Danish Discoveries

Odin Teatret, La MaMa, E.T.C., October 1999, New York.

Hotel Pro Forma, Operation: Orfeo, Next Wave Festival 1999, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

Thanks to Denmark's tradition of artistic beneficence (and the cooperation of two long-established local experimental venues--BAM and La MaMa), New York audiences were able last October to compare the work of two premier Danish experimental theatre groups, work which--side by side--succintly illustrates the journey of theatre experiment from the 1960s to the present, a journey from emotional commitment and ensemble creation to emotional estrangement and formal interrogation. It wasn't an entirely equal comparison, for the older group, Odin Teatret, was able over a three-week period to show almost its entire current repertoire. As a participant in BAM's annual Next Wave Festival, the younger group--Hotel Pro Forma--was represented by a single piece--Operation: Orfeo--which was not formally typical because this theatre consciously rejects one uniform theatrical style. Moreover, while the Odin Teatret has carried its distinctive presence all over the globe for over thirty years, the Hotel Pro Forma's work usually begins site-specifically, and while some of this work has traveled throughout Denmark and in Europe, it obviously cannot do so easily. We must, therefore, be grateful to see for the first time on these shores even one piece by a theatre which has had significant European influence for over a decade.

Both groups are investigatory theatres, but the focus of their explorations could not be more different: Odin Teatret was founded in 1964 in Oslo when a young Italian, Eugenio Barba, returned from three years' apprencticeship with Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland, determined to create a theatre on Grotowski's new model. Assembling a small group of committed actors, the newly formed Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium finally settled in the remote Jutland municipality of Holster-brø where it remains based to this day (with several of its founding members). I need not here reiterate the enormous impact that Grotowski's actor-centered, ritualistic "poor" theatre exerted on European and American theatre in the late 1960s. Monastic in its cloistered intensity and minimalist in its theatrical means, Grotowski and his performer disciples were determined to find their via negativa to the naked heart of the encounter between theatre artist and audience-communicant. It is that tradition that Barba and his company vowed to follow and continue to honor. As with Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory, each Odin piece is slowly developed and shaped through the interplay of the actor's intense personal investigations and the group's collective impulse. Only in a work's final stages does the director assume authoritative artistic control. So central to the group's vision is this cumulative collective approach that Odin Teatret's recent New York season presented several one-person "demonstrations" created largely through personal accretion and elimination.

Each piece, then, is less a "production" than part of a collective journey of self-discovery which the group is determined to share. Inevitably, however, an individual piece seems to achieve "definitive" status as particularly representative: On Odin Teatret's first visit to La MaMa in 1984, that piece was Brecht's Ashes 2, a work which found disturbing contradictory images in Brecht's life, ideology, and aesthetics. This time around, a similar theme, in very different imagistic guise, is reiterated in the central work in the current repertoire, Mythos.

The piece is significantly subtitled "Ritual for the Short Century," a century that began in 1917 with the success of the Russian Revolution and ended in 1989 with the death of the Soviet Union. The political disquietude of Brecht's Ashes (a political overtness never found in Grotowski's work) is carried to a logical end in this funeral wake for an historical figure few of us ever heard of: Guilhermino Barbosa, an illiterate Brazilian peasant, who from 1925 to 1927 marched with fellow rebels 15...