles, like the body of a snake, shifting relationships between the links in the

chain of consciousness. The transformations of the montage developed between Varley and I

Wayan Bawa channel the energy of this chain towards free acts, transforming through Barba's

concrete directions. As Barba speaks of a wave of peripeteia, we see flows of action and

matter as a wave that continues its transformation unless it is stopped by an obstacle. The next

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chapter, “Chapter Five: A Case For Luck' comments on various obstacles in the production of

luck in my own social context, voices that have contributed to free action between orders of

being, and the relationship between theatre and social transformation at the Holstebro Festuge

(Festive Week) in 2014 and 2017.

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Chapter Five: A Case For Luck: The Production of Luck in a Social Context

The body speaks through the montage of its functions in action. These actions wriggle,

like the body of a snake, between orders of being, producing luck. The action of this snake is

an act of will. It can bring simultaneous time frames into the present, or weave new

relationships between matter and consciousness. Following the previous discussion of

linguistic cases, this chapter, Chapter Five: “A Case For Luck: The Production of Luck in a

Social Context” considers my own context. In this chapter, the action's capacity to speak

resonates as theatrical, social and cultural. Giving a brief account of the development of my

practice, the chapter considers the gambler's luck ingrained in the Australian psyche. It draws

on the well known Twentieth Century commentator Donald Horne's notion of luck, from The

Lucky Country , his critique of Australian society that prevents luck from being produced. His

critique holds true however, also for his own work, that, without departing from a rational

mode of critique, cannot exit its cycle of projected knowledge. These projections are

contested in Australian theatre, observed by Kath Leahy in Lords and Larrikins , where the

division between action and speech prevents luck from being produced. The material basis of

action can be found in other disciplines, such as through Indigenous economist Tracker

Tilmouth's work, recorded in Alexis Wright's biography of Tilmouth, Tracker. His arguably

theatrical notion of Indigenous economics resonates with the large form social transformation

found, for example, in the theatrical context of the Holstebro Festuge. Wright's epic story

Carpentaria is a parable that transmits this concept of transformation between orders, cultures

and social settings, weaving a new image of the snake which produces luck.

The DNA of my theatre practice is informed by physical, material, and intellectual

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forms. Physically I began training in gymnastics from age six. Our primary school staged

themed musicals at the local Returned Services Leagues Club in Parkes, a medium sized town

in Rural New South Wales where I performed idiosyncratic bit parts, including fragments of

Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. My High School, West of Sydney subscribed to Penrith's Q 278

Theatre, offering post World War II Australian and Anglo – American plays. As a young

reader I was heartened by Raymond William's description of Brecht's dismal early work in a

second hand copy of Drama From Ibsen to Brecht found in a local book shop when I was a

teenager researching Peter Schaeffer’s Equus . At University I directed Ionesco's The Bald

Prima Donna , studying languages and Art History, and wrote The Man From the Chip Shop ,

between Ocker Comedy and Absurdist traditions. Although gratified, I wanted to find out

what lay outside my ideas, understanding how to convey these to actors, but not how to

respond to living flesh. I might miss something, I thought, as I assumed my Mother might

have in her work as a councilor, listening to other people, if I did not engage with my own

actions. Although not really a performer, I joined a contemporary theatre ensemble at PACT

Theatre and completed a Masters degree in Sculpture, Installation Performance at Sydney

College of the Arts. There were no actors at art school so I was forced to work with my own

body to create The Seagull , based on Chekhov's naturalist classic, the story of a bird's life in

art. I began training with Ira Seidenstein, an acrobat influenced by Odin Teatret who taught

clown, while I tutored for Laleen Jayamanne's Silent to Sound Cinema and Cross Cultural

Perspectives on Film at University of Sydney. As a young artist I was commissioned to make

Impossible Plays for the Next Wave Festival 2012, a verbatim theatre performance that

reimagined social life through the fantasies of strangers, a Drag King, Arrernte watercolor 279

278 A working class suburb in Western Sydney. 279 Aboriginal Australian peoples who live in Arrernte Lands, Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in Australia's

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artist, Street Poet, and a Tarot Card Reader. Stepping beyond projected knowledge, as I have

described in this thesis, I felt my practice to be at the mercy of circumstance. The Production

of Luck has been a kind of resistance to circumstance, the mercantile imperatives of

mainstream contemporary alternative theatre on one hand, and the immobility of academia on

the other. It has allowed its actions to begin to speak between the two producing luck through

action in the unknown. While researching I have also taught acting at the Q Theatre and

National Institute of Dramatic Arts Open courses, and worked for socially engaged theatre

companies as a director and workshop facilitator at Big hArt, Shopfront Youth Arts, Milk

Crate Theatre Company, Shopfront Arts Co – op, as well as pursuing my own practice. The

divisions between intellect and action that prompted me to step into the unknown, beyond

gratification, can also be traced through the material circumstances of an Australian social and

cultural context, as described and exemplified by some of its most important commentators.

“The Lucky Country”

What does it mean to speak about luck in an Australian social and cultural context? What is

the resonance of producing luck in this context? Australia is colloquially known to locals as

“The Lucky Country” after Donald Horne's 1964 commentary of the same name. Although

this has been adopted as a popular expression, Horne's original intention was to criticise those

who lived off the 'luck' that was produced outside the managerial culture of Australian

politics. On one hand Horne described the practical ingenuity of an Australian working class,

and on the other a culture of managerial control throughout Australian institutions. His idea

Northern Territory.

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reflects what is at stake for this thesis, the relationship between action on one hand, and

thought on the other. He writes “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second – rate

people who share its luck.” He describes the Westminster System of government, a legacy 280

of the penal history of the Australian colony as an abstract system without a relationship to its

land. Writing in the nineteen sixties he was of course unable to conceive of Indigenous

sovereignty (or even self determination) but his writing indicates there is some fault with our

luck, expressed as dialogue between action and thought in the formation of culture. Horne

continues his critique of government,

It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. A nation more concerned with styles of life than with achievement... inimical to originality and the desire for excellence (except in sport) and in which there is less and less acclamation of hard work. According to the rules Australia has not deserved its good fortune. 281

Although we're not told exactly what these rules of deserving luck are, it seems the

foundation of Australian government in action is shaky. He describes the domesticated

Australian character as “a man in an open necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice cream. His

kiddy is beside him.” In 1964 Horne thought technological and environmental change 282

would necessitate social and political change, or destruction of “Australia” would be

imminent. In 2019, while Australia continues on, its mercantile values continue to oppose 283

action in the face of change. Horne traces the predicament through public and domestic

spheres, intellectual life, intercultural relationships within Australia and in Asia, “womens'”

280 Horne, Lucky Country , xi. 281 Horne, Lucky Country , xi. 282 Horne, Lucky Country , 20. 283 Horne, Lucky Country , xx.

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spheres of influence, education and in the arts.

Horne states his work was progressive for its time but would be seen as racist today. 284

He describes what he perceived to be a practical minded Australian carrying out a “non –

rhetorical” set of values within the Asia Pacific region,

The pragmatic, sceptical Australian can walk through the rhetoric of Asia like a blind man avoiding bullets. They are out there in Asia, advising on pest control, credit policies, irrigation, language teaching, some of the thousand little things that help civilisations survive the radiations of their own bombast. 285

This is a bombastic description of what others may see as economic and cultural imperialism.

He writes about women, which was again progressive for his time, describing the domestic

sphere where women shaped the values of future generations. Though of course his work is

retrospectively sexist, observing womens' generalised interest in undies and bedspreads. He 286

concludes with an exhausting list of “Australian qualities”,

non – doctrinaire tolerance, their sense of pleasure, their sense of fair play, their interest in material things, their sense of family, their identity with nature and their sense of reserve, their adaptability when the way is shown, their fraternalism, their scepticism, their talent for improvisation, their courage and stoicism. 287

Horne seeks to escape from what he sees as an obsession with defining a national character

stemming from the 1890's, saying “There is a desire to maintain traditional standards of what

Australian should mean instead of finding out what it does mean.” And yet we can see that 288

working within the mode of critique, Horne is unable to exit this cycle of defining identifying

284 Horne, Lucky Country , xx. 285 Horne, Lucky Country , 243. 286 Horne, Lucky Country , 77-9. 287 Horne, Lucky Country , 245. 288 Horne, Lucky Country , 18.

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qualities.

On the face of it Australia has a gamblers' luck. Even the use of the phrase 'gamblers' luck' can be misleading; it suggests knowledge of risk and insecurity, when it is a feature of Australian life not to take insecurities into account. The saving Australian characteristic – and this has some of the gambler's cool about it – is the ability to change course quickly, even at the last moment, and to seek a quick, easy way out. Australians have good nerves. They hate discussion and 'theory' but they can step quickly out of the way if events are about to smack them in the face. 289

His work reflects the rift within Australian cultures between action and thought, a rift that he

is also unable to overcome in his own rationalist approach to this issue.

Horn also acknowledges the role of mercantile values limiting social evolution, stating

“originality and feeling for excellence is absorbed into matters of immense triviality – a new

knob of a TV set, a new way of slicing beans” , though was unable to distance himself from 290

industrial interests when they presented themselves as national interests. He quotes the

wartime rhetoric of Vance Palmer,

there is an Australia of the spirit... quite different from those bubbles of old world imperialism... it has something to contribute to the world. Not emphatically in the arts as yet, but in arenas of action, and in ideas for the creation of that egalitarian democracy that will have to be the basis for all civilised societies in the future. 291

The value of speaking about Donald Horne is that his notion of luck articulates the

impossibility of meaningful action in a context where management and self identity have lost

their relationship with action. Despite the limitations of his text, many of which were

acknowledged by Horne himself, his aim is to define the conditions of meaningful action in

289 Horne, Lucky Country , 235. 290 Horne, Lucky Country , 38. 291 Horne, Lucky Country , 11.

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an Australian context. His notion of meaningful action is defined by the relationship between

the material concerns of the country, the actions of its people, the formation of governing

systems and international partnerships in which these actions and concerns could speak. The

resonance of this speech, between action and thought is a concern within many strata of

Australian society and culture. It is played out in Kath Leahy's account of “The Larrikin

Revolution” in Lords and Larrikins: The Actor's Role in the Making of Australia. She

articulates the literal difficulties posed towards actor's speech from social and cultural

perspectives, as well as the rift between the language of action that was developed by

virtuosic performers such as Reg Livermore, and the intellectual culture of theatre that was

unable to resonate with their work.

Speech acts

Leahy describes how actors' speech was part of contesting social power structures during the

'Whitlam era'. The Whitlam era was a period of social transformation and progressive

government from 1972 – 1976 led by Gough Whitlam . Whitlam was sacked in 1976 by the 292

Governor General, the Queen's representative in Australia, in response to which Donald

Horne published The Death of the Lucky Country contesting that even the imported

Westminster System of government had been violated by this decision. The period of 293

Whitlam's government was characterised by social mobility. It was an era of protest, against

Vietnam war conscription, gay pride, Indigenous civil rights movements, women's movement,

292 Whitlam was the first Labour Prime Minister of Australia since 1949. 293 Donald Horne, The Death of the Lucy Country (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1976).

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sexual revolution, and the end of the White Australia Policy. Leahy notes that during this 294

era, the 1975 National Critics Award was shared between two productions that seemed to

have come from very separate parts of this world, John Bell's Royal Shakespeare Company

influenced Much Ado About Nothing and Reg Livermore's scandalous comedy Betty Blokk

Buster Follies . The two represented different poles of theatrical speech, one anchored in a

project of cultural 'legitimacy', and the other that belonged to what Leahy calls “The Larrikin

Revolution”. The Larrikin Revolution, she says, spoke a colourful new Aussie lingo. Popular

movements joined stage based vaudeville cultures to T.V. variety shows, producing Graeme

Bond's Aunty Jack Show , Gary McDonald's character Norman Gunston, as well as Paul

Hogan's 'Hoges', who defined Ocker Comedy as an Australian genre on film. Ocker 295

comedians were the popular counterpoint to the National Policy for the Arts' doomed mission

to produce a 'legitimate' sense of national identity that appealed to an outdated and imagined

idea of English culture. Ocker comedians provoked the censors and inspired a fear of

degeneracy, though as a parody of the working classes, often seemed to have a bet each way.

Leahy takes up the problem of speech quite literally in her discussion of the 'New

Wave' of Australian theatre emerging from the Sixties and Seventies. She describes the

Catholic roots of John Bell of Bell Shakespeare at Marist Brothers School in Maitland (the

same school as my Poppy who left school at 13, though, to provide for this family). Bell

continued on to Sydney University as a scholarship student and then to the Royal Shakespeare

Company. She describes the class based transvestitism of his performances, leading actors

speaking in the voice of upper middle class Australia. The production of Hamlet that 296

294 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 143. 295 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 143. 296 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 144.

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established Bell at the Nimrod Theatre in 1973 did not perform its clown roles. Its sole grave

digger, Leahy says, appeared more like a lost archaeologist in an undergraduate moot than a

person belonging to an agricultural class. Such was our relationship with the Earth in the

'legitimate theatre'. The production of Much Ado About Nothing for which Bell received the

shared 1975 Critic's Prize, attempted to transpose Shakespeare into a more Australian context.

The speech, however, was still divided between broad and ethnic tones when actors played

comedic scenes, and middle class English when they spoke serious lines. Ira Seidenstein 297

was one of the actors employed to establish the company's vaudeville humour and ethnic

diversity as an American Jewish immigrant acrobat, aimed to give the company a more

authentically Australian flavour. John Gaden, a leading actor at the time, confirmed

Shakespearean actors had their intellect in an imagined England and their hearts in the 'New

World'. This division between the body in action, and the projection of imagined cultural

ideals reflects the trouble with speech in this landscape. 298

In contrast to the question of vowel sounds in Australian vernacular, Leahy

concentrates more on the question of action when she discusses the larrikin performers. She

observes that Roy Rene's vaudeville performance as Mo in Strike Me Lucky, Paul Hogan's

popular T.V. performances as Hoges on The Paul Hogan Show , and Reg Livermore's Betty

Blokk Buster Follies each included a ballet interlude, subverting the masculinity of Ocker

Australian culture, and challenging the perception that high culture belonged only to the upper

classes. She acknowledges the skills that set Reg Livermore apart from the others, dancing on

pointe as his character Vasaline Amalnitrate, who was the prima ballerina of the Australian

297 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 148. 298 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 150.

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Rules Football Team Ballet Company. Leahy describes Livermore's training with the 299

legendary Australian method practitioner, Hayes Gordon, and his work in establishing The

Old Tote Theatre. She notes that despite the National Critic's Award for his work in 1975 he

remained on the margins, pigeon holed as gay in an era when homosexuality was still illegal.

Livermore, however, considered his sexuality to be private. He provided a theatrical

justification for his work,

In the performances I have adopted a neutral role […] so that the make up mask enables me to be all things to all people [...] I must appear as both sexes. I use drag as a means of awakening people to their own strengths and weaknesses. My particular approach to drag is the great overstatement. It is in the grand tradition of overkill, hanging somewhere between vaudeville and burlesque. It is grotesque, it is outrageous, it is bizarre, it is never pretty or glamorous. It is ultimately I hope poignant, lonely, pathetic, and then beautiful. But I never want my audience to believe I am the woman in question. 300

Livermore animated social tropes through his work with materials as a virtuosic actor. No

mainstream critic would attend the opening of his performances however, and his recognition

was given with innuendo. He was described by Dorothea Porter as “everybody's dream and

everybody’s nightmare”. In spite of this powerful unconscious effect, it was impossible for 301

even virtuosic action to resonate within the national consciousness, however, due to the

managerial culture of its institutions, curtailing the capacity of even the best actors to produce

luck.

Indigenous Economics

299 Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 158. 300 Livermore in Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 162. 301 Porter in Leahy, Lords and Larrikins , 161.

173

The struggle for actions to resonate within Australian institutions is visible throughout its

social structure. Although a far cry from the Australian stage of the 1970's, the work of

Indigenous economist Tracker Tilmouth is a materialist example of this struggle. His work

provides an example of how amplifying material actions, an approach which can be seen as

theatrical, can speak between cultures. Tracker Tilmouth explains an idea of an Indigenous

economics in which Indigenous practices speak within institutions that may not necessarily

share their values, without changing the cultural practices. His comments are recorded in

Alexis Wright's 2017 biography Tracker based on verbatim interviews with Tilmouth, his

colleagues and community members. She includes a breadth of voices montaged from many

walks of life and social levels, voices of those who knew the deceased Indigenous visionary.

This was her approach to telling a story that was impossible, she says, almost too big to tell.

Tilmouth's comments have far reaching implications that address the relationship between

action and thought for the production of luck.

In an interview with Alexis Wright, Tilmouth introduces his idea of an Aboriginal

economy. He says,

...you cannot go to a debate on treaty if you cannot contribute. A treaty is an economic exchange between two peoples. It is both legal and economic, but it is mostly economic followed by a legal precedent. So you have the argument that the protection of your country is the contribution you make to the economy of the 302

country. It is as simple as that. But how do you measure the contribution in economic terms? Do you measure it in biodiversity? Do you measure it in species retention? Do you measure it in land management? Do you measure it in terms of commercial development, like mining and pastoralism, cropping, whatever? How do you measure it? How does each bit of that pie contribute to your position in an economic debate? What weapons do you

302 This is a particular Indigenous use of the word 'country' that refers to the connections between land and storytelling, cultural, spiritual and environmental systems that are intertwined for Indigenous people.

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bring to the table to allow you to debate the issue in relation to biodiversity? What is the value of biodiversity to your people? The social fabric, the cultural fabric, the economic processes that were part of your Aboriginal society? How do those things contribute? Because that is what you are going to trade with.... Irramarne [...350 km north – east of Alice Springs on the Sandover Highway, was originally a stock reserve that was re – scheduled as Aboriginal Land, and held under the Irramrne Aboriginal Land Trust. The CLC Land Management Unit undertook extensive work that included analysis of aerial photography, satellite imagery, and vegetation and fauna surveys, to assess the capabilities of the land. Alexis Wright] was the next stage of that, where you could map the data on a computer screen, and map the country, and then discuss, for example, the value of getting goannas in October versus the value of getting goannas in January, or vice versa. When is the best time to get goannas? What are the health issues in relation to going out and hunting goannas? How did that affect you and your social wellbeing, and the people who hold a story for that goanna? You are interwoven to such an extent, and that is an economic activity. 303

These questions Timouth is evolving between action and cultural practice resonate

within the material language of economics, though they are a valuable lesson to theatrical

cultures in how to amplify the practice of culture, through discursive fields that culture

touches on, social, cultural, medical, commercial, geographical, historical, political fields of

enquiry. Through his evolving system of Indigenous economics he speaks between these

orders, allowing Indigenous cultural practices to speak within Australian social institutions.

