She’s off her trolley. Nuttier than a fruitcake. A couple of kangaroos loose in the top paddock. She’s ‘crazy’. 

For years women have been locked up, medicated, pathologized and silenced with the label ‘crazy’. Challenging these preconceptions, acclaimed Australian performer Leah Shelton makes her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with her solo show BATSHIT, directed by Ursula Martinez. Bianca Mastrominico was there for Total Theatre Magazine.  

Crossing the stage area of Traverse 2 to reach my seat for BATSHIT, I am treading softly on the set, taking in the imposing, tile-patterned white screen which flows from the back wall of the stage onto the floor area, neatly delimiting the performance space.

The feeling is of entering a gigantic bathroom, in which sit a purpose-built, old-fashioned television, and a chaise longue with boxes underneath. On the right side of this installation, discretely placed against a black wall, is a mic on a stand, which will be brought onstage at various times in order to engage with the audience through forced jokes and raw storytelling.

As I sit and observe, the set design (by Leah Shelton with Freddy Komp) appears slightly off-centre, exaggerated, clinical yet weirdly familiar, surreal but with a vintage and reassuring vibe to it. Then, when darkness engulfs my eyes and a very dim glow follows, I perceive a figure crawling on the floor in front of the television and something in this bodily form doesn’t really add up. An other-than-human shape, wrapped in a fluffy and floating fabric, with appendages which are just too long. There is an unidentifiable object attached to one part of this alien creature’s limbs, which keeps swishing around with each movement they make.

While my brain is trying to make sense of what my retina can grasp, I am experiencing the vision as an unsettling ‘mistake’, similar to an AI hallucination, the kind of algorithm-driven body dysmorphia which makes you question your own perceptions and the subtle feeling of abjection that comes with them. When a loud sharp sound strikes and the lights brighten, we are confronted with the full reveal of a figure standing tall in front of us. They are awkwardly looking and smiling in stillness, and could be equally identified as a woman, a drag queen, or perhaps even a non-human, robotic entity with a feminine allure.

The figure wears a knee-length ballroom-style gown in tones of green and sparkling gold with pristine matching green and shiny dance shoes. They exhibit blonde curly hair and heavy doll-like make-up. Their arms are enveloped in long green gloves and one arm is definitely longer than the other, ending with a hand holding a toy axe.

This is the opening scene of BATSHIT which, without preamble, starts toying with our perception of ‘otherness’, our interpretation and judgment of bodies and identities, filtered by our own perspective, shaped by our personal associations and affected by our own biases and background.

Devised by acclaimed Australian performer Leah Shelton and directed by Olivier award-winning performance artist Ursula Martinez, the show is the culmination of a decade-long collaboration between the two artists. Shelton’s accomplished performance and Martinez’s uncompromising directorial vision conjure a dystopian storytelling centred around the performer’s family history which, as the programme states, ‘explores the stigmatisation of women’s mental health – the myths, fantasies and fears that keep women compliant and the systems that let us down’.

The dramaturgy revolves around the story of Shelton’s grandmother, Gwen, who was incarcerated at Heathcote hospital in Perth, Australia, in 1963, and given a cocktail of medication and ECT treatment without her consent.

Eventually we come to understand that the weird image of a heavily made-up blonde with a long arm and a plastic axe is a theatrical rendition of Gwen’s psychological states through which the performer/granddaughter, both symbolically and symbiotically, re-enact her grandmother’s most difficult moments in life. We learn from Shelton that these followed a major nervous breakdown, when in a spurt of rage Gwen – a Methodist and a housewife – destroyed the family television with an axe. 

There is something profoundly strange in the appearance and behaviour of Shelton as Gwen – for example, in the showing off of big and clumsy dance steps executed as if the blonde figure were a puppet instructed from within to move ‘without their consent’ – a behaviour akin to the grandmother’s experience of mental health issues and subsequent hospitalisation.

This link is reinforced by the white harness that the performer holds in the mouth, which impedes her speech when she tries to communicate with us, telling childish jokes at the mic to warm us up; recorded audience laughs layered upon Shelton’s own forced laughing. Ten minutes into the show and this image alone raises the bar of what could be a fairly conventional comedic routine into a contrived – and painful to watch – spectacle of intellectual oppression and emotional suppression, which are core themes in the performance.

