Brecht’s Ashes 2 by Eugenio Barba; and The Million by Eugenio Barba (review)

anachronistic image was a reflection of the audience itself. The audience was crammed onto backless benches on a very small room, facing a double-level lit set with candles. Underneath, Ivan Karamazov was obsessively isolated in his alchemical study. Above, Raskolnikov was similarly isolated in his book-crammed slum room. The audience, at the rear, was blotchingly reflected in a wall of smeared mirrors, simultaneously present in its own time and the characters'-we also saw ourselves isolated both from the characters and from our immediate neighbors to either side in the serried rows of a frontally-focussed theatre audience. At the final "curtain," the actors threw open the windows behind the tulle of the funeral parlor to admit fresh air, wan twilight, and the traffic noises of downtown Helsinki. But though the twentieth century suddenly flooded into the room, the actors in their nineteenth century dress remained, frozen in place like mourning icons as we left the room. Brecht's Ashes 2 The Million Eugenio Barba Directed by Eugenio Barba La Mama E.T.C. (New York) William 0. Beeman From the outset it must be said that Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret, here making its first U.S. appearance, can lay claim to being one of the finest, if not the finest ensemble acting troupe in the world. Their performance at La Mama was a major cultural event in a year of little excitement in the New York theatre. In the two pieces presented, the cast members exhibit extraordinary performance skills. Control of body and voice seem close to total. The entire group sings, dances, performs mime and comedy routines with ease, acts in numerous Western and Eastern styles, and plays musical instruments as diverse as Indonesian gamelan instruments and as prosaic as trombones and soprano saxophones. In addition, the group seems to exhibit an almost mystical rapport. Movements on the stage are entirely organic, as the members of the theatre move with a single set of arms, legs and torsos. Both the skills and the rapport of the group come directly out of working conditions sadly unavailable to most actors in the West: the opportunity to rehearse and perform together as an ensemble for many years. The Odin Teatret is a theatre where members with eight years' experience in the group call themselves "newcomers." The oldest veteran, Torgeir Wethal, has been with the group since its inception twenty years ago. Such extraordinary tenure assures 64 that the work of the group goes far beyond normal theatrical work-it is a total living situation in which all members contribute directly to the creative act. Director Barba, who worked with Jerzy Grotowski in his "laboratory" in Opole, Poland, claims that he doesn't himself know what a performance piece will consist of until the group has a chance to work through it in rehearsal. If the group's work only went this far, one would be hard pressed to say how it constitutes more than a high-quality version of the work pioneered by Grotowski himself, or other closely interacting performing groups of the last two decades, such as Mabou Mines, the Living Theatre, the Performance Group, Bread and Puppet Theatre or similar landmark ensembles. The difference for Odin Teatret is that it is a theatre which engages totally with its performance environment. Barba identifies the approach of the theatre as "anthropological." Barba's sense of environment is not to be confused with the Schechnerian notion of environmental theatre, where attention is directed to the configuration of the immediate playing area and audience interaction within it with each other, the performers and the ongoing performance. The environment of the Odin Teatret is the total human environment-not just of performance, but with the community life processes that encompass performance. The theatre has carried out much of its work as "barter." By this is meant that the group enters a community and literally exchanges their performance for performance on the part of local individuals. In this way the group has toured Latin America, Europe and Asia in search of new theatrical experience. The results of one of these periods of exploration on the part of the members of the theatre...