His approach is an act of resistance that creates the possibility for new relationships to form

between social organs. This resistance and the capacity for relationships it produces is

reflected in his idea of a segregated Indigenous economy,

...unless you segregate that economy at the start then it is very difficult for Aboriginal people to understand exactly what you are talking about, because the pressures of the normal market are upon them, and where people are forced to do certain things that are detrimental to the program in the long term, you end up with a bastardised system of production rather than something that is going to be sustainable. 304

303 Tilmouth in Wright, Tracker , 347 – 48. 304 Tilmouth in Wright, Tracker , 350.

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This concept of resistance also applies to the history of theatre. In Chapter One of this thesis

Barba described the resistance of theatre to purely mercantile necessity through its capacity to

define its value as a cultural artefact, part of the intellectual and cultural life, part of its social

fabric. This capacity to define the value of cultural practice is an act of resistance against the

demands of the market, allowing it to develop as a continuum between diverse orders of

needs. This is an essential part of developing any durable system, be it Theatre Anthropology

or Indigenous economics, that resists the fate determined solely by market forces. Through

this resistance, the cultural practice begins to speak. In the context of a self perpetuating

managerial logic, of the type described by Horne, or exhibited by theatre criticism, resistance

is a condition of speech, Tilmouth says,

You cannot build the type of economy I'm talking about inside those types of organisations. This is what I'm saying about segregating the economy. You cannot control the debate if you do not control the purse. The purse is the resources that you bring to the table. If you cannot control that you have lost the debate before you walk in the door. This is why there is an inordinate amount of funding for Native Title Representative Bodies, land councils and huge bureaucracies. They are all over governed, absolutely over – governed. You talk to any organisation and they say We've got no money . Hang on a minute, how much money did you get last year? We got fifty million to run the Land Council . Fifty mil! Not to build an Aboriginal economy. 305

Tilmouth's view of an Indigenous economy is an educative tool, showing how the

practice of culture becomes discursive within a broader context if it is able to detach from the

context's determining logics (without slipping into relativist nihilism) and to define the value

of its practices without changing them. This amplification is arguably a theatrical process.

305 Tilmouth in Wright, Tracker , 354 -5.

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Tilmouth's Indigenous economics, like Theatre Anthropology, teaches us that cultural actions

are discursive between multiple orders of being, based in resistance and able to produce their

own value through this resistance. This resistance is basis of relationships between one culture

and another, as Tilmouth articulates when he speaks about property rights,

...the government has nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it, because its based on British law, based on the Magna Carta, based on the Privy Council, everything that came out of England... the instructions from Queen Victoria was that you shall do an agreement with the natives – that was the instructions. 306

He aims to speak directly between one culture and another to protect and articulate the value

of what is already materially and culturally present for Indigenous people. In doing so he

shows us to articulate the value of culture per se without which theatre and action can't speak.

This is a visionary insight into how articulated action transforms social reality. The

transformation of social reality through theatrical action is the aim of the Holstebro Festuge

(Festive Week) staged by Odin Teatret in its local surroundings. I discuss my participation in

this festival to articulate the place of action within the large form of social transformation.

Holstebro Festuge 2014, 2017

The social setting of Odin Teatret is the context for the Holstebro Festuge, a large scale

theatre festival staged by the theatre triennially since 1990. It takes place in Holstebro's

surrounds, transforming the town's milieu over nine days and nights. The first Holstebro

Festuge was a gift from the theatre to the municipality, celebrating Odin Teatret – NTL's

306 Tilmouth in Wright, Tracker , 378.

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twenty fifth anniversary in Holstebro. The festival coordinates between social institutions,

community and professional groups, as Odin Teatret describes, “Sports clubs, educational

institutions, churches and their parishioners, ethnic and religious minorities, the army, police

and firemen, businesses and commercial associations, kindergartens, schools, hospitals and

old people's homes...” make up the festival's participants along with local and international 307

artists who form collaborative relationships with these groups. The festival connects,

celebrates and transforms social behaviours and groups through these collaborations and the

performances they create. Like most work at Odin Teatret, the festival's rigorous precision

and surprising openness allows dream states to unfold, unanticipated connections between

usually distinct and social groups, actions, and psychic experiences make it an artistic

production of luck within social life. My discussion of the Holstebro Festuge reflects the

value of theatrical action in this context and its resonance within the social fabric through

which it becomes able to speak, producing luck.

Turner and Watson both engage with the Festuge as an example of Odin Teatret's

relationship with their local community, noting how the theatre offers the festival to the

community, and connects with spectators through culturally diverse and participatory events.

Ledger engages with the 2008 Festuge Light and Dark. Through observations of the 308

festival's dramaturgy he highlights the spatial dimensions of the festival's encounters between

performance and daily life, which draw attention to the environment of the town. I write 309

about the Holstebro Festuge as a participant in Ninth and Tenth Holstebro Festuges Faces of

the Future, ghosts and fictions (preceding Odin Teatret's Fiftieth Anniversary Celebrations)

307 “Holstebro Festuge”, Odin Teatret. 308 Turner, Barba , 23. 309 Adam Ledger, “The People of Ritual: Odin Teatret's 'Festuge'”, About Performance No. 9 (2009), 220.

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2014 (funded by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust), and The Wild West, roots and shoots: rethink ,

2017 (supported by Doctoral Research Travel Grants program at University of Sydney). I take

my own experience as an example of 'Transformance' through the festival. The festival 310

creates a relationship between social contexts and artistic processes to produce these

transformances, or examples of luck. The idea of theatre as a link between social and artistic

settings was also suggested by Julia Varley in the symposium Theatre as a Laboratory for

Community Interaction May 2014 at Odin Teatret. My focus at the Holstebro Festuge

suggests transformation on the level of actions through theatre forms a continuum with

actions in a social setting that allows new relationships and expressions to emerge, a lucky

evolution for social groups and artists alike.

Over two consecutive Festuges I collaborated with Italian artist Isadora Pei on

installation performances on the Stør river, Living Island , and Wild Island . In 2014, in keeping

with the theme Faces of the Future, Ghosts and Fictions , the festival’s artists were groups of

international young people, trained in distinct performance styles. Participating groups

included the Balinese Sanggar Seni Tri Suari school (Bali), Lle Omolu Orixa dancers (Brazil),

The Koinonia Children’s Team (from Nairobi’s periphery, trained in acrobatics by Father

Kizito as an alternative to street life), Junior Banda de Spina (Italy), and Dynamis Teatro

(Italy). These groups collaborated with Odin Teatret’s emerging artist associates, as well as

local youth from Balletskollen, Musicskollen, local scout groups, local kindergarten and

primary school students. The collaborators staged actions that materialised as apparitions

across the towns, in multiple shifting locations. In 2014 for the 'Living Island' local scouts

sailed a raft down the Stør river each day, setting fire to a letter of the word 'past' hanging

310 A word used by Odin Teatret to refer to performance which transforms a social milieu.

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from the overhead bridge. Joining the rafts together they created as a growing platform to host

visiting performances, including Balinese Sanggar Seni Tri Suari school, accompanied by a

fire on the raft and instrumental music played from the bridge, Odin Teatret actors Roberta

Carerri, Jan Ferslev and Tage Larsen, the Mercurial Family (Odin’s Julia Varley, Deborah

Hunt (Puerto Rico and New Zealand), Carolina Pizzaro (Chile/ Odin Teatret) and Francesca

Palombo (Italy)), Lle Omolu Orixa dancers (Brazil), a local clown group and the local scout

groups themselves. The island was moderated by Pei, myself and a team of zombi scouts,

framed by large sail like patchworks with invented emblems, an auto – ethnographic museum

relics of everyday life. The week – long performance climaxed in a bonfire, scouts sailing the

rafts downriver on the final day . 311

A microcosmic effect of this Festuge within my own practice was the 'transformance'

of the character I used. Recycling red fabric covered flippers and blonde wig with feathers

from a solo performance The Seagull, the story of a bird's career in theatre, I added zombi

blacks with scout insignia to the outfit, plastic picnic cutlery and netting to make the Zombi

scout for the Island.

311 Alice Williams, “From the ashes, renewal”, Real Time 123 (2014), 8.

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Isadora Pei, Alice Williams, Eugenio Barba, Holstebro Festuge 2014, Photo Credit Teresa Ruggeri.

Performing the The Seagull after Festuge for Edinburgh Fringe however, I found the

performance had transformed from a theatre show to an outdoor interactive performance in

which the seagull steals snacks from strangers, and recounts its life in the theatre. The

meeting between theatrical and social contexts allowed this new bird to appear.

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Alice Williams, The Seagull , Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2014, Photo Credit: Unknown.

As with the other events at the festival, Living Island was remarkably well attended.

The audiences that returned daily to follow its progress over the week were skilled in

navigating its culturally diverse practices. Artistic literacy across the festival was a visible

result of Odin’s half-century collaboration with Holstebro Municipality, where cultural

awareness has developed through local connection with the theatre laboratorium. The

festival’s closing performance, If The Grain of Wheat Does Not Die , attracted hundreds of

spectators. Staged in the town’s main park it ended with letters spelling Odin 50 in flames on

the lake to celebrate Odin Teatret's Fiftieth Anniversary. The celebration continued with Clear

Enigma, an outdoor retrospective following the festival, which exhumed material from the

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Odin Teatret oeuvre from Ornitofilene (1965) on. The performance of these fragments,

enacted on a fortress made of dirt and aboard the ship Talabot , blurred the distinction between

bodies that enacted past performances and the physicality of past performances that animated

the bodies of the actors now. The work concluded with children invading the space and piling

Odin’s costumes and props onto a conveyor belt, dropping them into a pit, which a bulldozer

filled. A wooden frame with ropes was installed—a swing above the newly levelled ground.

The Holstebro Festuge and Clear Enigma reflected the importance of tradition and innovation

for Odin Teatret. They formed a cyclical, ritual event that provided opportunities for youth as

well as creating actions that revived the youthfulness of the theatre itself, a gesture of

celebration and negation—or “disorientation” that opened onto a new space of the unknown.

312

The Tenth Holstebro Festuge The Wild West: roots and shoots was co – commissioned

by the European Capital of Culture Celebrations, Aarhus 2017 and Caravan Next, a large

scale European Social Community Theatre Project with Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium as

leading partner. Comprised of over two hundred events the theme of the 'Wild West' allowed

the festival to contest a space between lawlessness and the law. The sea was a recurring motif

throughout the festival that opened with the performance When the Sea Came to Holstebro , in

which Teatro Potlatch operated a large blue satin cloth rigged to drown the council chambers,

as well as providing the stage for the performance. A Kathakali performer bartered with a

young ballet dancer on the blue cloth, and senior citizens danced Syrtaki , Zorba the Greek's

dance, a reminder of the multiple crises facing Europe in 2017. During the festival, Anna

Stigsgaard's Behind the Hedges installed fantastic visions within suburban backyards, a child

312 Williams, Real Time ), 8.

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painting black stripes on a white pony, an aerialist couple suspended among the branches of a

tree in a neighbourhood garden, a male rider on a white stallion carried a pistol, couples

waltzed together in their lounge room, closing the windows against our prying eyes. The

performance was guided by local children who led us through the yards, and were led away

by a figure skater on roller skates at the performance's end. Orchestral flash mobs played,

TTB waltzed as a nineteenth century coterie on stilts, the Lutheran church was lit with a three

hundred and sixty degree projection by Stefano di Buduo to mark the five hundredth

anniversary of the Gutenberg press. Boundaries between humans and animals became blurred

in Théâtre du Centaure's midnight rituals, performed in the town's graveyard and church. 313

The group's stallions were housed in a Centaur Village in the town square. The centaurs

performed in the town's library, and also led 150 local and international equestrians in an

animal glyph, a parade of horses and riders from the town to the sea, their exodus leaving a

large spiral formation trodden into the sand. The festival's closing ceremony continued to

work with the theme of the sea. In Landscape after the Sea Receded Deborah Hunt's

Horseplay International led a boat with red sails across billowing blue cloth. Trees submerged

in the town's lake showed only their highest branches, Teatr Brama's bodies were strewn, as

though washed ashore on a hillside. Théâtre du Centaure's performance on a horse with

crutches evoked the image of a stumbling mud crab emerging from the ocean, the progenitor

of life on land.

313 A theatre company from Marseilles working with humans and horses.

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Animal Glyph, Holstebro Festuge 2017, Photo Credit: unknown.

In 2017 Wild Island led by Isadora Pei was created by the 'Wild Quartet' comprised of

Pei, Luis González (Odin Teatret) and Marcelo Miguel (Germany), and myself staged on a

platform of rafts floating on the river Stør. Multiple performances occurred simultaneously on

and around the floating stage narrated by Odin Teatret's Ulrik Skeel from the bridge. The

quartet was performed as,

Four fugitive poets are stranded on a raft. In their flight, they took with them whatever they were able to save. The raft is a refuge for their poetic imagination but also a prison on the water. They try to escape from the daily reality by throwing themselves into a chain of incongruous and ludicrous actions. A commotion happens when, every day, a local poet joins them with the latest news from the literary world and the newspapers. Surrounded by people who watch them as if they were wild animals, they communicate with the rest of the world by means of flying horses and bottle mail. Finally, they are rescued by Holstebro Boy Scouts. But they prefer to

185

resume their flight in search of wildness and the alternative Nobel Prize. 314

The floating space was clothed with Persian rugs, hung with red crepe curtains, a commode

toilet, gramophone, wind vane, and furniture suspended by hooks in the water. The actions of

visiting groups, which included Wild Cats and Dogs (Roberta Carreri with an international

workshop group), Horseplay International , Teatr Brama, the Scuba Diving Club, Kayak Club

and Rolf Krake School, became hallucinations within the quartet's exile. The raft itself

seemed to have been torn from the blood red interior of a theatre and cut adrift. Its inhabitants

lassoed and ate their narrator on the final day, hitching a lift with the Holstebro Regatta, a

fleet of over eighty homemade boats that visited the river, leaving Mr Peanut on the raft alone

with Ulrik's remains.

Julia Varley and Ulrik Skeel, Wild Island , Holstebro Festuge, 2017, Photo Credit: Monica Bleige.

314 “Wild Quartet”, Holstebro Festuge, accessed February 15 2020, https://2017.holstebrofestuge.dk/en/medvirkende/wild-island-quartet-isadora-pei-italy-alice-williamsaustralia -marcelo-miguel-germany-and-luis-alonso-chile/ .

186

Another microcosmic example of 'tranformance' comes from my experience of

preparing Wild Quartet's scene for the opening performance with feedback from Barba. The

simple scene, led by Pei, was a ceremonial meal on a sinking ship. Barba replaced the fish we

used with bananas, a simple swap that created an absurd image of pathos, eating a banana on

a sinking ship. The scene was performed to Shostakovich's Waltz Number Two, Pei and I

carrying four white chairs, Luis González and Marcelo Miguel with tables, two technicians

(Ignatio Giménez and Amalie Fabricius-Steen) stretching a washing line hung with laundry

and bananas across the sea blue fabric. The quartet dressed and assembled the tables. Fetched

the bananas to serve them, we synchronised with the music, drew back the chairs, and sat to

eat, each banana was sprinkled with a little salt. We peeled the bananas, chewed with the

music, and threw the skins to the spectators. Still chewing we began to sink the cloth until our

heads bobbed below the table. The quartet disassembled the setting, inverting them to go.

Barba worked with us to prepare the actions. His work assisted us in finding the relationship

with objects that would allow materials to live and actions to matter. These concrete tasks

included, for example, how to fly the chairs over our heads, how to chew in time, and how to

apply the correct level of tension to the table cloth that would allow it to fly in the wind. He

instructed us to treat our objects as if they were lovers, which created a sensuous continuum

between biology and matter. He helped us eliminate unnecessary tensions, instructing, for

example, I should “not play or make grimaces” but perform “like Buster Keaton”. As Barba

described in Chapter Four about his use of words making an improvisation, these words

became a stimulus for me at the Festuge. From 2008 – 2011 I tutored Silent to Sound Cinema

and Cross Cultural Perspectives on Film for Laleen Jayamanne (at The University of

Sydney). Laleen had previously gifted her book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani to Barba

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as it mentions his work. Barba's instruction stimulated a memory for me of what Deleuze's

calls Keaton's “anarchist mechanism” . The association focused my attention on mechanistic 315

actions, which spoke through the deadpan expression as absurd. Each action in this machine

learnt to speak. They said, “we know what life is!”, leaving the silent echo in their wake,

“what is life after all?”, opening up a space within knowledge for the unknown. Working with

actions from everyday life, the festival as a whole created this space within knowledge for the

unknown. Deleuze also observes that Keaton's actions function in relation to the 'large form,'

for example a flood, or cyclone. The large form was exhibited at this festival, showing the

mass movement of humans and animals, mass extinction, economic crisis, the ocean rising

through the town. Within the 'large form', the actor's bios is a 'cog', a part of this machine

where social and environmental trajectories intersect . This was true of the centaurs who 316

trod the intersection between biological and cultural evolution trodden into the sand of the

beach. It was also a waltzing mouth masticating a chunk of banana on a sinking ship, another

instant in which culture, nature and mechanism open onto the unknown. The production of

luck is a step within this unknown an evolutionary transformation of the performer's action

within their social context.

A sleeping snake

Luck is a process of evolution, produced through action in the unforeseeable. It can be seen as

an energetic exchange between director and actor, or the resonance of theatrical action with its

315 This is opposed by Deleuze to Chaplin's “Communist Humanism” in Giles Deleuze , Cinema I: The

Movement Image trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam , London: Continuum (1986) 177. 316 Deleuze , Cinema I, 177.