Structurally, the first part of the work is about Shelton embodying her grandmother’s story. The fluffy ballroom dress is eventually discarded for a white coat which the performer – still in the curly blonde wig and make-up though now with bare feet – wears back-to-front to become both a male doctor figure and a female patient, alternating between the two personas.

At some point Shelton’s own narrating voice disassociates from her actions. While her recorded voice continues to deliver factual information about Gwen’s medical reports, her physicality shows us the effects of medication and ETC treatment.

This is how BATSHIT boldly plunges into a multilayered examination of intergenerational trauma, from a feminist perspective. Shelton/Martinez’s performance text also threads in the vox populi through street interviews from the black-and-white era of television in which a male interviewer asks women and men of various ages if Australian housewives are happy. Ironically, in the context of the performance montage the answers we hear end up bringing to the forefront women’s internalised patriarchy and normalised delusional mechanisms of coping with systemic oppression and gender inequality.

The use of projected captions – as seen previously in other shows directed by Martinez – is not only an inclusive technical mechanism but becomes a dramaturgical tool which amplifies the voiceover and visualises the text for the audience. Memorable and surprising is also when Shelton, lip-syncing the male doctor’s voice, moves around the auditorium interviewing individual audience members with the mic and asking open-ended questions – some banal, some mildly intrusive – which nevertheless require honest and personal answers. This scene is juxtaposed with the TV broadcast of an old programme in which a middle-aged white man (allegedly an expert) mansplains how to recognise the signs of hysteria in women. When the audience’s answers to Shelton’s questions are typed in real time on the screen wall and we can read them as captions, they not only become part of the dramaturgy but most importantly they end up demonstrating that so-called hysterical attributes of women are actually common emotional states belonging to anyone regardless and beyond gender. We laugh (bitterly) at this recognition as the man on the TV continues with what now clearly appears as an absurdist indoctrination.

As an elaboration of grief – visually and viscerally – the work questions hysteria as a psychological disorder connected with the suppression of healthy emotions. In BATSHIT we are skilfully drawn into a performance which dissects and dismantles body politics and patriarchal structures through exposing their impact on women’s wellbeing. Unmasking hysteria as a controversial and contested medical term, as well as a social fabrication and a stigma imposed on women to exercise control over their body/minds is a strong theme which is developed throughout the performance.

After interviewing the audience, Shelton takes the wig off and sits quietly on the floor to watch a black-and-white live feed of herself on TV, as if re-watching a scene from the past. When the performer gets up and exits the stage there is some respite for the audience to reflect and breathe, while we are left to watch the broadcasting of Shelton/Gwen in white coat doing street interviews in search of more contemporary and updated definitions of hysteria. Although this section could perhaps be shorter, it gives us the chance to witness and ponder upon contemporary problematic and unresolved discussions surrounding gender politics and their affect on women.

When Shelton returns on stage dressed in her own clothes and without the heavy make-up, a vulnerable storytelling at the mic begins to unfold, which brings back the story of the axe. Eventually, a real one is brought on stage and leant against the mic stand.

If Gwen was crazy, then a lot of other women were too, which gives Shelton and Martinez the hook to aptly end the show with the declamation of a long list of names of women who shook conventions and rebelled against patriarchal supremacy, facing the stigmatisation of being labelled as mad in order to break free and be who they are/were in the world. Recapping on the grotesque beginning of the show, in an act of tribute to her grandmother and all women deemed crazy, Shelton’s simulates smashing the TV with the axe, embodying one more time the violence, despair, deep need for love, value and self-recognition which led Gwen to destroy the TV – an object which in the 1960s brought news of wars, boosted consumerism with its adverts, influenced opinions, and became a powerful political tool in the Debordian society of spectacle.

While Shelton’s actions echo the gravity of Gwen’s rage, on stage the granddaughter’s gesture is controlled, contained and decided. It symbolically closes the circle, becoming a cathartic statement of emancipation and an assertive feminist requiem to her female ancestors.

