The interview
twelve o’clock, November 7, 2021 – 10:46
From 9 to 13 in Bari (Abeliano), then from 15 to 20 November in Lecce (Koreja) with the Odin actors
from Francesco Mazzotta
IThe Salento of Denmark Eugenio Barba, who from Holstebro marked the second avant-garde of European theater with the wanderings of Odin Teatret, one year later embraces his Puglia for two articulated residences. The first is scheduled in Bari, from tomorrow until next Saturday, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Abeliano, the second from 15 to 20 November, in Lecce, with the Koreja shipyards.
Maestro, as a tireless traveler, how did you experience this period in which getting around was particularly difficult?
«I have traveled a lot with my mind and found the time to found the international magazine The Journal of Theatre Anthropology together with old friends and young scholars ».
His travels started early.
«In 1954, when I emigrated to Norway to work as a worker. I left for love and a spirit of adventure. At that time there was no tourism. Visiting other countries was a luxury for the extravagant rich. For me, on the other hand, it has always been a spell to move, over time thanks to reading, in space, adapting myself to unknown languages, encounters and situations ».
Today it seems that fear is taking over, in many forms.
«I can only see how this fear is a mixture of anger towards politicians and economic insecurity. Superstitions and a collapse of values are taking over ».
Puglia means nostalgia, pain of memory?
“Terrible childhood memories bind me to Bari: the bombings of the Allies and the Germans after the armistice. My family lived in via Imbriani. Opposite was a building occupied by Sudanese soldiers. It was the first time I saw Africans. Then, Salento, which has profoundly marked my imagination for fourteen years. But I don’t feel homesick. Instead, I feel an indescribable pain, never felt before, when I return every year to Carpignano and Gallipoli, to visit the family tomb. It hurts to cross a landscape devastated by Xylella ».
Rite of collective introspection or intimate investigation: what is theater for you?
“Actually, by doing theater I wanted to exorcise the racism I encountered in the Scandinavian world of work. In the 1950s I earned my bread as a welder, and especially when I sailed as a sailor on a freighter, I suffered contempt for the Italians, the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Thus, I imagined erasing my ethnic image through the artist’s mask. I had no talent for writing, painting or composing music, and being a director seemed like a good solution. This is Odin Teatret for me: an environment where people pierced by history and life exorcise their wounds and fulfill their needs with artistic craftsmanship ».
What gaze did he want to cast on history with The tree, which presents in Bari and Lecce?
«More than launching a glance, I wanted to underline the eternal challenge I feel towards my job. The question is: can the theater shake the spectator’s nervous system, his memory, his pietas, his prejudices for brief moments? I took two concrete situations of our day, child soldiers in Africa and in Europe, both victims and perpetrators, and I described them according to the expressive tools of theatrical creativity. Franco Perrelli is right in stating that, once again, I go back to the core of all my shows, because The tree brings back the “butcher’s table” of which Hegel spoke to define history ».
The theme of death, present in The tree, it is even central in Ave Maria, the other title he presents in Bari. An essential theme when touching the universe of the sacred?
«Death is the experience that forces us to give meaning to life, to our brief passage on the planet. It is the point of reference for unknowingly answering the question: what is my position towards my neighbor, suffering, injustice? In the theater it becomes an opportunity to tell common stories and transform them from stereotypes into archetypes, in situations that involve the emotional and instinctive part of our identities ».
Will the proposal to deposit a copy of the Odin Teatret archive at the Castromediano Museum in Lecce become a reality? And how do you plan to characterize this initiative?
«The idea is to create the Floating Islands Living Archive. On the one hand, documents, books, videos, posters and anything else of Odin at the service of teaching, on the other a study center on the history and culture of group theater from other continents, especially Latin America, with which the ‘Odin had deep relationships. Experiences to be grafted with this part of the world. And then, the initiatives I carry out with the Barba Varley Foundation. I would like to open an office for the activities of the International School of Theatrical Anthropology. In short, a living archive for the curious and demanding part of the new generations, which is a stimulus to fight for their dreams ».
November 7, 2021 | 10:46
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