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social context. Either way it produces a montage of functions, that wriggles like a snake, and

through which it speaks. I end this chapter with a parable about a snake, Alexis Wright's

Carpentaria, in which Alexis Wright allows action to speak through what is already present in

the natural environment on an 'Australian' island – continent. Carpentaria begins with the

creation myth of the Waayani nation, an Indigenous nation in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the

story of a snake. This snake winds its way through Wright's writing, speaking as though

chanting an incantation or singing a song, linking one culture of speech with another.

Wright introduces her book with Seamus Heaney's poem 'The First Words':

The first words got polluted Like river water in the morning Flowing with the dirt Of blurbs and the front pages. My only drink is meaning from the deep brain, What the birds and the grass and the stones drink. Let everything flow Up to the four elements, Up to water and earth, fire and air. 317

Wright speaks through what is already present in the natural world. She commented in

an interview with Kerry O'Brien in 2007 that she was inspired by other writers who also have

a long relationship with country , Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Eduardo Galeano, Carlos 318

Fuentes, as well as the French Caribbean writer Patrick Chamoiseau. She says that like 319

Fuentes says about Mexico, that all times are important in Australia, that no time has ever

been resolved. Histories are woven into the present through her mythical storytelling in

317 Heaney in Wright, Carpentaria , 0. 318 Again, this is a particular Indigenous use of the word 'country' that refers to the connections between

land and storytelling, cultural, spiritual and environmental systems that are intertwined for Indigenous people.

319 Alexis Wright in Kerry O'Brien, “Alexis Wright Interview”, Hecate 33.1 (2007), 216.

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Carpentaria . I follow the snake of Carpentaria 's wriggling between natural, social and 320

cultural orders propelled by the luck it invents. The story describes the ancestral being, the

serpent that created the river and continues to live underground in the aquifers. It describes 321

the way the serpent formed the clay soils, rivers and underground aquifers, coiling inland

from the sea. During a storm last century, the river changed course, leaving the town of

Desperance as a waterless port. A council ceremony to rename the ancient river was spoiled 322

by the storm, “Damaging the cut sandwiches when it came through.” The story snakes 323

through the social milieu of the Northern Australian town, observing “Its citizens continued to

engage in a dialogue with themselves that passed down the generations, on why the town

should continue to exist.” Wright uses an expression coined by Indigenous economist 324

Tracker Tilmouth to capture his experience of for meaningless action growing up on a

mission, “chopping wood for practice” to describe the social life of Desperance. The phrase 325

reflects the meaninglessness of actions performed without will. Like the social structure

described by Donald Horne, this was a town where luck was impossible to produce between

action and thought, instead luck had become “...when no one else could smell your trouble”.

326

The story's main character is named Will. Will Phantom is capable of action beyond

the self identical logics of the town. Wright describes how Will could make himself invisible,

clay or spinifex. She describes how when the police searched for Will they found he was,

320 Wright in O'Brien, “Alexis Wright Interview”, 216. 321 Wright, Carpentaria , 1 – 4. 322 A name perhaps inspired by the West Australian town of Esperance. 323 Wright, Carpentaria , 9. 324 Wright, Carpentaria , 3. 325 Wright, Carpentaria , 103. 326 Wright, Carpentaria , 47.

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Man of the match on Picnic Day sometime. An Aboriginal boy with a big grin. Caught the biggest fish during the Easter fishing competition. You heard about the fishing comp? Its very popular? No. No picture must have been taken that year. Sorry!... Didn't he go to School? … Yes! Yes! He sung Sweet Caroline and Come Lately when he walked home from school. The police learned Will was a charming boy with a melodic voice who sung Neil Diamond songs. The whole town loved listening to him. Often the whole town would be singing the same song in his wake, as he walked past. 327

Will could not be identified within the institutional logics of the town. His ability to transform

was a form of resistance. Carpentaria describes the fragmented relationships of Desperance

where mining royalties had divided the two most powerful Indigenous families in the town.

The Phantoms' eldest son Kevin had been the family's most intellectual member until he

suffered brain damage as a result of an explosion in the mine, the story says, “even after the

last scab had healed nothing could put out the fire in his brains”. Will's relationship with his 328

partner, Hope, crossed the division between the families, leaving him exiled from the town to

follow a convoy of activists who travelled along dreaming tracks in beaten up old Holden

sedans. His father Normal Phantom continued to work as a song man, preserving the bodies

of fish in a shed in his backyard. He painted their bodies to be more iridescent than in their

natural state and suspended them from the roof of his shed. Working with elements of nature

in his preserving, Norm was able to speak the language of the sea, as Wright says, “knowing

he was an old man in reality, he could go to sea again and again, if he could still read the

signs.” 329

These actions of nature that speak to cultivated people like Normal Phantom continued

327 Wright, Carpentaria , 366. 328 Wright, Carpentaria , 109. 329 Wright, Carpentaria , 251

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to upset the social setting of Desperance. A cyclonic storm hit the town of Desperance. The

story describes Will's search for Hope and their son Bala, “Need to eat or sleep evaded him as

though he was no more than a song sung like an estuary fish: a pelagic salmon, single

mindedly travelling against the flow, or a barramundi being tugged by some invisible thread,

to struggle back to the sea.” T he cyclone seemed to be a fateful event, “all moments in time 330

are mysterious and powerful companions of fate,” that Will was able to navigate , another 331

image of luck as the capacity to act with courage and intelligence against the vicissitudes of

fate. This courage and intelligence is an ethical and aesthetic skill, as the story goes, “People

say, when a humble man really listened and looked past the obvious then he might fly with the

music into the unknown,” . Luckily for Will the storm was able to rearrange the social order, 332

moving the river and the town, allowing another reality to appear. The story ends with an

image of transformation. Will was able to return to the razed area where he had lived with his

family, to live “where the snake slept underneath.” In this image we can see the snake's 333

body as an image of transformation, a creation myth that is without ending. Wherever the

potential for montage between these orders of being exists, this transformation is possible.

Through Wright's story it is possible to see the presence of will that creates the capacity for

speech between various levels of being. The next chapter, “Chapter Six: The Mouth of the

Wolf” comments on how the presence of will is constructed in scenic behaviour through

residential development of the performance The Tale of the Wolf supervised in part by Roberta

Carreri at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret in 2017.

330 Wright, Carpentaria , 457. 331 Wright, Carpentaria , 387. 332 Wright, Carpentaria , 475. 333 Wright, Carpentaria , 519.

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Chapter Six: The Mouth of the Wolf: residential development at Nordisk

Teaterlaboratorium – Odin Teatret

This thesis has developed a concept of luck through Ancient and Vitalist notions of

action in the unknown. It has explained luck in the social, practical and intellectual settings of

Theatre Anthropology. Through a study of the actor's bios at ISTA it has articulated luck as a

montage between functions in the actor's body. The actor's body speaks through actions

between these functions. The basis of our humanity is reflected in its capacity to create

systems between matter, biology and consciousness to escape determinism. In these actions,

different orders of being form a continuum that could be compared to the body of a snake,

that passes, not only through the body of the performer, but also through their social context.

Considering the relationship between action and social institutions has identified the presence

of will within the actor's body that produces luck. This luck is an instantaneous event that

follows the already intelligent direction of the natural world, transcending what can be known

in advance. A voluntary act of resistance awakens the will, doing violence to what is already

known. The presence of will tensions the continuum of consciousness. It opens perception

onto the multiple simultaneous time frames of the present. Its current is imperceptible, but can

be brushed lightly in the instant of luck, when fate becomes flexible again, through the

resistance of a vital body.

Having discussed the performer's actions in the social milieu, I return to the actor's

resistance to social narratives inside the theatre, to consider the conditions of luck which

allow the body to speak. I discuss the residential development of my performance The Tale of

the Wolf at Nordisk Theaterlaboratorium in June 2017, partially supervised by Roberta

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Carreri. These experiences are discussed through discourses in neurology and psychotherapy,

concerning the neuromuscular basis for speech. The insights of this development contribute

technical information to these disciplines' discussion of action. They demonstrate how action

functions as the basis of speech. Carreri's supervision spoke to the axis of my work between

theatre and everyday life, allowing it to create a fictive body that resonated between the two.

The chapter reflects how actions impact perception, producing luck as an evolution of thought

between spheres. It reflects the value of Theatre Anthropology for actors, scientists and social

subjects alike.

The connection between action and speech is contested between neurologists,

performance practitioners and theorists. Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at

University of California San Diego, the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran considers mirror

neurons to be an important link in understanding the evolution of speech from gesture. His 334

presentation “Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind the great leap

forward in human evolution”, pursues a neurological explanation of questions that underpin

the development of human thought, and the role of aesthetics in the evolution of

consciousness. Known for his interdisciplinary work with mirrors in the treatment of phantom

limb pain, learnt paralysis, synaesthesia and Capgras sufferers, Ramachandran describes the

discovery of mirror neurons as a unifying frame for the field of neurology in the way DNA

defined genetics. Rejecting Chomsky's view of language derived from the evolution of a 335

separate human organ, he links the development of language to the firing of command, or

mirror neurons, in an observer, expressing an action as a neurological pattern within the

334 John Colapinto, “Brain Games: the Marco Polo of neuroscience”, New Yorker 4 (2009) accessed 02 October 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/brain-games

335 Colapinto, “Brain Games”, New Yorker.

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observer's frontal lobes. The lips and tongue creating an imitative sonic equivalence to the

physical action is, he says, the origin of speech. Interestingly for theatre training,

Ramachandran describes the discovery of mirror neurons, by Parma neurologist Vittorio

Rizzolatti, from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys “… [where ]...

certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand:

pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth

etc .”[emphasis mine] These are relational actions, resisting a material object or force. 336

The discovery of mirror neurons, while a major advance in neurology, has been

controversial for discussions of neurology and aesthetics. Philosopher and former dancer

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone asserts that David Freedberg and Parma neurologist Vittorio Gallese

attribute aesthetic experience of the visual arts solely to mirror neurons, overlooking

kinaesthetic perception. Sheets-Johnstone sites philosophers Roberto Casati and Alessandro 337

Pignocchi who also refuted the relevance of Freedberg and Gallese's work to aesthetics. 338

Drawing on the field of developmental neurology, Sheets-Johnstone suggests that

kinaesthetics are in fact the basis of this neurological development, which supports

Ramachandran's suggestion, while suggesting the firing of mirror neurons is also based on

primary kinaesthetic experience. Her argument situates the brain as a site of movement, a 339

dynamic system of synaptic connections, formed and pruned throughout infancy and adult

life. She maligns the scant attention Parma neurologists paid to the quality of movement 340

performed in the laboratory where the theory of mirror neurons was developed. Sheets –

336 V.S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind the great leap forward in human evolution”, Edge, Accessed 03 October 20019 https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html

337 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 385. 338 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 386. 339 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 387. 340 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 387.

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Johnstone directs her attention to how mirror neurons develop, suggesting that kinaesthetics

are the basis of this neurological development, based on the body's own experience. It is only

through kinaesthetic experience that the viewer can develop an inter – modal neuromuscular

equivalent to actions they observe, such as the imitation of action with sound. She describes 341

developmental neurology and the phenomenology of movement as 'kinaesthetic melodies'

imprinted on the body. The activation of these kinaesthetic melodies, learnt from primary 342

experience, is a neuromuscular response to dynamic actions. She positions mirror neurons as

the neurological offshoots of the neurology of movement. Action in the unknown is the 343

basis of the lucky effect of mirroring and the invention of language. The work of Roberta

Carreri and Odin Teatret provides a vital link as to how action activates the neuromuscular

response, through their work with resistance. Drawing on their work I suggest, not only that

the neurology of moment underlies the development of mirror neurons, but that they are

activated by relational actions meeting with resistance. This suggestion is developed through

my experience of training with Roberta Carreri. This experience reflects the relationship

between action, presence, and speech developed through Theatre Anthropology and the

evolutionary implications of its vital technical knowledge for the production of luck.

The Tale of the Wolf

The Tale of the Wolf was a performance that emerged from improvisations. Inspired by Odin

Teatret's daily training, I had begun training each day using improvisation exercises from my

341 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 389. 342 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 390. 343 Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons”, 398-9.

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clown teacher Ira Seidenstein, repeating each improvisation I made. The exercises functioned

as the 'empty ritual' in relation to which I grew over time. Training in Odin Teatret's “Blue 344

Room” following the Holstebro Festuge in June 2014 I had experienced sensations and

intensities, kinaesthetic melodies, in training, which made me aware that, through training, I

could learn what I did not know I already knew from my body. This “lucky” relationship was

an exchange between different forms of knowledge, bodily and conscious awareness. While I

was training I felt like my body was a small theatre, where I became aware of sensory

information transmitted through my body to my brain. Despite this, I struggled to compose

anything I could really repeat with conviction. I wrote family anecdotes separately to my

improvisations, aiming to explore diverse meeting points between the dynamics of the

physical improvisations and the text. Within my performer's dramaturgy the physical

improvisations suggested a frightened detective gathering clues from inside the digestive tract

of an animal that had eaten him. I added fragments to the text of traditional and contemporary

tales about wolves, figures of fear and transformation.

During the Holstebro Festuge (2017) Wild West, roots and shoots: rethink , I developed

The Wolf, as an outdoor performance character for the Wild Quartet in Isadora Pei's Wild

Island . The mask was made of chicken wire and paper mache, painted black, grey and white

with green eyes, highlights and shadows made of scraps of seal and goat fur from Odin

Teatret's sewing room . It became a charged object for me, paper and fur, that had eaten me, 345

worn as a trophy on my head. The teeth were knitting needles from local charity shops,

painted white cut at angles with a circular saw. On the Wild Island I had worn a tutu from

344 Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe, trans. Richard Fowler, London: Routledge, (1995), 85. 345 Including goat from a jacket worn by Else Marie Laukvik in the nineteen sixties.

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Odin Teatret's costume room, and two – tone black and white suede leather shoes from a 346

local charity shop. The original jacket had been replaced by Barba with a military jacket from

the renaissance, burgundy velvet. The figure became a montage between soldier, little girl and

the wolf, which continued to guide me after I had given the jacket back. I continued working

with this character in residence at Odin Teatret – NTL part supervised by Roberta Carreri.

Carreri let me know she usually works for a minimum of two weeks with a student,

and clarified that I'm not one of her pupils, though, during the week of supervision with

Carreri, her work with actions transformed my relationship with composition. Carreri

supervised my work on the physical improvisations I had made before coming to the

residency, observing they did not have resistance. Resistance is formed by action in

opposition to matter. In The Secret Art of the Performer Barba writes, “Although an actor's

actions take place in a context characterised by fiction, they must be real in their substance,

true psycho – physical actions are not just empty gestures. At the primary level of the scenic

bios , their efficacy depends on being material work which shapes the mental and physical

energy into a perceptible act capable of influencing the spectator's nervous system and

sharpening their attention. The actor can profit from those gymnastics that consist in adapting

the effort and logic of an action to an obstacle or an arduous task.” This may be why I was 347

not convinced by my ability to repeat the improvisations I had made, they were not created in

a relationship of resistance to an object or force that could create an imprint on my body, in

the way that actions in everyday life mark the body, and activate the neuromuscular response

of a spectator. Odin Teatret's laboratory research into pre – expressivity and the actor's bios

346 Dress from Odin Teatret's Talabot (1990) based on Kirsten Hastrup's autobiographical work in Iceland. 347 Barba in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 117.

See A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 117 for George Hebert's 'natural gymnastics'.

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contributes key principles to understanding how the action impacts the perception of a

spectator. Beyond “movement”, Carreri reminded me she will only speak about actions, not

movements, reiterating what she says in her professional autobiography, “Unlike movement,

every action has the intention of changing something. The intention emerges as an answer to a

stimulus that can be felt by our bodies (hunger, an itch, pain), or by our minds (a sudden

thought), or it could be provoked by something that happens around us (a sound, a call, the

presence of another body, an obstacle). That is why every action is in fact a reaction.” 348

My sequence had been made from physical improvisations with forms and images, but

not from the material process of meeting resistance, opposing a force. The way Carreri

offered this observation also offered me resistance to it. Contextualising her perspective as a

question of “taste”, she reflected Kandinski did not affect her, but Botticelli did. She asked me

to repeat the material I'd developed in a sequence without cutting between sequences and

without using my arms. She observed that my spine was “frozen”, static, and did not create

intentions. Without intentions, formed through opposition, the piece could not dance. And

because it did not dance, it could not affect the “reptilian brain”, the oldest part of the brain

located at the brainstem of the spectator that controls heart rate, breathing, body temperature

and balance. Her comments reflect that the neuromuscular response must be activated for the

inter – modal resonance of actions to take place within the spectator's perception. Only

reacting to resistance would disrupt my spine. We began by creating opposition. Carreri asked

Vilja Itkonen to work with me on resistance, and coached us to produce oppositions using 349

pulling and pushing to disrupt my torso, causing it to shift and turn. I needed to be more

348 Carreri, Traces , 184. 349 A Finnish director working in residence at Odin Teatret in 2017 who collaborated in this development

of The Wolf at Nordisk Teatre Laboritorium as an outside eye.

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active in my work with Vilja, Carreri commented. She demonstrated the difference between

leaning, using weight, and pushing using a wall. The activation of muscles between the

shoulder blades affects the spinal column, activating the spectator's kinaesthetic perception.

Roberta asked Vilja and I to compose a sequence of nine actions, alternating between pushing

and pulling. Every third action created a statue of dynamic immobility, the final action linked

back to the first. After some negotiation, our actions found a viable level of resistance. They

became a dynamic flow, reflecting that resistance is a form of connection as well as

opposition. We repeated the sequence, varying the scale and intensity of the actions until they

created an impression or body memory of the real action.