At the end of the show, in an enthusiastic blurring of art and life, Shelton asks us to feature with her in a selfie for her Mum’s 80th birthday and we all shout: ‘Happy 80th Birthday, Mum!’ 

At the heart of the Fringe, the personal continues to be unapologetically political.

Featured image (top) Leah Shelton: BATSHIT. Photo Pia Johnson

QuietRiot / Leah Shelton: BATSHIT played at Traverse Theatre, 1-25 August 2024, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe www.edfringe.com  

For full details of Traverse Theatre’s year-round programme, see www.traverse.co.uk   

Watching Odin Teatret’s Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever, Bianca Mastrominico reflects on the extraordinary six-decade journey of the company, the crossroads they have now reached, and the home of their legacy

‘It is the day after the last battle. The war between the two sons of Oedipus for the dominion of Thebes is over. The rebel Antigone has been punished for profaning the law of the city. Families bury their dead. Oedipus’s ghost wanders among the corpses. Creon and Tiresia are plotting for peace. The Sphinx and the plague lie in wait. For all of us it is spring, a time to fall in love. The future is a frenzy of sun and gold: a yellow fever’ (from the brochure of Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever by Odin Teatret).

Mid November 2022. It’s a beautiful sunny day and I have just arrived in Paris, where walking briskly in darkness through the atmospheric Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of the city, I am about to experience Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever by celebrated ensemble Odin Teatret. After opening in Denmark and touring in Poland and Italy, the performance is presented at La Cartoucherie de Vincennes, the headquarters of Théâtre du Soleil, the Parisian avant-garde company founded by Ariane Mnouchkine, Odin Teatret’s longstanding comrades in the invented tradition of the European theatre laboratories, and historical hosts of the company in the French capital. The ensemble performance signals a turning point in the almost 60-year life of Odin Teatret, and of its founder and director Eugenio Barba. Its run marks changes in the company’s structure and base, away from the farm in the Danish town of Holstebro which Barba and his actors transformed into their theatre laboratory and artistic home in 1966, with the name of Odin Teatret – Nordisk Teater Laboratorium.

Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever is performed by Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Donald Kitt, Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Julia Varley with the text and direction of Eugenio Barba (see end of this article for full credits). 

It is based on the myth of Oedipus and the saga of a Greek family in the city of Thebes, which – as Barba writes in the performance brochure – ‘has accompanied my life in theatre since my very first steps’. From Oedipus tyrannus by Sophocles as a mise-en-scène project at the Warsaw theatre school in 1961, to El Romancero de Edipo in 1983 with Toni Cota, Barba brought the myth back in The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus in 1986. Here Antigone, played by Roberta Carreri, embodied what Barba calls ‘an archetype of thirst for justice and rejection of the laws of the city’.  In 1990 he met the ’father killer’ again, while working on a new performance with Iben Nagel Rasmussen, and in 1998 Oedipus was one of the protagonists of the Odin Teatret ensemble performance Mythos, alongside the myths of Medea, Dedalus, Cassandra, Orpheus and Ulysses.

In an interview released to the journalist Anna Bandettini for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Barba observes that ‘Oedipus is an enigmatic story: a young person tries to achieve the saying from the oracle of Delfi, “know yourself”, and while pushed by the desire of searching for his parents, unwarily and unwittingly he triggers patricide, incest, plague and fratricidal wars’. 

‘What does this myth want to tell me?’ asks the Italian born eighty-six-year-old director, who has turned his life as a migrant in Norway in the 1960s into one of the most luminous and prestigious theatre endeavours in contemporary theatre. Barba, who through personal revolt and an uncompromising work ethic has, with his performers, conquered ‘the difference’ of starting as an outsider of the Scandinavian theatre establishment, answers himself, as if interrogating his own existential quest: ‘Should we not know ourselves?’.

