The Five Continents of Theatre: Facts and Legends about the Material Culture of the Actor by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (review)

The Five Continents of Theatre by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese is a large format book rich with intriguing information comprising, for the most part, short factual statements rather than expansive reasoned arguments, supplemented with an abundance of colorful illustrations reminiscent of an art volume rather than a book of ideas. But do not be fooled.

The Five Continents of Theatre is best understood as a companion, in both form and substance, to the previously published, highly successful book by the same authors: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, which has remained in print in numerous languages since 1991. Both, for example, are substantive volumes akin to a medical school anatomy text in which carefully chosen visuals are an informative supplement to meticulous scholarship. The Barba/Savarese books consist largely of relatively brief dictionary-like entries augmented by numerous photographs and illustrations. Both engage a multicultural rhetorical strategy that highlights the inter/cross-cultural as they acknowledge national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries as geographic realities that shape the expressive.

Despite their formal similarities, it is the difference between the two books that ultimately matters. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology focuses on the performer as a creative artist- technician; The Five Continents of Theatre, on the other hand, explores the sociocultural dynamics that have both provided an evolving context for realizing the technique of the artist-technician and a set of fluid practical concerns that have shaped the public presentation of the actor’s art over time.

The dynamics identified and explored historically and across continents by Barba and Savarese in The Five Continents of Theatre include, for example: the modifications in material circumstances that have shaped theatre performances from their beginnings to modern times; the shifting economic and organizational aspects of public presentation from theatre’s beginnings to today; the introduction and increasing use of advertising in the theatre; the implications of experiments in theatrical space for the performer/spectator relationship; the expanding role of staging; the origins of and changes in box office practices; the transformations in set design, construction, lighting, makeup, props, as well as costumes in the theatre; and an eclectic chronology that places material developments in theatre architecture and technologies in the grander scheme of design history writ large. To name but a few!

The Five Continents of Theatre is divided into five discursive chapters and a sixth that consists entirely of visual material. The first five chapters carry the burden of the book’s argument and represent the primary organization of the volume identified in order as: When, Where, How, For Whom, and Why. Each of these chapters combines discussion of select aspects of what the authors term “the material culture of the theatre” pertinent to the chapter title and its implications for all involved in the event including actors, audience members, directors, writers, etc.

That said, the “material culture of the theatre” encompasses the broadest sense of the term for the authors. It is not limited to organizations, architectural developments, or improvements in technology, though it touches on all of these. It also includes entries on important theatre companies, directors, actors, and entertainers who have contributed to the material development of theatre and/or have played significant roles in places and situations less well known to an English-speaking readership, what Barba has referred to in the past as the Third Theatre — a world of theatremakers on the margins, driven by a desperate need to address their material, political, social, and/or creative poverty through a theatrical professionalism that belies their circumstance.

The volume concludes with a final chapter confirming a major premise of the book: that engaging the visual is a powerful means of understanding theatre history. It does so, however, by abandoning the narrative logic of the chapters up to...