During this process, the resistance reminded me of what I had observed at ISTA, the

shifting relationships that allowed the body to speak. Barba commented at ISTA that there are

essentially only two actions, pushing and pulling, that produce the manyfold inflections of

acting. Carreri also states in her autobiography “After years of work, I have come to the

conclusion that every action is the result of a composition of two fundamental actions:

pushing and pulling. For example, if I want to pick up a glass of water, my fingers press

around the glass while my arm pulls towards my mouth.” Nuanced relational modes of 350

speech emerge from variations of this act of pushing and pulling in the performer's bios ,

creating resistance that is transformed in innumerable dramatic and subtle ways. This

reminded me of actions as the basis of language, where language imitates, the already

intelligent direction of the actor's bios . The value of this imitation resonates with Walter

Benjamin's work on the Mimetic Faculty in human evolution which suggests, “Perhaps there

is none of [our]... higher functions in which ...[this] faculty does not play a decisive role.” 351

350 Carreri, Traces, 204. 351 Walter Benjamin “On the mimetic faculty”, Reflections ed. Peter Demetz , New York: Schocken Books

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Carreri corrected the actions of our score, until they created a continuous flow

between actors and actions. She ensured I was not creating tensions that would freeze my

spine, that Vilja and I maintained contact with our hands. When the sequence flowed, we

worked ten centimetres apart, five meters apart and then in our own space, maintaining the

actions' intentions with different orientations, intensities, textures and scales. We varied the

scale of the actions, working at fifty percent, twenty percent, ten percent, taking care not to

create tensions or change the actions. These exercises are documented in Carreri's

professional autobiography where she describes the process of reducing actions so that actors

can compose between their largest and smallest expressions, the smallest of which is a “form

of dynamic immobility”. Although I had done these exercises previously, training with 352

Carreri transformed my experience of the exercises, assisting me to understand the energetic

continuum that was at stake in the relationship of resistance that could be varied in infinite

ways, as well as the degree of precision that was required for the action to speak. Carreri

emphasised this precision without introducing tensions, which resisted the actor's habits,

projections, interpretations. Preserving the actions' resistance paradoxically allowed them to

transform. In the Parma laboratory the monkeys created resonance through the kinaesthetic

and neuromuscular echoes of their real actions. This resonance is also the result of this

detailed work in the theatre laboratory, an evolutionary process that translates action from one

mode to another. This process could be explored following Barba's notion of a 'second

nervous system' as a 'neurology of the second body' demonstrating the potential for 353

transformation between action and thought through resistance, to produce luck.

(1978), 333. 352 Carreri, Traces , 206. 353 Also developed by Laleen Jayamanne for Cinema Studies in “A Second Nervous System”, in The Epic

Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015), 124 – 148.

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Carreri introduced 'actions with hands and feet' from her Dance of Intentions . This 354

exercise cultivates various forms of action, directing the performer's energy in varying

directions. I had encountered these tools before but, in the context of the residency they spoke

directly to the context of the work I was doing, transforming the expression of my work there.

Carreri describes the flexibility of these tools in Traces : “The Dance of Intentions'... is a

sequence of physical and vocal exercises I have developed over the course of many years of

teaching. The structure of the workshop is fixed, but each time I lead it something always

changes because every workshop is the result of my encounter with specific individuals at a

specific moment in my pedagogical trajectory.” Because they work with oppositions that 355

create intentions and mobilise the spine the DNA of the actions can be given varied

expression. It is not your spine, but your axe, Carreri commented, saying you can make soft

cuts with the axe, hard cuts with the axe, they can be small, large, fast, slow, but this is your

axe. I was touched to have this axe to cut through 'the wolf' that had swallowed me up, or the

limitations imprinted on the body, through which the bios of the extra – daily body is able to

slither. We worked with the actions, pointing, throwing, calling, stopping, the feet suctioned to

the floor, drawing energy out of the ground. Carreri made an imprint of the real action asking

me to throw her shoe across the room, observing the action of fingers, spine, tail and eyes.

She demonstrated the opposition of pointing inside the body, a dance between the finger and

the tail, an opposition between hand and eye in calling, stopping and throwing. We varied the

dynamic, working on speed, scale, and intensity by degrees, each action reacting to the texture

of the last. As the variations began to flow I felt, the dynamic cases of language begin to

appear again, as variations in resistance. These were the cases observed at ISTA through

354 Carreri, Traces , 202 Inspired by Claire Heggen, Theatre du Mouvement. 355 Carreri, Traces , 183.

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which language acts, and the body speaks. They reflect the human capacity to create systems

between different orders of being, common to language and theatre.

Carreri expanded on the nature of my frozen spine, saying this is my “performer's

mask”, that it gives the impression of presence, without any actual presence. Its tensions

prevent me from creating actions, as a monkey in a Parma laboratory might do, that are able

to activate the neuromuscular response of a spectator. She stood behind me and called, to

check if I could turn, saying even with metal plates in her disks she was still able to turn. She

asked me where the tension came from. I associated the tensions with my daily habit of

writing, genetic inheritance and somatic reactions to lived experience. Carreri followed my

actions pointing out when the tension had transferred itself to another part of my body. Next

morning, working without this habitual tension, on my own, I felt very vulnerable and raw in

my body, trembling as though I was frightened, close to tears. This vulnerability produced an

instance of luck. While I was working in this way, the text I had been working parallel to my

score transformed. The text was the series of family anecdotes that I had written alongside my

original improvisations, but that had not developed. This text began to speak, neither as

personal anecdote nor cultural stories, but cohering through a third space into a fictive body of

thought. I stopped training and went to write down what had cohered. It became a fictional

auto – biography of my life as a half – human, half – wolf, set within the fictional history of

wolves in Australia. This was an instantaneous event, connecting between one level and

another produced through action within the unknown. It transformed the matter of the past

into a living present. This was the production of luck. Losening the constriction in my back

allowed my body to enter into the present moment where multiple time scales and levels of

being are simultaneously present. Through this presence the body was able to speak. The

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physical speech allowed my thoughts to transform beyond the categorical distinction between

own self and other to find a third state of being which allowed the story to be told of human

instincts transformed by nature.

I've included the text below. It intertwines texts developed in residency at NTL with

family anecdotes and fragments of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves . The section that

transformed during the residency at NTL is scene 2.

Scene 1 “ One beast and only one howls in the woods by night. The wolf song is the sound of

the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering. The eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you – red for danger. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins, then he knows he must run.”

Scene 2 I was first bitten by a wolf when I was five years old. My mother was employed as a

wolf hunter for the department of human services. Was she needed to help hunt wolves, or did she need help to hunt wolves herself? Whatever the case may be, what she sought by day eluded her vision at night. My father, a wolf, was himself raised by wolves.

Wolves are of course not native to Australia, but were introduced by the first fleet,

often as fictional characters. The oldest known relative of ours in Australia was a Scotsman called Miller, who left his cubs to be raised by a humble bread maker by the name of Williams. Having introduced wolves to the country, the Brits used them as a justification for all kinds of warfare, namely taking the children, land, possessions of local people, often in the name of protecting them from the very fictional wolves, which they had themselves introduced.

The wolves themselves were hapless animals, conscripted into the army, or was it that

the horrors of war made wolves of innocent men? My grandfather returned from war as a wolf who gambled his life away, and didn't lose often enough. He married the croupier of the local casino and savaged his family, from which my Father escaped, running away from his village as a teenage werewolf at fourteen. He ravaged the streets of Sydney hunting out drugs, transexual liaisons, thievery, crime, break and enter. He protested conscription, then voluntarily enlisted during the Vietnam War to try and get himself off drugs.

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My maternal grandmother was also raised by wolves, given to the catholic church by her parents when she was four she ravaged her family, or was it family life ravaged her? She wanted to be a mechanic, trained as a nurse, then was not permitted to do either as a wolf and a woman. My mother doesn't speak much about her life, but is the author of “Permission to speak: successful treatment of psychogenic non epileptic seizures for wolves and their prey”. You can find it in any reputable library database on the psychogenic seizures of wolves. Wandering the foreign lands of University of New South Wales during the Whitlam era of free education, these two fairy tale creatures met, moved to rural New South Wales and had five semi fictional kids.

Scene 3 I think I've probably told you before, about Robbie. Who?

Robbie. I think I already told you, I'm pretty sure I told you, I think I told your Mum, I'm pretty sure I told your Mum...

Who's Robbie? Oh well you know back in my drinking and drugging days, I can't remember her

name, I think she had red hair, but anyway, she decided to keep the baby, so I think there's someone out there called Robbie, and that's something I just have to live with, if one day someone turns up on my doorstep and says, “Hello Dad”, I'll just have to Say, Hello Robbie.

Timmy was the family dog. I can't say we were close. After I moved out I asked Mum

one time, “Mum, where is Timmy?” She said, “Timmy died about three or four years ago”. I thought he was just under the house.

The other thing that lived under the house was Tony. Tony was the fictional sibling

Lachie and I invented to try and make our little brother Chris go to bed on time. Lachie is my older brother. He was swallowed whole by a wolf in broad daylight

when we were kids but even from the darkness of the wolf's belly continued to suggest creative sibling parenting techniques in which I was complicit.

“You don't want what happened to Tony to happen to you” “Who's Tony” “Oh, he's our other brother. Mum and Richard made him live under the house because

he wouldn't clean his teeth and go to bed on time.” “When he died, they cut up his body and put it in the walls” One day Mum was sitting on the toilet. She said, “Ah Richard”. I said “Richard?” She

said, “what do you mean Richard?” A few months later she got together with our stepdad Richard. Eleven years later they got married and sent me a card through the post.

I started teasing my Mum about being pregnant. Whenever I mentioned it, she, or

Richard would offer me a biscuit. Three months later when they told me they were

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having a baby it took a lot of biscuits to digest the information. The baby was called Samuel Clarence Grey, S.C.G. Like the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Richard only realised when he was putting petrol in the car on the way home from the hospital, too late. He plays hockey for Australian now.

Grandma was not our actual Grandma, but was the alter ego of Joseph, next younger

brother from me. He used to give life advice in the voice of a retired member of Peeking opera called Grandma, “you all so stupid you mus be from Korea”.

Sam, the baby, would roll his eyes,

“Our family has gone racist again.”

He would also say, “Alice, you're a little bit naughty, but Laurence is perfect.” Laurence my next younger brother was a classical pianist. But I also saw him

quacking to himself one day as if he was a duck when we were on a family holiday. The other “racially diverse” member of our family was my little brother Chis. On the

first day of high school in Lithgow, a little known town West of Sydney, little known for its small arms factory, maximum security prison and coal mine, someone asked Chris, “what's in ya, are you a wog or what?” Chris was a little bit confused but replied with an even more confusing answer, “I'm Black”, taking a photograph of himself with an African American Blues musician from Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival to school and said “thats my Dad”.

Chris also worked at Lithgow hospital now which is one of the most racist hospitals in

NSW where I think he's realised he's not actually black. I grew up with short hair. In swimming pool change rooms or at gymnastics, are you a

boy in a leotard, are you a boy or a girl? What I lacked in long hair I later made up for with leg hair. Not because I was a boy in a leotard, because I was half human, half wolf.

Scene 4 “Of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest the wolf is worst for he cannot

listen to reason. It is winter and cold weather, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat. Wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pounced. Those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse as you go through the wood unwisely late. If you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague.”

Scene 5 My Nana had Cataracts on her eyes before she died. They made her eyes look milky

and white. I wonder what it looks like from the inside, if it makes everything look

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white? When I was travelling a few years ago, my mum complimented me on my Skype profile picture. I said, “Mum, I don't have a Skype profile picture.” She said, “Yes you do darling. It's a blue box, and you're in it, dressed in white.” I said, “Mum, that's just blue box with a white circle in it.” She said,“Oh, I thought you had your hair up.”

Dear Love, where are you now, I heard you were travelling in the Andes, searching

their high peaks, you wandered the cliff faces, quite high up, I hope you have not got altitude sickness, you were quite high up. Don't go too close to the edge of those sheer lookouts without a rail where you might plummet to your death. The world would miss you love. Love, where are you now, I heard you'd learnt to swim with the sharks and were enjoying your time on some faraway island where the sun rose over your mysterious presence looking out to see. Don't forget us love. The last thing I hope is that when you died, bones crunching under the waves with no one to hear you scream, except for the fish, seaweed and passes by, that despite all the bloodshed, between the breaths, you might spare a thought for me dear love. Love where are you now? I heard you were cast as part of the chorus in a Broadway hit, tap dancing with all the other girls, you always were a charmer. I know how tired you must be with all your long rehearsals and understudy for the main role in the show. Love we're well. We shelter ourselves in the evening and sometimes half speak of you, those silly things you would have said or done, slipping out of memory and into sleep. We all know the signs of your dancing, those long, complicated numbers with many steps, breathlessly, tirelessly, each one following on from the next. We think of you when the sun is red above us in our garishly beautiful skies, when the blood rushes to your feet on the cliff faces, or when we see the add for the latest play, we think of you and hope you are well. We'd love to hear from you. Love us. P.S. Kiss kiss hug hug love heart love heart, kiss kiss hug hug love heart love heart.

Scene 6 “She stepped into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas

Eve. The malign door of the solstice, the hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should, the longest night, still swings upon its hinges but she has been too much loved ever to feel scared. Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws. Ten wolves; twenty wolves – so many wolves she could not count. Their eyes reflected the light from the kitchen and shone like a hundred candles.”

When I was a kid I thought I was good at fighting. I heard about how Hudini had

died. He was punched in the stomach by a volunteer who hit on two instead of three. I thought I would always be ready. I asked the teenage boy who lived opposite to punch me in the stomach. I was about six or seven. I was just lying on the ground gulping like a guppy fish. You're such a liar, and so sensitive, you always have to be right.

Standing on a street corner in Belmore writing letters to you, from where you'll never

see, inside me. I remember your eyes, your skin and your pit bull dead stare. The time you played pinata with a live parrot that flew around the room. I think of those times

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we spent with our Dad. Smears of tomato sauce on the inside of white paper bags, chips, dagwood dogs, staring blank eyed at rural football matches. I look around at the warm glow of the inner city cafe with its artisan bread and high quality organic materials, this is not the life I want to live either. My brother spoke at dinner for a long time about electricity. The conventions ensure the positive and negative circuits are always wired the same way so the worker who follows the initial electrician is safe. I think of the superficial fireworks of our five minutes of fame with its disappointments and unpredictable sparks. Our mismatched eye lines bouncing around the dark marble laminate of the Belmore hotel where you glassed yourself to have yourself kicked out. Or had yourself banned for gambling. Its closing time now and we both have to go back to some place we never knew we came from.

Scene 7 “Wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes

we cannot keep them out, there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni.”

“There was a hunter once, near here, that trapped a wolf in a pit. This wolf had eaten

up a mad old man who used to live by himself in a hut halfway up the mountain and sing to Jesus all day. He put a duck in it, for bait, alive-oh, the byre straw gave way beneath him. No wolf lay in the pit, but the bloodied trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead.”

Scene 8 As older children moved out Sam developed his own family of guinea pigs, Mum said

it helped him cope with the loss. He photographed them, blue tacking them to his bedroom wall. They propagated quickly, despite starting with three females from the pet shop. One Christmas Sam gave me his room to sleep in, where many pairs of un-photogenic eyes, nestled in tufts of guinea pig hair glowed red over me while I slept.

I've always hated Christmas, since I was quite a little kid. Last year my older brother

called me before Christmas. I have some photos of family on the wall of my kitchen. Staring down over the oats and chopping board with tufts of experience and haunting red glow of associations. To contain their spell I've put a pattern of fluorescent pink post it notes around them with affirmations I've read in pamphlets. I added a few of my own, “you were right” is one that my little brother Chris picked out quickly. “You were right!” He laughed, that's not an affirmation. My older brother Loki saw them and said it was like I was trying to piece together an affirmation based murder mystery.

Scene 9 “The blizzard had died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow

as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest

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pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall. Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints. All silent, all still. Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink though. She took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses and threw it on the fire for she wouldn't need it again. See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”

P erformance still The Tale of the Wolf , Goleniow, Poland: Human Mosaic Festival 2018 Photo Credit: unknown.

The performance text has three strands, like the three sequences of three actions Carreri asked

Vilja and I to make using pushing and pulling. It consists of family anecdotes, text taken from

Angela Carter stories and text from a third syncretic fictive world. It uses scores developed

from pushing and pulling, actions with the hands and feet, as well as the original

improvisations. It draws on the DNA of the work with Carreri as well stepping into the

unknown expression of these actions in the present contexts of the performance. The costume

is a montage between my mother's wedding dress she gave me as a teenager thinking I might

like to use it for theatre, a red jacket given to me by my Grandmother and a wolfskin fur coat

given to me by Else Marie Laukvik at Odin Teatret, which she hadn't worn since the nineteen

sixties.

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The final exercise Carreri taught during her supervision of my process was the

“snake”, an energetic continuum within the performer's body that extends between the coccyx

and head, which is used in her exercise on 'leading points'. To describe her work with leading

points Carreri writes,

I discovered this principle thanks to a question an Odin Week Festival participant once asked me. After a week of workshops, demonstrations and performances, he asked me, 'I want to create my own personal training, do you have any advice for me?' I would have liked to answer: 'For this whole week at Odin we haven't done anything but provide you with suggestions on how to create your own training!' Instead I said: 'The important thing is to take the first step.' And I left. His question irritated me because it showed he did not get the point of our efforts, which was precisely to inspire one's own work. However, I felt some remorse for my curt reply. So I decided to put into practice the advice I had given him, as if a master had given it to me. I stood up in order to take the first step. Keeping the axis of my body straight, perfectly vertical from the top of my head, I began to move forward starting from the tip of my forehead at the roots of my hair. I realised that by following my weight I could accomplish the step starting from my head. 356

When I read Carreri's autobiography Traces, I recalled this question from Odin Week 2012.

Learning this exercise five years later allowed me to receive the fruits of Carreri's self

reflection as a teacher that creates a continuum with her craft. To create the snake, the head

lifts vertically from the body by one centimetre, the chin retracts, and the stomach draws in.