In Paris, the bohemian appeal of the bar-gazebo mounted outside La Cartoucherie’s theatre building that hosts Odin Teatret quickly fills with the casual chatting of a cosmopolitan mix of spectators of diverse ages, languages and backgrounds. I add myself to this vibrant and international theatre community, queueing at the entrance, and holding a ticket and a programme in the awareness that Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever will be performed for the last time ever, on these premises, on 19th November 2022. A cycle in the life of an ensemble, which continues to inspire generations of theatre practitioners to push the boundaries of theatre-making through their ground-breaking experimental performance work, concludes in Paris to make room for new directions. Odin Teatret officially left the premises of the Nordisk Teater Laboratorium on the first of December 2022 and – as Varley, actor at Odin Teatret since 1976,  announces on the Magdalena Project website – was ‘founded’ again as an association based in Holstebro, which will from now on provide the framework for its activities in Denmark and abroad.

‘I continue to move within the walls of Thebes,’ Barba writes in his introduction to the performance, ‘as if I predicted that one day, like Oedipus, I would be expelled from this city and would go ad venturas, towards things to come: adventures. The circle closes: the future, unexpected and unimaginable, brings me back to the uprooted conditions of my youth’.

Yellow, as I continue reading from Barba, ‘is reminiscent of gold, of the sun glistening on the fields of wheat and rapeseed, of the hair of some women I have loved, of Van Gogh’s hunger for life when he painted his sunflowers and sometimes, during his crises, swallowed this colour from the tube’. The above extracts from the brochure belong to six pages of diary-like entries on the making process of the performance, where Barba retraces its laborious genesis and reveals the maize of detours, sources and themes, which filter and mutate through the calculated serendipity of Odin Teatret’s ensemble craft. Only, it is more than just feeding the spectator with backstage stories or associative and historical meaning about the production. To me, a witness of many Odin performances, participant in training, and at various points in time a collaborator and facilitator of Odin Teatret’s work in the UK with my company Organic Theatre, Barba’s reminiscence and associations with the colour yellow also seems to allude to the dark forces, both personal and collective, which shape and consume individual artistic destinies in unpredictable ways. More specifically, in the interview by Bandettini, Barba refers to the yellow fever in the performance title as ‘a creative frenzy’, recounting how in Europe by 1850 industries started to produce new colours for painters, such as yellow and violet, which could be stored in little tubes and used in the open air. Barba notes that the use of the yellow colour by the artists of that period becomes ‘a real fever’, which he compares ‘to the craving that social media has generated’ today. In the performance, the frenzy of the yellow fever becomes a celebration of being alive, almost a nervous excitement, an electric current between the performers and the spectators, and a vital impulse unleashed by the transformative potential of an extra-ordinary theatre happening.

As the programme says, the performance consists of twelve scenes, each titled to bring context to the course of events, such as Ritual of Purification (scene 1), Oedipus’s Spirit Wanders on the Battlefield Where his Two Sons-brothers Have Slain Each Other (scene 2) or Oedipus’s Spirit Reveals to Tiresias the Sense of Human Destiny (scene 4). The captions exemplify for the spectator the journey of a mythological man who will eventually blind himself in front of our eyes, to escape his sense of guilt, questioning ironically and in the cruellest way possible the purpose and nature of the human gaze. These cues not only guide our understanding of the unfolding dramaturgy, they also tell us that the appearance of the performers as myths is part of a ritual, of which we as spectators are holding the imaginative and interpretative keys. The descriptions work as a prologue, suggesting and provoking associations in the spectator’s mind ahead of witnessing the scenes. Yet, they are not spoiler alerts, like cinema trailers, as there is no expectation that we look for a representation of Greek mythology on the Odin Teatret stage. Rather, what is offered are narrative hooks, which entangle the imaginative power of the spectators with the evocative power of the performers’ embodiment, while suggesting that something of the live experience of a mythological world of violence and extremes we are about to engage with is not dissimilar to the malaise, brutality and societal crisis of our post-pandemic times.

In the foyer, Barba is standing on one side of the queue, smiling warmly to those who turn to catch his eyes. He is silently waiting and welcoming each one of his spectators, as he has done many times for the company’s ensemble performances, and the yellow fever is already amongst us, raising our collective temperature, while we are escorted to our seats by the front of house team. Once more in my life, I am stepping into the world of a theatrical myth, that of a theatre group who has managed to defy conventions, the tide of time, industry expectations, creative gatekeeping and artistic commodification with an unrivalled longevity and commitment to the profession and the craft. A theatre group who whilst developing an original performance aesthetic over the years has been capable of forming longstanding artistic alliances and relationships around the world, connecting with and supporting multiple international networks of independent (often marginalised) theatre groups, to whom Barba refers as Third Theatre.

