Eugenio Barba. The Moon Rises from the Ganges: My Journey Through Asian Acting Techniques ed. by Lluis Masgrau, and: The Five Continents of Theatre: Facts and Legends About the Material Culture of the Actor by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (review)

To scholars and practitioners of world theatre, Eugenio Barba is a well-known theatre director, having founded and nurtured the experimental international troupe Odin Teatret, known widely for their community-based barter theatre and intercultural spectacles for nearly six decades. Barba's productions continue to be produced, revived, and toured by his troupe and individual performers, some of whom have been with him from the beginning. As producer, he has created a wide and deep network of "Third World Theatre" groups in Europe, South and Central America, many of whom were nurtured, trained, and even financially supported through the frequent workshops and laboratory productions Odin sponsors at their home in Holsteboro, on an island in Denmark.

As an author, Barba has identified the technical and psychic qualities that make great actors and performances, expressed in muscular prose in books that have become bibles to collaborative theatre groups around the world. In particular, The Secret Art of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology(Routledge 1991, Italian original, 1983), opened up new ethnographic fields in performance studies.

Because of his many enterprises, it is perhaps less obvious that Barba is also a long-term student of and collaborator with Asian performing artists. Barba's company is informed by many "classical" traditions, including ballet and ballroom dance, folk-song, ritual, and festival performances from Europe, South America, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. However, as is clear from this book, the greatest influence on his work is the Asian theatre. Barba has studied formal movement patterns, breathing, "becoming a character," mask-work, and mise-en-scène of Asian traditions including Indian kathakaliand Odissi dance, Japanese noh and kabuki dance, Balinese masked topeng, and ancient gambuhtheatre. Most of these were made through observations of training practices and productions in situ; others were teased out during residencies and open workshops at Odin and Barba's International School for Theatre Anthropology (ISTA).

Barba is perhaps the most profound and practical practioner in a long tradition of theatre directors attracted to Asian theatre as inspiration and stimulation to their own work. However, as a working director, few since Craig, Eisenstein, and Peter Brook can put into words the precise technical vocabulary of astute observation coupled with a perspective of Western aesthetics, myth, and anthropology as he can. As artistic director and manager of the Odin Teatret in Holsteboro, Denmark since 1964 (he retired in 2020, passing the torch to long-term collaborator Julia Varley), Eugenio demonstrates the practical perspective of an actor, poet, and teacher's ability to offer sensory examples that are both romantic evocations yet reverberate as profound truths. Despite occasional excesses, there is a humility and purity to his work and life that comes out in this book summarizing his prolonged and profound encounters with Asian dance and theatre.

This book compiles Barba's writings over five decades on Asian theatre, including conference lectures and keynote speeches, book prologues, ¹theatre programs, and a disparate selection of essays, diary entries, and personal correspondence—many as-yet unpublished in English. The appendix also lists Asian performers who have participated in workshops and productions at Odin from 1963 to 2013 (pp. 260–277), a remarkable testament to a deep and ongoing knowledge-seeking and collaborative creativity. By taking a long sliver of one vital aspect of Barba's multifaceted career, Gangesprovides a fascinating accounting of the (Asian) sentimental education of a great pioneer of 20th century theatre...