The forehead is lowered, eyes perpendicular to brows. With the shoulders drawn down, the

body forms an energetic continuum. This continuum can be inflected with different intentions

by varying the inflection of the leading point for each action in this stance. Carreri mentioned

that, performed correctly the leading point's inflection can touch string inside the performer,

that, when it resonates, can also be felt by the spectator. This observation reflects that the

356 Carreri, Traces, 198.

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kinaesthetic perception of the spectator is activated by resistance, in this case, the resistance

that creates the correct intention within the performer's body. This intention can be compared

to the will, tensioning the chain of consciousness within the performer to enact multiple

simultaneous realities. Through the performer's presence they activate the spectator's

attention, and the many simultaneous realities present within their neuromuscular experiences,

as reflections.

Establishing the intensity necessary to activate the body, and again eliminating

unnecessary tensions, Carreri began to explain the various inflections given by the different

leading points. These points direct the energy of the current passing through the performer's

body in varying directions. Travelling forwards with the head can inflect the body with a

more aggressive pre – expressive presence to leading backwards with the head, for example.

The heart leading forwards or sideways has a different inflection to the heart leading

backwards, an open attitude can become sadder in this concave position, hips forwards or

backwards can vary the degree of sensuality in a walk, knees backwards, toes could lead

forwards or backwards as with the elbows, the shoulders could lead forwards, backwards, or

rotating, as with the hips. Carreri mentioned the importance of the toes leading backwards.

She mentioned this was a shortcut to presence. Placing the toe tip against the floor demands

the attention of the performer and so sharpens the attention of the spectator as well, reflecting

the physiology of our neurological response. The leading points can be used in varying scales,

textures and combinations, developed with a text. These same variations on resistance were

used with the actions with hands and feet , working on the dynamic of calling, stopping,

pointing, throwing, smallest to largest, reversing the action.

Carreri explained each action reacted to the previous' dynamic, a continuous flow of

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varying resistances rather than a series of thoughts. The resistance to the dynamic, fear of the

unknown manifested again, as I was wanting to get it “right” and afraid to look silly. She

commented that my body was intellectual, aware of itself externally rather than being a body

that does without thinking. Seeing I was hurt Carreri reminded me wolves are not hurt unless

they are physically harmed, unlike humans. She let me know this wasn't the silliest thing she

had seen, also reminding me she had seen me try to ride a push bike in flippers, and it became

much easier to work on the dynamic. On this track the dynamic inflects how the action will

resonate. The same was true for the voice. Carreri instructed me to explore dynamics within

vocal resonators, chewing the words, and letting the actions bring words to life. We fitted text

to the actions, pushing and pulling, and breathing during the pauses on the statues.

Synchronising text and action in this way breaks the body's automatic reaction of breathing

and moving at the same time, bringing awareness to this voluntary – involuntary function.

Carreri suggested speaking the text with Vilja in the sequence, which was much easier, the

continuum of resistance giving the words their flow. The text began to unfurl like the

tablecloth tensioned in the breeze. The work on the dynamic created a continuum between the

body of the actor, their presence, including the breath and the actions performed by the text

which could activate and transform the spectator's experience of their own kinaesthetic

melodies. Carreri spoke to the axis of my practice and performance, asking how I describe my

role, as an actress, a director, why did I want to make the performance? Was it for money, for

pleasure, for spectators? Her work on the development passed through the multiple orders of

being as the performer's snake and allows its actions to speak.

The actress' voice at Odin Teatret

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The question of speech for women in theatre is also an historical, social and intergenerational

question. In “Mutes of the Past ”, a title quoted from Anais Nin, Iben Rasmussen writes about

the conception of the actress as a mute woman. She speaks about the historic idea of actresses

hiding behind wordless intuition. Nin categorised even the influential actress Elenora Duse as

a mute, despite her importance for other prominent actors and directors, including Isadora

Duncan and Amy Lowell, as well as Chekhov and George Bernard Shaw. Rasmussen's own 357

characters have engaged with nonverbal modes of speech, for example, Katrin, the mute from

Mother Courage, who speaks with her drum, and the clown character in Dressed in White who

spoke through gestures, touch, leaps and sounds. She describes these experiential modes that

exceed the iceberg tips of words. She speaks a language with clear emotive content “for those

who can hear” it, telling the stories of women who often disappeared before they were able to

communicate their experiences. In this article, Rasmussen recounts an anecdote about 358

Nijinsky who once visited a great admirer of his. The admirer complained after dinner that

Nijinsky had remained silent most of the time. She notes the prejudice against intelligence

contained in the body that was reflected in these comments. Rassmusen writes about her 359

own development as an actress, “when I began to feel myself as a whole person, I seemed to

lose the power of speech, remaining silent. In reality I was finding my own language.” 360

She reflects that it is difficult for a woman to find and accept her own voice,

As an actress it seems as if I show a woman's strength. I uncover all my energies and let them flow without repressing them without taming

357 Iben Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past: Responses to a questioning spectator”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 5.

358 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 6. 359 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 7. 360 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 7.

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them, without imprisoning them, I do not force them to conform to the laws of “femininity” which the eyes, the wishes and words of men have forced on women, and often turn the actress into a woman doubly domesticated.

At the same time I talk of women using images of earth, fertility, and motherhood. Yet, you say, this is not a rejection of the traditional image of woman and certainly not the only goal of women fighting for their liberation. I cannot and will not oppose one idea with another, I want to talk of what I myself know, even if it is on a very individual level. Finding one's own voice means not being afraid of this force and meeting something that is neither frailty and gentleness, nor rancour and bitterness. It gives one warmth, and is also something to fight with, it is not important to merely win the fight, but also to come out of it without becoming hard, bitter and dry. 361

Rasmussen creates a continuum between an embodied vision of women and their capacity for

action, that is the basis of speech. She presents an image of vitality that follows the already

intelligent direction of the natural world, and is a force of resistance in itself.

Rasmussen explores the intergenerational question of womens' speech through her

memories of her mother. As a child, she describes asking her mother, Esther, where the soul is

located in the body, recalling her reply that, “The soul is like a metal tube in the throat. It has

two holes, one at the top and one at the bottom, and they are both closed.” “It was true.”

Rasmussen writes, “My mother belonged to a generation of women who had shut themselves

away.” She made a performance about her mother's life, Ester's book . The performance drew 362

on passages of a letter Rasmussen's mother had written to Rasmussen in utero called Book of

the Seed . Halfdan Rasmussen, Rasmussen's father, was Poet Laureate of Denmark. Her

mother, Ester, was also a writer. Although Rasmussen describes her mother as kind, she says

she had needs and desires that were unfulfilled. She describes her mother as happiest at her 363

361 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 5. 362 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 12. 363 Rasmussen, “Mutes of the Past”, Itsi Bitsi program, Odin Teatret, 13.

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typewriter, commenting she came to recognise a particular rhythm in her improvisations and

characters, that was the rhythm of her mother's typewriter, lulling her brothers and herself to

sleep. The rhythm that imparted her mother's happiness while she was writing crept into

Rasmussen's work. This rhythmic form of speech is developed in Ester's Book, which also 364

speaks through the rhythm of its actions. Ester's Book tells the story of Rasmussen's mother

after she developed dementia, a story that could not be conveyed solely through the circular

conversations they had from that time. Ester's book speaks through its rhythms to tell the story

of the seed from the Book of the Seed, speaking to its author.

My own mother, among other things, is a therapist working with nonverbal responses

to trauma that, through the therapeutic process, become able to speak. Although the choice to

work through my body can be traced to the limits of the scientific mode, there are similarities

in the subject of her work to the concerns of this thesis. She is the author of “Permission to

Speak: Therapists' Understandings of Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures and Their

Treatment.” Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are “nonverbal communication

behaviours evolved in traumatic interpersonal systems in which verbal expression of affect

was proscribed and nonverbal communication of affect was prescribed.” The article refers 365

to physical symptoms of trauma which develop in situations where speaking is not possible

and behaviour is coded. She describes the cultural transformation necessary for clients with a

history of trauma, co – morbid with the condition, in a safe therapeutic relationship. The 366

symptoms, which in the case of PNES, appear similar to epileptic fits, have no discernible

neurological or medical cause. Her paper considers those cases co – morbid with trauma

364 Rasmussen, “The hidden paths of Ester's book”, Ester's book program, Odin Teatret, 4. 365 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 108. 366 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 113.

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through research, with therapists and clients, and theoretically analyses the causes, functions

of PNES, and the process of their treatment. She found, acculturated nonverbal

communication inhibiting clients' speech, resulted in a nonverbal model of expression, a

functional compensation for a deficit of personal and interpersonal skills in relationships. In

those situations where clients had a compromised temporal relationship with the present,

reenactment was one function of their somatic interventions, and in others, escape from the

present screened the effects of trauma as they presented. The fits could be a form of 367

protection, the internalisation of abuse, or a way of preserving attachment to abusive

caregivers. Where the relationship with the present was intact, symptoms presented as escape

and self harm, offering distraction and release. Treatment varied depending on the clients'

relationship with the present. 368

The therapeutic process described by practitioners was one of personal transformation,

as they struggled to understand the internal languages of patients, which would be illuminated

in watershed moments. They described building a strong dynamic of mutual transformation, 369

working towards the goal of the client's health through an experiential relationship of trust.

This was more difficult where comorbidity disrupted the integrative orientation to the present.

The article suggests that therapists need to be able discover the meaning of symptoms for 370

their clients, a process of transformation for themselves and for clients alike. The article

concludes these symptoms are systems of non verbal communication, which are treated by the

therapist who enters into the client's culture of communication, as well as enhancement of the

client's self and interpersonal skills. It describes disorientation as necessary for therapist and

367 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 114 - 5. 368 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 116. 369 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 117. 370 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 117.

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client alike to find a new orientation for the client. 371

Although this article focuses on shared meanings and therapeutic treatment, it is also

possible to see the relationship between therapist and client as functioning on the pre –

expressive level. The therapist's professional DNA allows them to engage with the anecdotal

actions of the client. The relationship formed between them allows the resonance of the

client's actions to transform. The therapist must be willing to lose their orientation to fixed

semiotic points of reference. This allows the client to transform the dynamic of their actions,

and increases the capacity for choice between their responses in everyday life. In this context

pre – expressivity is a means of transformation, producing new forms of speech. Theatre

Anthropology is useful here to highlight the dynamic basis of speech, that is based in real

actions and can be transformed to produce new approaches to living. It gives patients,

therapist, actors and others the capacity for transformation not only within the proscribed

parameters of the therapeutic setting, or only within the conventions of theatre, but provides

the tools to transform actions between domains through their own bodies to produce luck.

The mouth of the wolf

When the actor meets with an action, they are able to work with it as a material, tailoring its

dynamic to transform how it speaks in the world. This speech is theatrical, neurological and

behavioural. The importance of technical know how to effect this transformation is reflected

in Nando Taviani's epilogue to Roberta Carreri's autobiography On Training and

Performance: Traces of an Odin Actress . Taviani compares Carreri's virtuosic work with 372

371 Quinn et. al., “Permission to Speak”, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 11:1 (2010), 120. 372 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 215-229.

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actions to a sartorial transformation, in which the costume radically changes the actor's

appearance and carries special significance for the spectators. Taviani begins his epilogue by

telling an anecdote about Madame Pauline, an early Nineteenth Century Parisian dancer.

Visiting Mexico Madame Pauline was delighted to find an elegant gown for a very reasonable

price, so she added it to her performance. Audiences were disgusted, because she had

accidentally performed in a gown that had been exhumed from the body of a Mexican

Countess who had recently passed away. The fabric which had seemed so beautiful and

reasonably priced carried the tasteless taint of grave robbery that overshadowed the

performance This anecdote reflects Taviani's understanding of how powerfully the 373

associations with a costume can affect spectators. Taviani continues on to describe the

precision with which Carreri adapts both her performance material and the clothing she uses

between contexts, comparing her work to that of a master tailor. His discussion includes a

misunderstanding he had with Carreri over a dress that she had worn in the work

demonstration The Whispering Winds . He commented on what seemed to be a simple little 374

dress that Carreri wears to introduce her work, in contrast to some of the more ornate

costumes Carreri wears in the piece. Carreri informed him on the design, fabric and cost of

the dress from Milan which is modern and light. So seemingly simple it was easy to 375

underestimate the piece.

The rigour of Carreri's actions in this introduction could also be misunderstood. The

Whispering Winds was a work demonstration that was first presented in Copenhagen at ISTA,

1996. It consisted of four presentations, by Julia Varley, Roberta Carreri, Iben Nagel

373 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 215-217. 374 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 219. 375 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 219.

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Rasmussen and Torgir Wethal, accompanied by musicians Kai Bredholt, Jan Ferslev and

Frans Winther. The aim of the work demonstration was to explore the relationship between

theatre and dance. Taviani describes Carreri's initial presentation in the piece as disarming. 376

Arriving in the “simple” modern black dress, Taviani describes Carreri's speech about theatre

and dance, existing in opposition to one another. Although her style of address was 377

“simple” her presentation was composed as a score. Working with musical accompaniment,

he describes the way the same score was tailored to fit the rhythm of the music as a dance,

working with and against the music. The physical actions seemingly made for the score of an

actor, seemed equally fitting for the dance. Adding a heavy elegant dress Carreri repeated the

score, which now seemed theatrically to have been created specifically for the character

Molly Bloom . Taviani observes that Carreri's presentation reflects what happens “in the 378

liminal areas of each [spectator's] brain”. Her actions speak not only to each of the contexts 379

they're performed in, but also inflect the spectator with the resonance of their own

associations. Taviani comments that under the powerful microscope of Carreri's work, the

movement of the mind, coupling 'meaning' can be seen. It is the precision with which Carreri

transforms the resistance of each action, speaking various languages through the dynamic of

her actions that allows this meaning making process to take place.

The transformation Carreri enacts resists the grasp of 'knowledge'. Taviani says, “try to

do it and you will find yourself with a cold little body of an exercise that serves for nothing

sprezzatura ”. Speaking about the way a master teaches he says, 380

376 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 223. 377 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 223. 378 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 223. 379 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 223. 380 “The art of making the difficult appear easy”, Taviani, Traces, 225.

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They show you the knot, the technique, the agility, the length of training, and together with the mental – physical attitude, the coexistence of commitment and disinterest, of fun and work, of devotion and self mockery. They show you the distinctive strength of mind that allows them to spend a great part of their lives on minuscule and infinitesimal things that are enormously difficult, and hugely useless until that moment in which they succeed to liberate from themselves a kind of radioactivity that makes a clean slate of the technique and exercise to materialise an image, an unburied shadow, that was previously not there, not even as a prediction. Not always. Not in any case. Not certainly. It depends. 381

Here Taviani articulates the importance of the unknown to the instantaneous production of

luck. He asks, what or who is transformed by the performer's fabric of actions and the

resonance they activate? The answer is unknown . Taviani writes, “That is why theatre

remains, deep down, a form of play, gioco, jeu, spiel, a gamble. A game of chance – and also

of courage.” Each action that resonates as speech is a step in the unknown, produced 382

through technical rigour. Taviani uses the Jain Indian word Syadvada , ' perhapsity ', to explain

the outcome of this rigour, and its production of luck. This word is similar to Carreri's

comment, I recall, when I asked if I could come back and work with her in the future,

replying, 'perhaps'. Experience is a meeting between orders of being in the present, the results

of which are unforeseeable. Capturing the darkness of this unknown space from which luck

emerges Taviani writes, “What else could 'reality' mean, if not the senseless jaws of a wolf?”

He concludes his epilogue by wishing Carreri well with her book, using the Italian 383

expression in bocca al lupo 'in the mouth of the wolf' which translates into English as 'good

luck'. 384

381 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 225 - 6. 382 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 227. 383 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 229. 384 Taviani in Carreri, Traces , 229.

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Chapter Seven: The Chronic Life: “I came because I was told my father lived here...”

Luck is an instant in which we transcend the known, finding what we did not know we

were looking for. It defies the accidental logic of everyday life, in which reality seems to

conform to rational knowledge. This “reality” cannot be viewed objectively. This thesis has

traced the complexities of the mind's relationship with nature, and the limits of perception at

the centre of living thought. The Chronic Life , a 2012 performance by Odin Teatret, deals with

the final limit of human perception. Death is the fate we often try to hide or mitigate, like a

gambler, to escape a sense of loss. It is the limit in relation with which we act to produce luck,

creating systems of action, language and thought, in instances of courage and intelligence. We

work through the meshes of our determinism in these systems to overcome it. Each of these

systems projects another reality, a reality that seems to conform to rational knowledge.

Transcending these projections and broadening the instant of creation, which is the aim of

some kinds of philosophy and acting, is a collective action between fields. Spectatorship of

The Chronic Life provides an insight into how the formation of awareness takes place through

theatre, unmaking the spectator's perception of reality, as the action on stage is created during

the performance. I have not provided a traditional performance analysis of this production, a

clear description of the scenario and interpretation of its meaning, but worked through my

own and others’ experiences of losing our way with the piece to demonstrate spectatorship as

an evolving relationship with the unknown. The loss of signification generates meaning in the

piece. Spectators' accounts of The Chronic Life provide as points of illumination into the

common dynamics between disparate spectator's experiences concerning loss, and how we

generate meaning from the unknown. These common dynamics correspond with elements of

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the rehearsal process described by Barba and the Odin actors. I do not constitute the

performance as an object of knowledge but take these illuminations as guides through the

process of not knowing, which is as central to spectatorship as it is to performance, to re –

order perception. This reordering is discussed through Walter Benjamin's historical

materialism, particularly “The Storyteller” and the transcendental notion of Nietzsche’s

Eternal Return interpreted by Pierre Klossowski, a perpetual system of evolution within the

unknown. My aim is not to interpret the performance within these ideas but to find discursive

correlates for dynamics within the performance that articulate the process of producing luck.