There is a charged atmosphere of anticipation, while we are invited to take seats in a traverse stage configuration often used by Odin Teatret, which Barba calls the ‘river space’, allowing spectators to face each other while the performance happens in the middle, between, around and amongst us. This state of co-presence in a shared space with the performers provokes a sense of alertness and togetherness amongst audience members. It also adds an ethical dimension to the spectators’ gaze as proximity implicates us in the action.

Then in darkness reverberating with the warm light of portable lamps, Thebes at the Time of the Yellow Fever begins. Mindful of the explanation in the programme, I know that ‘it is the day after the last battle’ and that ‘the war between the two sons of Oedipus for the dominion of Thebes is over’. Figures wearing black robes, whose faces are erased by white fabric covering their entire heads, like bandages, enter one by one on the empty, feebly lit stage to perform a ‘ritual of purification’. They are the families who are burying the dead after the war is over, expressing their grief through battering and cleansing bloody stained white sheets in an invisible river to remove pain, guilt and remorse, while crying their horror and sorrow to the gods. The collective trauma of post-war destruction and desolation is played tenderly and with compassion, in the awareness that, as Barba indicates in the programme, ‘the figures of the Greek myths are action and energy. Their ferocity is not vile. Their suffering is not sadness. […] They don’t believe; they are aware. They know the Reality: the ineluctable power of those forces that we call Evil’.

Perhaps because I am conscious that I am attending the performance in Paris, I read these figures as a reference – if not an homage – to French actor, pedagogue and creator of corporeal mime Etienne Decroux, who opened his first mime school in the city in 1940. Transforming his Parisian home into a highly disciplined theatre laboratory in 1963, Decroux experimented with techniques such as erasing the face of the mime performer with masks and silk veils to increase the expressivity of the whole body. It is crucial to say that due to decades of cross-cultural pollination and exchange with Eastern and Western somatic practices, including corporeal mime, as well as with theatre pedagogies from around the world, what always stands out in the work of Odin Teatret is the incorporated technique of its performers. Individual training regimes and collaborative exploration through uninterrupted performance practice have been at the core of Barba’s empirical research, eventually leading to the creation of ISTA – International School of Theatre Anthropology – in 1979. As a field of study, theatre anthropology continues these days in its quest to identify shared techniques regulating performer behaviour across cultures, such as presence, which Barba refers to as the ‘pre-expressive level’ of the performer, a state which precedes any intentionality of meaning, character or representation. 

Almost unreal and without identity, the chorus of covered head figures in Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever with their combined vocal and physical action generates musicality, rhythmic soundscapes and energetic ruptures, without (re)presenting anything other than its own flow. In scene 10, the ‘yellow fever breaks out’ and the mythological figures of Oedipus, Antigone, Creon and Tiresias spread over the river space, populating it with the ghosts of our civilisation, made of human-size canvases painted with replicas of famous artworks by Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt, amongst others. Unrolled and laid on the stage floor by the performers, the explosion of the ‘creative frenzy’ and of the yellow colour against the black minimalistic set is accompanied by the eruption of a cappella singing and is as vital as it is unsettling, like partaking in a display of mental extremes. The closeness of the performers’ bodies, their wisdom in the use of vocal resonators, and the immersive experience of Odin Teatret’s river space amplifies every whisper sneaking into our ears, while a soul-piercing choral song accompanied by the loud and forced sound of an accordion shakes the illusion that this is a distant society and an ancient world. Oedipus’s story cannot be told or understood without dealing with the brutality of our existence in close-up.

My kinaesthetic sense is moved in a space which is aurally and physically saturated by the bodies and voices of Bredholt, Carreri, Kitt, Rasmussen and Varley. In this sensorial journey, I am touched by what Barba in his introduction calls the essential, which manifests itself in ‘the bond-in-life between me and a handful of actors and a few spectators’ – a bond weaved  ‘during a working process of months and months together with my actors who are also driven by blind and mute needs’. In Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever, I am struck by the fluidity, subtlety and organicity of the performers’ dramaturgy and stage behaviour. These rest on a quality of embodiment built through decades of training, and through solo as well as ensemble performance making, resulting in a body language which is extremely precise and accurate, yet vibrant and translucent. As Barba points out in his interview with Bandettini, ‘it is not what you tell which is important, but how you tell it’. 

