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| Eugenio Barba |
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Eugenio Barba was born in 1936 in Brindisi, Southern Italy. He created a Scandinavian laboratory theatre called Odin Teatret/Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (1964), which still works in Holstebro, Denmark; and he founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in 1979. In 1954, Barba emigrated to Norway, where he worked as a welder and sailor. He came to Poland in 1961 after receiving a UNESCO scholarship to study at the state theatre school PWST in Warsaw. Between 1962 and 1964, he worked with the Laboratory Theatre, assisting Grotowski during his work on Akropolis after Stanislaw Wyspianski and Dr. Faustus after Christopher Marlowe. Based on these experiences, he wrote his first book dedicated to Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre – Alla ricerca del teatro perduto (In Search of a Lost Theatre, Padua, 1965). Barba has directed sixty-five performances with Odin Teatret (and with the Theatrum Mundi Ensemble ), some of which are: My Father’s House (1972), Come! And the Day Will be Ours (1976), Brecht’s Ashes (1980), The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985), Talabot (1988), Kaosmos (1993), Mythos (1998), Andersen's Dream (2005), Ur-Hamlet (2006), The Chronic Life (2011). Odin presented these performances in Poland in Wroclaw (at the Grotowski Centre’s invitation), Warsaw, Lublin, Szczecin and Torun. Barba has received ten honorary doctorates for his artistic and scientific work from various universities, including: Århus (Denmark), Ayacucho (Peru), Bologna (Italy), Havana (Cuba), Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Warsaw (2003). He is on the editorial boards of journals such as: TDR-The Drama Review, The Journal of Performance Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, and Teatro e Storia. He has published many books, of which the following were translated into Polish: Land of Ashes and Diamonds. My Apprenticeship in Poland (the Grotowski Centre 2001); Theatre. Solitude; Craft; Revolt; in collaboration with Nicola Savarese The Secret Art of the Performer; A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (the Grotowski Centre 2005); and The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology (the Grotowski Institute 2007). |