Sitting in the dark

I first saw The Chronic Life in 2012 in the Red Room of Odin Teatret, as I have described, in

Chapter One, at the beginning of the Odin Week festival. Barba asked, as I have described,

who had seen a performance by Odin Teatret. This question also appears on the application

form for most Odin Teatret workshops, perhaps a reflection of the theatre's interest in creating

an educated audience. Filing into the dark theatre the Red Room of Odin Teatret, I felt a

degree of uncertainty, would I be able to watch this kind of theatre? After all, I knew

relatively little about the Odin Teatret other than their books and research. My initial reaction

to the performance was relief, I recognised the hallmarks of experimental theatre that had

filtered through my training in contemporary performance at PACT theatre in Erskineville,

Sydney, founded the same year as Odin Teatret. I thought, “I know what this is, this is

experimental theatre!” The frozen grip of knowledge divorced me from the performance. I did

follow some actions of the performance, none the less, the performers whose revolving

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actions circled without touching, each contained within their own spheres. I specifically

recalled the moment Julia Varley's character Nikita danced with Kai Bredholt's character the

Widow of a Basque Officer, an image of two widows lost in their own illusions, turning

together. I was startled by the intensity of Bredholt hurling the ice without letting go, spraying

water drops through the air against the backdrop of the theatre's black. I kept looking for

“Julia Varley” who I had seen in the pictures from her autobiography that had induced me to

visit the theatre, and realised only later it was her doing strange things right in front of me. I

wondered, to the end of Odin Week, when we would meet the blond actress from The Chronic

Life, who was in fact Roberta Carreri, who had been our guide and companion for over a

week. This first experience was characterised by a false sense of security that persisted

throughout the performance, a performance that over time has begun to challenge my

projected version of reality.

The second time I saw The Chronic Life was in May 2014, in Holstebro, Denmark in

advance of the 9 th Holstebro Festuge and 50 th Anniversary of Odin Teatret. The piece was

performed offsite from the theatre in a large warehouse. It was part of Theatre as a

Laboratory for Community Interaction, a symposium organised at Odin Teatret by Julia

Varley. The symposium had linked studio performance with work in the community,

considering theatre as a transformation between the two contexts. The symposium hosted

international presenters including Yuyatchkani (Peru), Bond St Theatre (U.S), and Welfare

State International (UK). I was doing an internship for the Holstebro Festuge and had already

started working at the theatre before the symposium. Barba let me know disorientation was an

important part of the experience of Festuge, and that I would find my own way through. I had

begun labouring on outdoor buildings for Odin Teatret's performance Clear Enigma .

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Tiredness and disorientation selling tickets before the performance, using Danish coins I'd

never seen before, prepared me to be an impressionable spectator and precluded any illusion

of my blindly “knowing” about the performance.

Not knowing is the predicate for experience. During this performance I experienced

the effect of luck that I have also described in Chapter One of this thesis. As mentioned,

remarkably little has been written about this effect in English. While most writers mention

their significant experiences with Odin Teatret, there is little exploration of how these

transform the relationship between action and perception. Writing about the rehearsal process

of The Chronic Life , Adam Ledger ventures interpretations of his spectator experience as well

as providing detailed observation of the performance's mise en-scene, though he doesn't

necessarily link material conditions in the performance to the biological level of the

spectator's perception. I hope by excavating my experiences it will be possible to reflect on 385

how language develops through the spectator's perception, impacted by the performer's bios ,

offering an insight into how theatre generates awareness producing luck.

My notes describe the physiological effect of the performance that began in my

stomach as a change of temperature. The change of temperature made me feel like my body

was on fire, like I was being burnt up from the inside. The heat in my stomach began to

spread to other parts of my body. I associated the temperature shift with the warmth generated

by significant moments, spending time with family that you haven't seen in a long time,

intense happiness, sadness or the death of a loved one. My vision sharpened and began to

glow. This biological effect reflects the activation of kinaesthetic empathy in my

neuromuscular memory described in Chapter Six. This kinaesthetic effect magnifies how the

385 Ledger, Odin Teatret , 112 – 128.

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body and mind communicate in the process of making meaning. The perceptual shift enabled

me to perceive the actions making the performance and unmaking my associations as they

proceeded in the performance. My experience of time drew into the present that unfolded

instant by instant like the pulse of blood.

My notes observe,

I had a dark ring under one eye from a traumatic event. After the fire, the warm fire of being burned alive, it was as though I had been punched in the eye for a second time, releasing blood back into a bruise where it had been solidified as a scar. 386

This physiological effect reflects the dynamic many spectators observe, that performance has

the rhythm of pulsing of blood. The performance activated an experience of loss that had been

mirrored by Varley's relationship with the suit of clothes she uses in the performance. Varley

works with a suit of clothes belonging to her character's husband, who has disappeared or is

dead. Hugging and speaking with the clothes her actions mirrored actions from my own

experience when I had discovered two jumpers behind a cupboard that I had worn during a

relationship before I lost my partner. I spoke to the jumpers and hugged them trying to

comfort them because they hadn't heard the news. Varley speaks to her husband's clothes and

me to my own, but in both situations there is action in relationship with matter to negotiate

what is incomprehensible to the mind. The memory of the jumpers recalled an awareness of

how the reality I lived within was fabricated by my relationship with the world. The weave of

this reality began to unravel with the pulsating actions of the performance. Varley's use of

playing cards began to play out the dynamics of my thought on the topic of luck. When she

chased the King of Hearts that hovered above her finger, forever out of reach, I saw the

386 Williams, Field Notes (2014), Unnumbered.

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magical thinking and superstition of the topic. When she revealed cards from the deck that

were blackened, broken or crossed out I saw the allegorical function of this topic drawing

attention to our actions in the face of misfortune and loss, our negotiations with fate. There

were many nuances in between. These evolving trains of thought were accompanied by the

question, how will I ever transmit this in writing. Not knowing is fecund for the emergence of

the impossible.

Speaking with Varley the following day, between sessions of the symposium I asked

her about these images, letting her know her work with the suit had affected me. She said she

had been working with an image of loss, also described in “The Birth of Nikita: protest and

waste” related to her by her friend Claudio Coloberti, who had spoken about when his wife 387

had passed away, he crawled into her wardrobe to sit with the smell of her clothes.

The snake as a textured continuum

This act of sitting with the dead, through the fabric of their lives could be seen as an attempt

to protect the dead, or our experience of reality contained in our relationships with others,

against the senselessness of fate. Walter Benjamin expresses this in the context of Historical

Materialism when he says, “that even the dead will not be safe... if he wins. And this enemy

has not ceased to be victorious.” This protection is a form of resistance that Walter 388

Benjamin locates in “The Storyteller” and his “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”.

Benjamin speaks about the instant in which perception reorganises itself, in which nothing is

387 Julia Varley, “The Birth of Nikita: protest and waste”, The Chronic Life program notes, Holstebro: Odin Teatret (2011), 37 – 53.

388 Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, 257.

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lost. He quotes Gerhard Scholem's Angelic Greetings , “My wing is ready for flight,/ I would

like to turn back./ If I stayed a timeless time,/ I would have little luck.” Luck cannot be 389

produced through a rational relationship with time, but it appears in the flash of this

materialist instant, “seized only as an image that flashes up at the instant it is recognised and

is never seen again.” This image is explored as the materiality of speech in “The Storyteller: 390

Reflections of the Works of Nicolai Leskov”. Benjamin describes Leskov as a geomorphic

storyteller, as observed in Varley's work at ISTA with the materiality of the performer's body

in exile on an island, the outlines of his tradition appearing as images seen in a rock

formation. Benjamin describes his storyteller as speaking at a time when “something that

seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions was taken from us: the ability to

exchange experiences.” The incommunicability of experience identified by Benjamin 391

appears in The Chronic Life through intergenerational militarisation, denial of human rights,

nationalism, addiction, law and innovation as tools of erasure, and the proliferation of

“disappeared” persons neither living nor dead. These historical forces besiege “fragile human

bodies” whose chances, according to Benjamin, are less than none. The threat to speech 392

Benjamin identifies comes from the rise of information as well as mercantile trade. These lay

claim to the truth and universalism of the tale but place experience itself in danger. The 393

challenge lies, not only in the communication of experience to others but, also in the capacity

for experience itself.

Benjamin equates the loss of communicable experience with the disappearance of

death from public life, the final limit through which one experience is tied to another. Death is

389 Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, 259. 390 Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, 267. 391 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 84. 392 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 84. 393 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 89.

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the authority from which the story speaks . Barba offers his own death in The Chronic Life , 394

as the authority on which its actions speak, activating spectators' own projections in life.

Benjamin also locates storytelling within the shifting nature of the earth. He says natural

history is marked by death, as a quarry marked by fossils. Quoting Peter Hebbel's

“Unexpected Reunion” he describes the regularity of death in storytelling,

In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed. America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died also. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold II went to his grave too. Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun... 395

Death can occur to social realities, as well as to bodies. This passage recounts the birth and

death of multiple orders, countries, borders, heroes, systems of government, mineral orders

from the earth that condition our lives, orders of reality the flow from one state of being to

another. Benjamin says, death is as regular in this story as the figure of death that “appears in

the processions around the cathedral clock at noon.” in the Dance Macabre. Benjamin 396

describes the Asian master storytellers who show “the web that all stories form together in the

end” as in Scheherazade. The dynamic of these stories infects the viewer's relationship with 397

their own fictions, unthreading their narrative material, re – directing their attention to its

394 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 93 - 4. 395 Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 94 – 5. 396 Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 95. 397 Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 98.

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weave. It allows spectators to remake stories within their own lives. He says, the storyteller is

“not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are

embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.” They display happenings as models 398

of the inscrutable course of the world, eschatological or natural.

Leskov writes, for instance, about the speech of stones. “Consider the story “The

Alexandrite,” Benjamin says,

which transports the reader into that old time when the stones in the womb of the earth and the planets at celestial heights were still concerned with the fate of men, and not today when both in the heavens and beneath the Earth everything has grown indifferent to the fates of the sons of men and no voice speaks to them from anywhere, let alone does their bidding. None of the undiscovered planets play any part in horoscopes any more, and there are a lot of new stones, all measured and weighed and examined for their specific weight and their density, but they no longer proclaim anything to us, nor do they bring us any benefit. Their time for speaking with men is past. 399

Varley's body at ISTA worked between the geological or material level of the body, forming

relationships between orders of being, to speak, and in a similar way Norm Phantom can read

the signs of the sea. In The Chronic Life Varley works between materials, actions and

relationships to form allegories of inheritance and sorrow. Benjamin expresses the 'magical'

nature of the fairytale that escapes our rational understanding, its nurturing touch, balanced

between the sexes, as an hermaphrodite blooming in strength, the balance between anima and

animus expressed in Theatre Anthropological research. Benjamin offers an ethical discourse 400

in which nature speaks. The highest place in his theatre of the world of theatrum mundi is

always changing hands, occupied by tramp, peddler, man of limited intelligence. He says “no

398 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 96. 399 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 96. 400 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 104.

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one is up to this role it keeps changing hands... in every single case it is a moral

improvisation.” Odin Teatret performances are a revolving and evolving dance, that, like 401

the fairytale and Leskov's stories, contain the paradox of violence and hope. In Leskov's story

The Alexandrite the stone glows green for hope during the day and red for blood in the

evening, spelling the fate of Tsar Alexander II. The actions of the craftsperson weave our 402

relationship with fate, crafting experience through their actions. Benjamin's observation of the

storyteller was “the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the

gentle flame of his story”. He could equally be speaking about The Chronic Life , gently

melting through Barba and his actors' willingness to give themselves so that our own losses

can transmute themselves into impossible hopes.

“The Birth of Nikita: protest and waste”

In “The Birth of Nikita: protest and waste” Varley describes the premise of The Chronic Life.

She says the performers were asked to respond to a suggestion that they had arrived at the

theatre to be told Eugenio Barba had died. This premise had elicited a strong reaction from

her. She notes that many deaths marked the process of rehearsing the performance, the 403

death of Varley's friend Chilean actress Maria Canepa, Claudio Coloberti's wife Silvia

Mascarone, her mother's partner Marco Potena, the photographer of Odin's iconic tours Tony

D'Urso, and founding member of Odin Teatret Torgeir Wethal, who worked at the theatre until

three weeks before his death. She also notes the important though less painful 404

401 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 106. 402 Benjamin, The Storyteller”, 107. 403 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 38. 404 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 38.

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disappearances, of Frans Winter as a musician from the performance process, and the death of

her original character, the Uncle From America who had worn the dove grey suit now carried

by Nikita hanging from a meat hook inside her dry cleaners bag. She expressed the desire to

comfort where she can through her presence.

I continue to give details from Varley that produced the psycho – physical reaction

before returning to subsequent viewings of the performance. Varley elaborates on how the

performance premise paralysed her until she found the Uncle from America, a character

between anima and animus qualities, that could give her buoyancy in the face of what had

seemed so morbid. He moved with an exaggerated buffon like quality, Barba commented he 405

looked just like her father. During a tour to Istanbul she bought the character two tone shoes,

handmade from a men's clothing shop. Asked to make a scene based on “the struggle with 406

the angel” she worked with Maria Canepa as a guardian angel supporting her, using another

dove grey suit given to Varley after Canepa's death. Varley was inspired by two stories in 407

Mexican author Angeles Mastrett's book Husbands, one a Lebanese man selling cloth door to

door, then from a shop he built with enough room for his family to live upstairs, and the

second about a gambler throwing a card among the folds of his lover's skirts. Leaving her

said, “you are the only country to which I want to belong”. She writes about her work in the 408

vӕksthus or green house in Odin Teatret's Black Room where the ensemble worked for two

hours each morning on their materials and texts during the development of the performance.

As this character, the Uncle from America, who was a cloth seller, she showed the character's

cloth, counted her money, waltzed with someone no longer there. She describes her work with

405 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 41. 406 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 42. 407 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 44. 408 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 44.

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the cards,

I improvise with the cards: I make them fly, I rub them, I use them to clean my hands, wash the floor, cover my eyes, I shuffle them, pick them up in different ways, I sow them as seeds, I build a labyrinth, I offer them, stick them on my tongue, hold them like a cigarette or a fan, I fold them, use them to play different rhythms, I let them caress and kiss, I climb on the pack as if it were the base of a monument, I cry and let the cards fall from my eyes like tears... I hang a card with a black ribbon like the photographs I have seen hanging round the necks of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. 409

These virtuosic variations reflect the actions we're able to play in relation to fate, playing

them as they lie can influence how the cards fall. Many of these elements are still in the

performance, manifold variations on actions played in relation to fate. Varley's Uncle from

America died when Barba insisted she return to a female role, asking her to wear a burka. In

resistance to this suggestion, Varley proposed layers of aggressively colourful women's

clothing, and rubber gardening shoes with dirt still on them. Nikita was born, retaining a

masculine name despite Varley's feminine form. The Uncle from America was killed, his suit

placed inside the dry cleaning bag, hung from a meat hook. Varley says, “I attach the black

and white shoes to the suit. I can't abandon them even though they make everything much

heavier.” She describes her relationship with the suit, dancing, embracing, allowing it to 410

chase her, remembering the anger of those who have lost a loved one. Nikita recounts her

wedding night with her husband who has not returned from war. At the end of the

performance a shot is fired and the suit collapses, a soldier dragging it off stage, recalling

Walter Benjamin's comment that, “ even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

409 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 45 - 6. 410 Varley, “The Birth of Nikita”, 48.

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And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” 411

Varley's inability to let go of the shoes resonates with an experience recounted by Joan

Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking . Didion says about grief, “ We might expect that we

will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool

customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” Following the 412

death of her husband, Didion describes her relationship with space and time, protesting

against his loss. She did not receive his medical records for eleven months from the hospital,

because she had accidentally written the wrong address on the hospital form, mistakenly

writing the address of a house where she had first lived together with her husband, briefly,

after their marriage. She describes an interview with the mother of a nineteen year old boy 413

killed by a bomb in Kirkuk who wouldn't let the military medic into her house to tell her

about her son. She writes about how she could understand the mother's form of resistance,

“As long as she didn't let him in, he couldn't tell her.” The mind resists the 414

incomprehensible, using space and matter to barter with reality in its disorientation, protecting

the dead from their fate. Didion describes the other ways she bargained with matter to resist

her husband's death. While she was fine with an autopsy on his body, she was resistant to an

obituary being published in the paper, as though putting things in words would finally confirm

his death. She declined her friend's offer of company the night after her husband died. She

said, “I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of

magical thinking.” 415

Didion draws on definitions from Freud and Melanie Klein to describe grief as a form

411 Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, 257. 412 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , London: Harper Perennial (2006), 107. 413 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 199. 414 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 13 - 14. 415 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 33.

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of temporary mental illness or derangement that is resistant to treatment other than through

the passage of time, through which the individual will overcome it. She describes her 416

thinking as the thinking of a small child, as though her thoughts or wishes had the power to

change reality. She thought this way covertly, but constantly, allowing others to think her

husband was dead while she secretly buried him alive. Again resisting offers to help give 417

his clothes away, she cleaned the majority of his closet, “I was not yet prepared to address the

shirts and jackets, but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes. I stopped at the

door of the room. I could not give away the rest of his shoes... he would need his shoes if he

was to return.” , she says. Didion describes her book, “This is my attempt to make sense of 418

the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had

about death, about illness, about luck, about probability, about good fortune and bad, about

marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways that people do and do not deal

with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” She rearranges

what had been fixed in her ideas, producing luck through her encounter with the unknown.

This process of transformation in relationship with the unknown repeats itself

throughout Odin Teatret actors' descriptions of the rehearsal period of The Chronic Life . Sofia

Monsalve the young Columbian Actress who first played the protagonist of the performance,

a young boy, was only seventeen when she joined the process of The Chronic Life. She

recounts in “What My Father Left Me”, the first morning of the rehearsals, when Barba had

spoken to the group about superstitions as spells that incited people to confront their destiny.

She gives the example of North American parachutists who shout “Jeronimo!” before they

416 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 33 - 4. 417 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 35. 418 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking , 37.