Throughout the twelve scenes, I witness Odin Teatret performers radiate their individual Flower (Hana), a metaphor created in medieval times by Japanese playwright, actor and theorist Motokiyo Zeami, which is linked to the performance tradition and training practices of Noh Theatre, well known to Barba and Odin Teatret’s performers.

The Flower refers to a performer’s achievement not only in terms of their degree of virtuosity in the craft but in relation to their ability to attain transformative powers. At the highest level, which Zeami calls ‘the Miraculous Flower’, acting is perceived through the mind of the spectator, and not purely through the eyes or their other senses. Zeami refers to this as ‘acting beyond the mind’, when the performer is capable of defying the natural laws of time and space. This ‘mental’ acting allows performers to transcend the visible and audible, and to perform ‘miracles’. In Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever the ineffable quality of the unique Flower of each Odin Teatret performer emanates through an exceptionally embodied knowledge of their craft. The rigorous technical work however remains invisible, while we are brought to a state of enchantment by a subtle manipulation of our imagination through almost otherworldly and rarefied physical and vocal scores. I am immersed in a performance which is not just a performance, as it empowers the spectators’ minds and associative capability, viscerally playing our inner human chords and opening the door to intuitive knowledge, rather than rational meaning – which, incidentally, is what myths do. As Barba elaborates in his interview for La Repubblica: ‘A performance can be illogical in conceptual terms, but has to possess a rhythmic and formal coherence which makes it believable to the nervous system and to the kinaesthetic sense of the spectator. In other words: a performance is dance, music and poetry, stimuli directed towards the senses, the emotions and the imagination of each single spectator.’

While the five performers regulate my experience of an elaborate and extremely refined montage, on the river space I witness the flowing of human fragility, greed, desperation, love, sexual desire and divination. Thebes exists and breathes as an organism, while the performance develops a pulsating heart, which alters my perceptions of space, raises my energy and transports my body-mind into another level of consciousness. In scene 12 – the final – titled ‘seven times Thebes will be destroyed and seven times plus one Thebes will rise again’, the purification rite of the beginning transforms into a clearing-up routine. The stage is dismantled and disassembled by the performers, who shift their physical scores into a light and springy dance, while simultaneously singing and folding each canvas. One by one, these are arranged to form a pile on a Thespian cart, and are covered with one of the bloodstained white sheets from the first scene, tucked in to seal off what belongs to the now consumed ritual of the performance. A severed bull’s head is placed on the sheet. The performers exit with nothing left in their hands, leaving the air in the theatre vibrating and transparent. Spectators remain seated, applauding an empty stage, as it is tradition in Odin Teatret that the performers do not take a bow. The bull’s head eyes, which can no longer see, reclaim my attention. A bright blue and cold light is still on the animal head, balancing on top of the red-stained sheet, as if the whole performance has been transformed into an installation, which contains both the abjection of a human sacrifice and the contagion of the yellow fever. I take pictures. Others do too. I remember Barba’s question ‘Should we not know ourselves?’. Just as in the ensemble performance Mythos, here too the myth of Oedipus seems to advise ‘tear out your eyes, so you will see the story in the light of your memory’. Life is our enigma. As long as we have the stamina, we will try to find an answer, after which what remains is the contemplation of what has been, in all its beauty and cruelty, for those who wish to remember. 

