Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate ed. by Ian Watson (review)

342 REVIEWS autobiography, as in performing aspects of one's own life, and performing a role other than one's self. They are not the same, and at times the writing veers dangerously toward a blurring of definitions that does not enhance or support the important work being done by the performers presented here. WORK CITED Ferris, Lesley. Acting Women: Images a/Women in Theatre. London: Macmillan. 1990· IAN WATSON, ed. Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate. Theatre Theory, Practice, Performance Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 275, illustrated. $24.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Margaret Weny, University ofMinnesota In the vexed debate over intercultural theatre, where even the best political intentions stand as no defense, Eugenio Barba is almost too easy a target. His search for universals of performance in the "pre-expressive" elements of performative presence risks charges of humanist universalism or biological essentialism. His mining of "ancient" performance traditions. almost exclusively Asian in origin, seems like unabashed orientalism, mysticism, or outright colonialist plunder. In his International School,for Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), "research" proceeds largely in cultish privacy, with a rigidly hierarchical structure that replicates a colonial economics of knowledge production, and a prevailing methodology predicated on the radical cultural decontextualization and objectification of performance forms ("dissection" is the preferred metaphor). Then there is the transcendent, one might say elitist, cosmopolitanism of his tours with the Odin Teatret, that has them stilt-walking their way into far-flung, underprivileged communities spouting messianic pronouncements about the universal nature of theatre. And finally, topping off the cataJogue of intercultural sins, is the infuriating condescension with which Barba and his followers have historically greeted most challenges to his intercultural ethics. When all the charges have been laid, however, the fact remains that as a living and thriving descendant of the intercultural impulses of the 1960s EuroAmerican avant-garde, Barba's Odin Teatret is a practicing intercultural company with an artistic life that has spanned four decades and as many continents , and is supported by a fully articulated philosophy of practice. And, whatever its shortcomings, theatre anthropology probably constitutes, as Richard Schechner argued ten years ago, the "most serious, extensive, and systematic attempt to understand the :nature of acting'" from an intercultural Reviews 343 perspective (qtd. on ix). Barba's enterprise may be easily dismissed from the moral high ground of academic objectivity, but from the trenches of theatrical practice, the reality is - as the contributors to this new collection repeatedly emphasize - a great deal more complex, and surely worthy of serious reconsideration by theatre scholars. Watson's approach as principal author and editor of this volume is broadly ethnographic, illuminating the ways in which Barba's collaborators, interlocutors , audiences, hosts, and barter partners understand his theatrical practice and theory. It is also dialogic in the best sense of the tenn, structured so that Watson's own critical voice is dominant but does not dominate those of his "colleagues," and presenting a diverse range of opinion in which scholars and practitioners, insiders, not-quite-so-insiders, and Barba himself receive equal credence. The contributors include longtime members of Odin Teatret, such as Roberta Carreri, collaborator Sanjukta Panigrahi (in interview with Watson), academic interlocutors (theatre scholar Nicola Savarese, Danish anthropologist Mette Bovin), ex-students (such as Pino di Buduo), and professional associates (Miguel Rubio of Peru's Yuyachkani company). For some of these contributors Barba is a catalyst, for some merely an enabler, while the work of still others has been shaped through an impassioned, respectful repudiation of his methods and politics. Barba's theories and the institutions he has created to explore them function, according to these contributors, as a platfonn rather than a prescription for intercultural exploration: his intercultural project is at once generous, open-ended, problematic, contested, fertile, occasionally very contradictory, and, to the degree that it resists categorization, also resistant to outright condemnation. The three sections of the book reflect the breadth and heterogeneity of Barba's project, focusing on theatre anthropology, Odin's protocols of performance barter (in which perfonnance is the currency of exchange and medium of reciprocal encounter between theatre artists and the communities they engage), and Barba's involvement with radical political...