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leap into the void. Barba gave her a line to repeat as her battle cry, which was, “I came

because I was told my father lived here.” This was a line from a Mexican writer Juan 419

Rulfo's story Pedro Páramo. Rulfo tells the story of a young man travelling to the village

where his mother was born, in search of his father. Instead of his father he finds only ghosts of

the past. Monsalve also had to search through the process of rehearsing The Chronic Life . She

describes the way, part way through the rehearsal process, Barba came to her dressing room

before the rehearsal with a piece of golden cloth to cover her eyes, asking her to cover her

eyes. She had to perform as before but without knowing what was in front of her. Faced 420

with this unknown, she counted her steps, trying to follow the rhythms of the other actors, and

to remember where objects were placed in the space, though they changed their places every

day. She began to recognise every millimetre of the floor, acculturated to sightlessness to the

point that vision was no longer necessary. Reflecting in her diaries she says she can see “the 421

performance also speaks the process of creating it. In the same way that the genetic history of

the species can be traced in each foetus.” She describes being reborn into the community of 422

ghosts that surrounded her through this process. Monsalve sees the loss of the “father” as the

origin of her search and not knowing as the basis of her growth. 423

Sitting in the dark with others

In my process of spectatorship, not knowing has also been the basis of growth. Through

repeated viewing, each sensory perception has increased the capacity for language to form

419 Sofia Monsalve, “What My Father Left Me”, 24. 420 Sofia Monsalve, “What My Father Left Me”, 26 -7. 421 Sofia Monsalve, “What My Father Left Me”, 27. 422 Sofia Monsalve, “What My Father Left Me”, 27. 423 Sofia Monsalve, “What My Father Left Me”, 27.

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around the performance. This is reflected in the reflections on The Chronic Life developed

through repeated viewing at the workshop Co – habitation on Theatrical Structure at Odin

Teatret in 2015. Co – habitation on Theatrical Structure was “nine days seeing again and

again, analysing and working on theatrical structure with Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret

actors” . The workshop created a collective mind between participants from various cultural 424

and creative backgrounds who presented their own work as well as viewing and responding to

Odin Teatret performances and workshops. During the workshop we were able to witness the

development of each actor's sequence, their first composition, following changes in the

composition and the final montage. Viewing in this way the sequence referred to as fight with

the angel mentioned by Monsalve and others allowed us to see the performers' actions

produce a multiplicity of expressions, threaded together by the director's artistic frames of

reference. During the Co – habitation , Barba asked us to write our impressions of the

performances, The Chronic Life , Ave Maria and Inside the Skeleton of the Whale . The more

immediate the impressions, the more valuable. He asked us not to try to be too intelligent.

Repeated viewing of the performance The Chronic Life at the workshop Co – habitation on

Theatrical Structure facilitated responses of spectators reaching towards a greater linguistic

equivalence with the dynamic texture of the performance itself. This could be described as the

development of spectatorship within the culture of theatrical practice. I've included my own

responses to the performance to demonstrate their development through repetition, followed

by the responses by many writers from diverse backgrounds recorded in the University of

Babeş-Boyai publication Dramatica to demonstrate the relationship between the theatrical

and perceptual dynamics of the performance and spectators between contexts.

424 Workshop materials, OTA.

236

Chronic Life 20 th May 2015 The Chronic life made me feel like I was not alone in the habits and obsessions that

have hardened into character traits within which I struggle, surrounded by images of fate and fortune. I felt contact with the actors and buoyed by their jubilant horrors as they described everyday violence, political violence, genetic history, and struggles with consciousness. The work had grown since last time I saw it as I'm more aware of my own struggles with biography, consciousness and history, and no longer experiencing the first dawning awareness of these illusions. I still feel like I have a lot to learn but feel more present to the task, thanks. I also felt it mourning a particular kind of craft which I'm coming to appreciate more, though also think it transforms and doesn't disappear completely.

Chronic Life 21 st May 2015 This time I followed the actions more, though was also driven by associations. First

thing that attracted me was Iben's character sheltering around the glow of an electric lamp, the artifice that lights her modern folk mythology. Then to Julia's cards, a magician revealing your card from the pack, inheritance of tragedy. I saw Tage's laws and Roberta's asphyxiation. Julia's exclusion, which as Tage says, the country will be built on, and enjoyed their pas de deuxs across the border. I felt myself again to begin to reflect on my search for memories and the association with my father, particularly as Sofia's eyes were uncovered and she looked, not with seeing eyes, but with a kind of unresponsive vision. The question I had at this point was what does it mean to find the thing that you are looking for, with the association of a memory I had been looking for. I followed this thread again in her work with the door, that its opening is an undissolved object to bear. The gunshot that ricocheted through her father, the lost love of Nikita and herself was another moment of simultaneity – like when the sound of the violin comes from the base guitar, and the book on Nikita's back sounds like metal. Seeing this I reflected on the statement of Barba that he had come to see the performance as about the death of a generation, for which he could see little hope. I wondered about the doubling of the boy and the kind of death that their play behind newly closed doors might represent.

Chronic Life 22 nd May 2015

This time I followed the logic of interruptions thinking, oh no, I was supposed to follow the lead of one character but I forgot, what will I follow and I thought, I will follow interruptions and incursions.

I noticed each character interrupts the last in a kind of discontinuous flow. There is a discontinuity within Kai's scene as he is talking to a doll which comes to life (later I thought like Pinocchio or a Gollum). Julia scurries in. Sofia's entry is an interruption to Julia who attempts to interrupt Sofia's journey into the space. Even Roberta taunting Julia with the key is interrupted by the function of her own body as bread erupts from her mouth.

I noticed this logic of interruptions was framed by Sofia's running which made my head follow the perimeter of the floor space, which is later closed by Falsto with his tape. Once Sophia has framed this space we see different variations on the perimeter,

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the dance of the law with exclusion. There is a correspondence between the inside and outside when Roberta tries to kill herself with the cloths, an image that again evokes torture, placing herself in a position that evokes an imagined Guantanamo within normalcy, her statement there is no compassion here no mercy (which I notice is the reverse of her line in In the Skeleton of the Whale “Show them no mercy”) contrasts to the way the space is dilated and framed at that moment. The flashes of torchlight in our eyes signal the moment that war has come to wonderland. At this moment there is a rupture of the boundary, we are in the belly of the beast. Although Nikita is inside Wonderland she is not safe and the boy is tortured, his corpse washed by the mother, he sings from his deathbed. The boundary is restored when the wounded soldier is on the outside of the nation's parade and the boy emerges through the flag. As we heard, he learns to kill and he has his eye pads removed. Tage as the law opens the coffin.

Sofia discovers her father was killed by what she has learned to do, “what have I done”, his cross to bear. They play bingo on her grave, waiting for their lucky number to come up. Elena comes. Sophia points the gun at her, but also tickles and plays with her as though she were the little Pinocchio now. The final image reminds me of that scene from Solaris with the rain inside the house, a time-lapse image of nature that reasserts itself through our structures in our absence, conflating inside and outside, natural and artificial order. 425

As Walter Benjamin mentioned, the master storytellers of Asia know one story

always joins onto the next. So too the experiences of spectators express variations on

storytelling drawn from the same performance. Essays commissioned for University of Babeş

– Bolyai, Romania's edition of Dramatica celebrating 50 years of Odin Teatret create a

dynamic wave. They signal many of the themes that have already arisen, the relationship

between knowledge and blindness, disorientation and incomprehension as the basis for

perception, the growth of another kind of perception, between biology and culture, resistant to

the determinisms of history, producing luck. I'm limited by my language skills in addressing

these responses though have responded to those that appear in English, signalling a broader

response as an area for further research.

In “The Chronic Life and the “ Reading ” Paradox” Filip Odangi (PhD), Lecturer in 426

425 Williams, Field Notes (2015), Unnumbered. 426 Filip Odangiu, “ The Chronic Life and the ‘ Reading ’ Paradox”, Dramatica , Romania: Studia UBB 10:1

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Theatre and Television at Babeş-Bolyai University writes about his frustration at not being

able to “read” the performance's assault of visual, auditory and tactile images, a tight unsolved

knot in his mind. He desires to unpick this knot by writing. Watching the recorded video of 427

the performance he was again unable to follow. He “barely grasped plot “threads”” rhythmic

changes, simultaneous actions, sound and light textures that left him re – living his original

experience. This prompted him to question his position as a spectator. These images 428

couldn't be de – coded, but had to be taken “within” to create equivalent relationships to the

events as a civil spectator. A particular kind of knowledge appears useless in this theatrical

experience, requiring, rather than a knowledgeable lecturer, someone who is able to

experience their own rhythmic, dynamic experiences. Watching with another kind of eye 429

the performance began to speak, a debate on loss from survivors, warfare, ideological

blunders, senseless entertainment, the flaws of the system and its opponents, are ripples

perceived. Relationships with Brecht, popular theatre, contemporary performance. The

dominant form of speech and sound is a para – language of verbal gestures and song. The

boarders exclude and contain, demarcated by “glass” cleaned by Carreri, do not cross tape

that marks a crime scene, ironic given the audience's implication in the act. The 430

performance does not function as entertainment nor as sign but, quoting Barba's Theatre,

Solitude, Revolt “... theatre that seeks its value by trying to escape its condition of theatre.” 431

The refusal and resistance to everyday life expressed by the theatre is part of the group's deep

relationship with its transformation. Odangi notes the actor's role is describing social types

(2014), 45 – 8. 427 Odangiu, “ The Chronic Life and the “ Reading ” Paradox”, 45. 428 Odangiu, “ The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 45. 429 Odangiu, “ The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 46. 430 Odangiu, “ The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 46. 431 Odangiu, “The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 47.

239

rather than defining characters, “the Orphan, the Politician, the Widow, the Prostitute etc”,

their real actions expose rather than enact their situation. He gives the example of the 432

widow telling the persecuted family's story using playing cards. The actor is accompanied by

the doll, used interchangeably to demonstrate the role. In this observation we can see the vital

relationship between matter and perception activated by the performed action. Odangiu

concludes by commenting on Yoshi Oida's description of the actor who points to the moon,

becoming invisible so as not to disturb the image. Odangiu's comments reflect the educated 433

spectator unlearns what they know. The actors and director in this performance become

invisible leaving us with the moon, our perceptual means of reflection.

Ion Vartic, Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babes-Bolyai

University records his reflections of three moments fundamental to the performance in “Le

Radeau de la Méduse” or “The Raft of Medusa” . Vartic comments on the use of La Tour's 434

Follia as a leitmotif acoustic pun floating through the performance's world of folly. He

observes the Danish flag unrolled in the central space when disrupted by the Chechen widow.

The flag is hoisted as a sail below which the space floats like The Raft of Medusa . The final

observation touches on the door, a motif in Barba's performances, it is used variously as a

table, lid for the coffin, and carried through the protagonist's struggles to exit the “chronic

life”. Art historical and musical references indicate fecund knots of aesthetic experience. 435

Vartic comments on the door foregrounding the conditions of transformation as resistant,

opaque and unwieldy. His observations reflect knowledge as the capacity to share discourses

that transcend the historical circumstances of the spectator or artists.

432 Odangiu, “The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 48. 433 Odangiu, “The Chronic Life and the “ Reading '' Paradox ”, 48. 434 Vartic, “The Raft of Medusa”, 50. Referring to the painting by Gericault. 435 Vartic, “The Raft of Medusa”, 51.

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Eugenia Sarvari, Literary Secretary of National Theatre of Cluj-Napoca describes the

ice drips throughout as a measure of time. She notes the multiple functions of the performance

space walled with spectators, a river bed, or a raft, a refuge and a prison for its inhabitants

who speak in a plethora of languages. Sarvari quotes Taviani's comments on action as a “life

cell, which seems to not belong to a body, to not have an identity. A cell that can be

transplanted to an unscheduled context.” The biological basis of the performance is 436

encapsulated in this comment, describing the actions' open interpretability. Sarvari describes

the widow who washes the body of her husband while rock music plays in the background,

watched by the black Madonna. Her son is initiated into the order of spectres. Nikita shares

the cards of destiny everywhere, the Rumanian housewife always wiping, cleaning trying to

kill herself. The actors and their work amplify one another as chronic. History amplified 437

through actors' work which contains the wisdom of living.

Annalis Kuhlmann provides the most extensive engagement with The Chronic Life in

this volume, particularly engaging with the themes of blindness as insight, and loss of

signification fostering another form of perception that the performance presents. Kuhlmann 438

identifies The Chronic Life's resistance to the silencing of struggle. It is a geopolitical

reflection on the capacity of the body to speak. She describes the performance as a sonorous

lament, that carries a spirit of joy within. Thomas Bredsdorff also comments in “The Chronic

Theatre” about the light touch of a theatre that dances its maladies, limping or skipping along

on its last legs. Kuhlmann, a scholar from Aarhus University close to Odin Teatret, compares

Odin Teatret to Theatrum Mundi due to its diversification of West Jutland and its relationships

436 Sarvari, “The Chronic Life”, 51. 437 Sarvari, “The Chronic Life”, 52. 438 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark. Odin Teatret and The Chronic

Life ”, 219- 34.

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throughout the world. She opposes the world as theatre to globalisation and questions of

Danish nationalism within the performance. 439

Kuhlmann details theatrical and musical references through which the performance

speaks. The final silent tableau of Odin Teatret's older actors is a rhythmic caesura referencing

Myerhold's The government Inspector (1926). The last movement of Beethoven's 9 th

Symphony (Ode to Joy) and Mendelsshon's Wedding March transposed into a minor key

appear as well as Ode to Joy montaged with Chopin's Funeral March . Although Kuhlmann 440

interprets these as hopeful allegories, the minoring and montage of these melodies could also

suggest pathos in the jubilation of the younger generations. They are performed by Elena

Floris who accompanies Sophia Monsalve, the young boy, as her double, on the violin.

Kuhlmann links Monsalve's blindness to an awareness of time ascribed to Odin, god of

insight, blindness and the perception of destiny. She sees Monsalve's character as an

archetypical witness who, like the spectator, lives rather than sees what happens. This is part

of Odin's search for a discipline resistant to knowledge. 441

Kuhlmann sheds light on the topic of luck. She reflects on the vulnerability of

perception required of spectators to register painful scenarios that fall like a house of cards.

The performance is a metaxas, or web of polarity within which the spectator also encounters

themselves, as Monslav's character finds her alter ego rather than her father. Serendipity 442

opens spectators’ “eyes” onto another form of perception. She quotes Barba's comment in

2010 about dramaturgy similar to what he had repeated to me at Odin Teatret in 2012 about

luck as “finding what you're not looking for”. She notes layered fragments of past Odin 443

439 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 220. 440 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 222. 441 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 223. 442 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 225. 443 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 225.

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Teatret performances within this piece quoting theatre researcher Diana Taylor on archives as

layers of repertoire. Barba places himself in the position of an actor, rather than a director

with a totalising vision. She describes Barba's position of blindness allows him to find that

elusive order invisible even to him. In this search the individual's body opens onto biological

and geo – political forces. The relationship between bodies and materials inherits something 444

from visual arts. The band of red light encircles the stage, and the band of red and white

police tape finally closes the space. The space pulses with the performance soundscape,

creating the impression of a pulsating artery, an impression of pulsating blood, Kuhlmann

says. Ice drips into a military helmet suggesting dripping blood. The polar thaw becomes a

stream by the performance's end. 445

The sightlines of blinded characters do not reflect what they see. Rather they reflect a

form of perception based in the nervous system. This is the neuromuscular perception

transferred between performer and spectator, enabling what Kuhlmann suggests, that the

spectators are complicit in the enunciation of the performance, reflecting the activation of

kinaesthetic melodies imprinted on our bodies that we become aware of during the

performance. Our freedom of expression is at stake in this interaction Kuhlman suggests, the

capacity to be aware of our experiences and perceptions. The awareness generated, is the 446

evolutionary effect of theatre producing luck. Kuhlman observes this is political as well as

individual. The performance is dedicated to Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova,

Kuhlmann notes, Russian journalists who spoke against the Chechen conflict, killed in 2006.

447

444 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 226. 445 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 226. 446 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 227 - 8. 447 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 227.

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Kuhlman describes a concave form of perception like a blind socket that perceives in

darkness in the performance. She compares this perceptual space to the grave or womb.

Meanwhile, convex pillars of Danish nationalism, the flag and football anthem stand in for

darkness. The characters excavate Danish folk tune I skyggen vi vanke (In the shadow we

stumble). The convex, concave link is a fecund pre – expressive analogy. The convex 448

coffin's concave space is inhabited like a womb by the boy searching for his father. Its

vulnerability echoes the women's loss, which contrasts with pillars of the law and nationalism

where “everybody seems to be happy” in the frozen hopeless landscape. The spiritual

Amazing Grace counterpoints Carreri manically polishing invisible windows and swallowing

shards of a cognac glass. Kuhlmann traces a series of complex references between Odin

Teatret productions, to Odin Teatret's Kaosmos (1993 – 96) where the door appeared as a

question of access, Brecht's Ashes II (1982) where female characters limped and My Father's

House (1972 – 74) where atonement money was thrown away. 449

The loss of the patriarchal order is a classical theme in theatre. The loss of Barba, the

loss of the signifier leaves fecund concave spaces beyond knowledge, from which new co –

incidences can grow. In its “third age” Odin Teatret integrates loss into the context of

Denmark “the happy nation”. The happy nation is represented by the Code of Jutland , one 450

of the oldest mediaeval statutory laws, which reads “with law the land shall be built”. 451

Ursula Andkjaer Olsen's poetry spoken by Tage Larsen repurposes the code, “with a little

drop of whiskey in the coffee the country shall be built”. He creates variations ranging among

idioms and lines from songs. Larsen also works with the law of Jante setting out behaviour

448 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 228 – 9. 449 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 229. 450 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 230 – 1. 451 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 231.

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towards foreigners in Scandinavian communities. He opens the cavity between narratives of

national identity and action. Kuhlmann quotes,

With what must a land be built? One way direction is the fundamental promise. He who wants to get ahead always has the right of priority, of full speed and of skeletons in the closet. Look ahead! Never look back! Always take the easy option! Keep your eye on the ball! 452

The values of globalisation reflect the mercantile corrosion of civic life, a state belied by

narratives of progress. In The Chronic Life Barba offers himself as that dead that will not be

safe from this enemy who has not ceased to be victorious.

Kuhlmann moves between poetics of theatre space, history of Odin Teatret, global and

national boundaries. She describes individual stories, and reveals themes of loss. She says,

The production takes these big issues as individual narratives in a montage and in this way the isolated and sometimes also the lonely human in a globalised age... is produced with a scary sharpness. 453

This sharpness is born of the biological enactment of loss that unravels and re works our

individual psychic and geopolitical experiences. Kuhlmann draws towards the limit of death.