As Barba explains on the new Odin Teatret website, separating from the Nordisk Teater Laboratorium ‘was due to the artistic choices and organisational transformations of the new director and the board of directors’, whose ‘way of thinking and realising theatre diverges fundamentally from the ideals and work culture that have characterised the identity of Odin Teatret as a theatre group’. While it is emotionally and practically difficult to disentangle the rich and vast history of the company from the physical buildings Barba and his ensemble created, departing from Thebes towards new adventures, Odin Teatret’s activities continue and the calendar is buzzing. In May 2023 the 17th session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology / New Generation, titled ‘Pre-expressivity – composition – montage’ will take place in Budapest (Hungary). The research gathering will conclude with Anastasis/Resurrection, a new performance devised and directed by Barba and performed by the artists/teachers and by the participants. This session of ISTA/NG, like the previous one in Favignana in 2021, is part of the core project of ‘sharing knowledge’ initiated by the Fondazione Barba Varley, which was created by Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley in 2020 with a special focus on memory, sustainability, and solidarity. The project also includes the open source publication Journal of Theatre Anthropology, alongside video resources on theatre anthropology and the techniques of the actor/dancer which can be downloaded for free from the Fondazione website.

Another core mission of the Fondazione is to support through annual financial awards the submerged theatre culture of those who Barba calls the ‘nameless’ – that is, the theatre and socio-cultural groups in emergency and marginalised situations ‘who perform particularly important work in the field of human rights’. 

The past, present and future of Barba and Odin Teatret is also converging in the project of the Living Archive Floating Islands (LAFLIS), inaugurated in Lecce (Italy) in October 2022 as a partnership between Fondazione Barba Varley and Regione Puglia. The archive will be focused on memory, transmission and transformation and will be dedicated to the promotion, research and study of the history of Odin Teatret, Eugenio Barba, and Third Theatre, the international culture of theatre groups.

While the work continues relentlessly, on the company’s social media posts one statement for me beautifully encapsulates the power and unshakeable vision of ‘a group of actors who have been working together with the same director for sixty, fifty, forty years, which has never happened in the history of theatre’ as Barba says to La Repubblica.

No longer with a fixed base, the group who – in the words of Odin Teatret’s founding actor Else Marie Laukvik – ‘invented the training, invited [Jerzy] Grotowski and his theatre abroad for the first time, published a pan-Scandinavian Theatre journal, and organised seminars’ during its early years, now leave the following metaphor through its digital footprints for us all to consider: ‘Odin Teatret’s journey continues toward a house, which is all the houses scattered in every corner of the planet they’ve stepped foot on – the home of their legacy.’ 

For more on Odin Teatret and their legacy and plans, see: https://odinteatret.org/

For the Fondazione Barba Varley, created by Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley in 2020, see: https://fondazionebarbavarley.org/

Featured image (top of page): Odin Theatret: Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever. Actors pictured: Roberta Carreri, Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Julia Varley. Photo Rina Skeel

Odin Theatret: Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever was presented at La Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris

Bianca Mastrominico attended performances on 11 & 12 November 2022

Odin Theatret: Thebes at the Time of Yellow Fever – Full Credits:

Director: Eugenio Barba

Assistant director: Dina Abu Hamdan

Actors: Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Donald Kitt, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Julia Varley

Scenic space: Odin Teatret 

Light designer: Fausto Pro 

Light designer supervisor: Jesper Kongshaug 

Costumes and props: Lena Bjerregärd, Antonella Diana, Odin Teatret 

Visual art advisor: Francesca Tesoniero

Poster: Peter Bysted 

Musical director: Elena Floris

Photo: Rina Skeel 

Dramaturg: Thomas Bredsdorff 

Advisors: Gregorio Amicuzi, Juliana Capilé, Antonia Cioaza, Tatiana Horevicht 

Special advisors: Nathalie Jabalé, Ulrik Skeel 

Bianca Mastrominico is a performance maker, writer and director born and trained in a well-known theatrical family in Italy, who founded and ran their own company and theatre in Naples from 1972 to 2013. Since moving to the UK in 2002, she has been co-artistic director of the performance laboratory Organic Theatre 

Currently Bianca lectures contemporary performance practices at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, leading the BA(Hons) Performance and MA Digital Performance courses. She is also co-leader of the Practice Research cluster within the Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, and has presented her creative work and practice research widely, both in professional and academic contexts. 

Bianca is a member of the Magdalena Project network of women in contemporary theatre and has published for Total Theatre Magazine, The Open Page, Journal of Theatre Anthropology, New Theatre Quarterly, Body, Space and Technology, International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, amongst others.