She concludes her article “ with chronic life must theatre be built ”. Theatre as chronicle must

dance its relationship with death to stay alive.

The snake that bights down on its own tail

452 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 232. 453 Kuhlmann, “Something is rotten... not only in the state of Denmark”, 233.

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Dancing with death is a quality of magical thinking. Grief seeks to protect its dead with a

projected reality until that projection becomes unnecessary. Dancing with death is also an

action that resists the projections of rationalism, which unlike the madness of grief, are not

always healed with the passing of time. This thesis has commented on how these projections

can be resisted, through actions, to produce luck. The notion of action is further developed by

speaking through in Pierre Klossowski's “The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine”, an

interpretation of Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

Klossowski interprets Nietzsche's Eternal Return as seeking to broaden the creative

instant into an unending process of evolution producing luck. Klossowski describes the

Eternal Return as an evolutionary concept in “The Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine” in

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle . He says Nietzsche was motivated by the necessity of acting.

Klossowski says, “He was not worried about the fate of the human species, nor ... guided by

the fear of suffering ... it was rather the necessity of acting externally” through which he

confronted his internal distress. Nietzsche comments, “Nature has no goal and realises 454

something. We others have a “goal” but obtain something other than this goal.” This 455

reflection mirrors the conditions of luck. He seeks the intention or will that would replace

divine will, calling this will the “dorsal spine” of a human. This dorsal spine recalls the

intentions formed through physical actions in the performer's “snake” in Theatre

Anthropology, working with the body's determinism to increase its capacity for choice

between actions. Like Aristotle and Bergson, Nietzsche's questions also place him between

determinism and nihilism, seeking action. In this system, Nietzsche seeks to methodically re –

454 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 93. 455 Nietzche in Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 94.

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establish the fortuitous conditions of the past to create individuals capable of action. 456

Klossowski outlines the revelations of The Eternal Return to Nietzsche as fortuitous

experiences that allow conscious choice to become possible between actions, a system of

action which could be described as producing luck. Klossowski places Nietzsche's 457

statements within the tradition of occult political mystification within philosophy, where

demystification is followed by superior mystification, like the training of a performer's body

in Theatre Anthropology, endlessly forming a new acculturation. Klossowski suggests the 458

idea sprang from scientists' capacity to continually overturn the findings of science.

Overturning knowledge guards against the projection of intellect, which for Nietzsche is a

caricature of unreason. Klossowski suggests that as long as art, or science remains within its 459

designated category, it cannot effect a transformation. The “philosopher – actor” must become

an impostor, going beyond their own domain. Nietzsche sought to create an 'anthropo – 460

culture', a study of culture itself which was a self dissolving project, turning on its own

evolution. 461

This 'anthropo – culture' of constant transformation is, like Theatre Anthropology,

based in training. He clarifies the nature of this training,

there is no worse confusion than the confusion of (disciplinary) training with taming : which is what has been done – Training, as I understand it is a means of storing up the tremendous forces of mankind so that the generations can build upon the work of their forefathers – not only outwardly, but inwardly, organically growing out of them and becoming stronger - 462

456 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 98. 457 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 95. 458 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 100 – 1. 459 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 102 460 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 103. 461 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 107. 462 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 116.

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Training works artistically on the human, power becoming an energetic force. Surplus power

finds its image, “the image of chance” which here can be compared to luck. Production 463

sublimates affects, impulses, and know how to psycho – technical planning. Contemplative

'creative tasks' give freedom to life to “shine forth in the brilliance of its absurdity and the

absolute non – sense of existence” at which point spectators determine the values and the

course of things. For Nietzsche spectators are exceptions and variations from social/ 464

industrial production which conditions reflexes. As with spectatorship of an artistic tradition 465

these spectators have to be trained. Producing luck has an evolutionary function, resulting in a

broader range of affects and actions from the industrialised social body. In a willed moment is

where the 'signification' of industrialisation is overturned. Klossowski explains this was part

of Nietzche's vision for the arts. To reckon not only with art but also with the fabric of the

world through the reformation of matter, a consistent mode of production. He says, “partly

necessity, partly chance has achieved [it] here and there, the conditions for the production...

we are now able to comprehend and consciously will: we are able to create the conditions

under which such ... is possible ”. 466

As with the nurturing the capacity for experience expressed by Walter Benjamin,

Nietzsche’s work aims to counteract moral and affective numbing. Nietzsche foreshadowed

“the human being will no longer feel itself , not its substance, nor its power – even though it

will henceforth be capable of exploiting other planets.” Technological capability will not 467

allow humans to experience reality. The Vicious Circle is a sign of experimental evolution

463 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 118. 464 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 122. 465 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 120. 466 Nietzche in Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 124. 467 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 126.

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derived from lived experience. It maintains the status quo unless subjects are capable of 468

producing difference through experimental actions, adapting the aims of experience, to exit

from chronic patterns of projection. This is expressed through the image of the serpent that

bights down on its own tail, severing the circle of self destruction. Severing rational

projection, new possibilities for life. There is no limit to the unknown relations through which

this transformation snakes in the depth of experience, producing luck as the creation of new

forms of being.

Incomprehensibility and hope: the making of The Chronic Life

How did this encounter with the unknown unfold through the rehearsal process of The

Chronic Life ? Barba explains his interest in the limits of knowledge in the program of The

Chronic Life , in “Incomprehensibility and Hope” . He says he is often told his performances

are not easy to understand. Quoting from Danish Physicist Niel Bohr, he says the opposite of

truth is not a lie, but clarity. Although clarity is useful in writing, in a performance it can 469

produce something that is frozen, without hope. He says watching a performance in which

everything is clear “I think of an expanse of ice. I get the sensation of a petrified landscape,

one without hope.” He describes hopelessness or despair as understanding all too well what 470

faces us, which destroys the capacity for action. This is a description of fate. He asks, is hope

then a form of self delusion, like magical thinking, or something else. Barba believes hope to

be a way of engaging closely with what he wants to refuse without projecting his own ideas,

468 Klossowski, “Vicious Circle as Selective Doctrine”, 126. 469 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 4. 470 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 4.

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or believing he has come to see things with “clarity” himself, a detailed relationship with the

unknown. Barba says he would like his performances to be currents in the sea rather than

frozen, immobile landscapes. He recalls Fritjof Nansen, scientist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

and polar explorer, who sailed his ship into a prison of ice, calculating how the tides of the

frozen landscape would shift with the weather. He navigated the shifts in a seemingly frozen

landscape reading the ice. Nansen, Barba says, is the master of deep hope. Perhaps what

Barba describes here, also reflects Didion and others’ processes of grieving, moored in matter

that does not seem to move until certain currents begin to flow. Barba writes, “Because times

do change and even the longest night, as Brecht writes, is not eternal.” 471

Barba too finds movement within the immobile landscapes, offering spectators the

chance to navigate currents so deep their existence seems impossible, the kind of flow that

dislodged a solid mass from my eye. Those channels are the dark, historical and individual

forces that inhabit us and can be explored in the “enclosure called theatre” . Through this 472

process he is able, “to give form and credibility to the incomprehensible and to those impulses

that are a mystery even to [himself], turning them into a skein of actions-in-life for the

spectator's contemplation, annoyance, repugnance and compassion”, as a way of changing at

least one tiny corner of the world. These dark spaces defy what Barba refers to as the cult of 473

clarity, one of the most refined totalitarianisms of our time. He asks what other reality remains

behind that which seems so clear in the fiction of understanding. Removing the mystery we

are to ourselves removes the possibility for connection between orders of knowledge. Barba

writes,

471 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 5. 472 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 7. 473 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 7.

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I would like that skien of actions in life to infect that zone in each of us where unbelief blends with naivety. I would like The Chronic Life to open a tiny crack into the dark incandescent magma of the individual and his painstaking vital zigzagging to free himself from an icy embrace: that of the implacable and indifferent Great Mother of Abortions and Shipwrecks, Our Lady History. 474

474 Barba, “Incomprehensibility and Hope”, 8.

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Conclusion: From Not Knowing, to Knowing How Not to Know

If this thesis had another genre it would be a creation myth. Not the story about the

girl in the garden but a story about a snake and its little known plight after the incident with

the apple, how would it ever be able to connect with knowledge again? The thesis is an

attempt to set the creature free to connect between different orders of knowledge, matter,

biology, and conscious reflection, snaking between geography, politics, and history, as well as

different temporal and spatial spheres. The thesis fabricates this snake from different

viewpoints and discourses, looking for wriggle room to develop and articulate an idea of

theatre. It is a piece of auto – ethnography in so far as it approaches this study through the

body of its author, tracking its disorientation and the evolution of its perception. It is a piece

of Theatre Anthropology in so far as it finds what is shared between individuals and contexts,

drawing on the tools of this discipline in its search. It articulates potential directions for the

study of Theatre Anthropology through exploring material that is already implicit within the

field.

Speaking of Theatre Anthropology, it has taken me some time to understand the title

of Barba's guide to this field, The Paper Canoe . I first read the title of this book as though it

was referring to a little boat made of paper, like a child's toy, disposable after its first use,

thinking that a boat made out of paper would not be very durable. Walking in Dharawal

country (The Royal National Park, New South Wales, Australia) at Easter in 2018, I saw the

Dharawal carvings on Jibbon headland for the first time, which gave me another idea of what

the book might be about. The engravings tell the story of the arrival of the Indigenous

Dharawal people to that area South of what is known as Sydney. The story goes that they had

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stolen a canoe, from a whale, spearing the whale when they escaped, and had used the canoe

to sail into the bay. The engravings tell the story of the whale that continues to swim up and

down the coast, looking for the stolen canoe, spouting water through the hole in its back. The

story made me aware for the first time that a canoe could be a means of building an

environment, being able to stay put while continuing to trade with other people, rather than

having to continuously roam up and down the coast. A canoe could be another way of

creating a home. My hope is that this thesis contains some of the insights I have gleaned from

workshops and internships with Odin Teatret that have helped me to find roots and to be open

to exchange. The thesis marks a journey from feeling not knowledgeable enough about theatre

to continue on, to being buoyed by these insights into how it is possible to do something other

than know, that knowledge is just one part of this practice that snakes between fields. It has

been written as a form of resistance to theatre on one hand and knowledge on the other to find

what may or may not already be sought between them, and has followed a logic of accidents.

To recap, the thesis has developed an original theoretical concept of luck. That concept

is based on the human capacity for choice between actions that leads to the realisation of

conscious or unconscious will in ways that could not be foreseen. The concept, also

elaborated by Aristotle, has been developed in relation to distinct orders of being described in

Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution . The production of luck is a vital act that resists

projections of the mind. It has an evolutionary function. Its seemingly automatic occurrence

offers new choices to humans, increasing the complexity of actions we're able to perform in

relation with the unknown. This concept has been embedded in epics such as the Ramayana

over centuries, as related by Ian Pidd, reflecting it is not the novelty value of a performance

that creates its impact, but the realisation of will in unforeseeable ways which affect the social

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fabric. This effect has been marked in Indonesia's historical and political transformations.

Transformation risks incoherence, and must be maintained by technical knowhow, such as

that of the Dhalang in Wayang Kulit puppetry, the actor or director in other forms. Nicola

Savarese's writing on technical and material knowledge between cultures documents both

these risks and this knowhow. His work on puppets and masks between contexts reflects how

performers' actions animate matter.

I have documented the development of technical skills in this thesis through practical

research at Odin Teatret. This has been an experience characterised by instantaneous,

seemingly automatic events that have contributed to my evolution as a performance maker,

spectator, and researcher. My account of this experience develops over the course of this

thesis, reflecting the increasing complexity of my own capacity for actions as an auto –

ethnographic researcher and theatre maker as a result of this research. The most embryonic

introduction that I provide to this research is the discussion of my disorientation and difficulty

learning at Odin Week Festival 2012, as well as the experiences of luck I recorded at the

event. At this workshop, training with Odin Teatret members and with Eugenio Barba

introduced us to a theatre that resists the spirit of its times to remain part of the social fabric,

as a cultural artefact contributing to human evolution. Resistance here was explored as a

technical concept through action, in resistance with other bodies, objects and forces, as well

as an act performed by the theatre's administration to transform reality. We were introduced to

the theatre's networks and the voices it supports. The disorientation from rational perception

produced a receptive audience, preparing me to experience Judith which, for me, resisted

linguistic comprehension. I experienced the relationship between severing, resistance, and

growth through the dramaturgy of the performance, that showed resistance is the basis of

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connection between different orders of being, that produces luck.

Resistance to rational projection is the basis of Barba's notion of Theatre

Anthropology. Based on knowing with the body, theatre craft speaks through a language of

action. Going beyond mental projection has also been an important discursive theme in

Cultural Theory and its evolution from Anthropology's early study of other cultures. Speaking

between Cultural Theory and Theatre Anthropology reflects the importance of action for the

evolution of thought between fields. Overcoming projection is the basis of training in Theatre

Anthropology, 'learning to learn', rather than repeating what is already known. The threat of

detaching from the known compounds historical and social experiences of colonialism in

Theatre Anthropology. Key performers at the International School of Theatre Anthropology

reflect the capacity to overcome these problems in exchange between cultures, which is a

valuable and difficult skill mastered by a small number of reformers between fields. Debates

in Theatre Anthropology contest the relationship between signification and action. Patrice

Pavis and Jane Turner in her application of his work, approach the performer through various

strata of cultural signification. Where Pavis suggests we can only examine the skin discarded

by a snake that has wriggled away, I suggest that this snake is the continuum between matter,

biology and culture that speaks through the performer's bios . I explore the performer's bios ,

'learning to learn' and pre – expressivity through observation and participation at the XV

session of ISTA in Albino, Italy.

At this session of ISTA I explored the concept of the performer's bios as a continuum

between material and biology. I learned the actor's body is always composed on multiple

levels as a montage between functions, and that training between theatre cultures increases the

capacity for choice between actions for the performer. Where observation produced the

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semblance of continuity, action dislocated and disoriented, forcing the actor to co – ordinate

between internal and external perception. Elaborating on Barba's metaphor of DNA to

describe an action's transformation, this chapter explores the transformation of theatre

traditions through the biographies of performers. Barba's work with actors demonstrated how

the action spoke. The sequence he worked with Julia Varley to compose formed an analogy

between the material level of the body and the landscape of its setting. Varley's actions spoke

through varying relationships within the body and within this context, including reacting to an

unseen presence. I have compared her actions to the dynamic actions within language for

example in linguistic cases. This analogy demonstrates that it is not signification that speaks,

but action, which is common to nature, the human body, and language. Her work allows us to

reflect on Theatre Anthropology's relationship with language and other systems through

which humans escape our determinism.

The ways in which theatre can speak are social and cultural, as well as material and

biological. Case studies from an Australian context reflect some of the determining historical

obstacles to producing luck in this context. This thesis considers a vernacular Australian

conception of luck, the role of speech in Australian theatre, and the contestation of value in

Indigenous Economics. It demonstrates that culture is redundant without the material and

biological level of its production, which also have to be amplified through discourse to speak.

Transformation of the social milieu through theatrical forms is the basis of the Holstebro

Festuge, staged in Holstebro, Denmark. During this festival, local institutions work with Odin

Teatret to transform the town of Holstebro, re – contextualising the practices of participants

through performance. The body of the performer functions within social and cultural settings

as an encounter with the unknown. It challenges the projection of rationality in the same way

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that the snake reforms the territory of Carpentaria in Alexis Wright's epic storytelling.

The transformation is also enacted within the theatre. Action transforms the

socialisation of the performer allowing them to speak in new ways. Training with Roberta

Carreri at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium offered insights into the role of resistance in this

evolution for the actor, as well as for the evolution of language form action. Eliminating

tensions in my spine led to the seemingly automatic experience of luck through which my

performance became able to speak. This speech occurred in a third space of the performer's

bios , which is neither fictional nor anecdotal but followed the already intelligent direction of

the body. This notion of speech is explored by Odin actress Iben Rasmussen in Ester's Book

as an intergenerational reflection on the evolution of speech for women in theatre. I consider

the pre – expressive level of speech within my own mother's work as a psychotherapist,

suggesting Theatre Anthropology offers tools for also viewing therapy within an expanded

context where the tools of transformation are available between fields. This capacity for

transformation is expressed through Carreri's masterful tailoring of theatrical actions, to

produce luck as the resistance to crushing determinism.

The final limit of our biological determinism is death. Dancing with this fate produces

luck in Odin Teatret's The Chronic Life . The performance speaks through the mantle of

Barba's death from which its authority speaks. The insanity of grief reflects the everyday

illusions with which we attempt to stave off the unknown. The evolution of action and

perception through Theatre Anthropology allows us to acknowledge the illusions we generate

and increase the capacity for choice between actions. Repeated viewing of The Chronic Life

demonstrates how language evolves from action through perception. Reflections on The

Chronic Life demonstrate that evolution is a collective action, where loss of orientation is the

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source of insight. The fate of the dead is contested in historical materialism, relying on the

storyteller's capacity to relate experience. Overcoming the limits of determinism is the subject

of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, an 'impostor's' program for human evolution that hopes to

develop the capacity for human action and to stop the snake from swallowing its own tail.

This capacity is increased through Theatre Anthropology. Its work with the meshes of

determinism and resistance to projection allows us to develop skills in the production of luck,

if we're lucky.

So what is the aim now of Lady Luck? To animate matter resisting the inevitable?

Personally, I take a step off the page to continue patching together the body of this snake

between various fields of practice. Meanwhile, this research continues to expand on its main

contribution to Theatre Anthropology, linking between the materiality on an ecological level

and the materiality of thought on a socio – cultural level through the experience of the

performer's bios. It continues to snake between fields, twisting and turning to connect

between temporal and spatial planes previously distinct, its dynamic action is the basis of

speech. Together these paths will tell their own story, speaking through the actions of the

living and the dead, producing new cases of luck.

258

Bibliography

Andreasen, John and Kuhlmann, Annelis eds. Odin Teatret 2000, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000.

Aristotle, “Physics”, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Da Jonathan Barnes ed. , Princeton:

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