On Directing and Dramaturgy

Burning the House

Eugenio Barba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135225834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

"A theatre which is able to speak to each spectator in a different and penetrating language is not a fantastic idea, nor a utopia. This is the theatre for which many of us, directors and leaders of groups, trained for a long time....." - from the Introduction

On Directing is Eugenio Barba's unprecedented account of his own life and work. This is a major retrospective of Barba's working methods, his practical techniques, and the life experiences which fed directly into his theatre-making.

On Directing is an inspirational resource. It is a dramaturgy of dramaturgies, and a professional autobiography, from one of the most significant and influential directors and theorists working today. It provides unique insights into a philosophy and practice of directing for the beginning student, the experienced practitioner, and everyone in between.

1
THE EMPTY RITUAL

Borges: a book is made of many books.

Canetti: a man is made of many men.

Ergo: a performance is made of many performances.

Word bridges

Often, at the origin of a creative path, there is a wound. In the exercise of my craft I have revisited this intimate lesion to deny it, question it or simply be near it. It was the cause of my vulnerability and the source of my needs. It had little to do with aesthetics, theories, with the wish to express myself or to communicate with others. This wound necessity has acted as an impulse to remain close to the boy I was, and from whom time removed me, pushing me in a world of constant change.

I have often told my actors that a magnificent performance doesn’t change the world, but a performance which leaves one indifferent and seems generated by indifference makes it uglier. I was well aware that my performances didn’t have the same impact on all my spectators. But I wanted to emphasise a useful superstition: ‘behave as if a horrible performance makes the world uglier. But keep your feet on the ground, because it is not with just one performance that you will transform it. And above all, don’t let the tendency to be satisfied by the first result seep into your work.’

My sentence is valid only from the point of view of the ethos of the work. A mediocre or indifferent performance doesn’t make the world more obscene than it is. For the spectators, nothing is removed or added, and it soon fades from their memory. But a lukewarm commitment remains indelible in my and my actors’ memory and nervous system. It becomes a conditioned reflex in our future days of work. If I dilute my longing for excellence, for the peak of Annapurna, I erode and impoverish my working process, the capacity for discovering energies buried within me and reacting to the surrounding reality. In such a case, the tepid work tarnishes those who perform and accustoms them to the indifference of the world.

I don’t know if this attitude has emerged while working in theatre or whether it has accompanied me since childhood. In the beginning, on the path of the profession, every stone reminded me of the wayfarers who had preceded me. To each of them I asked the questions that I asked myself: What were you running away from? What was the initial impulse – the intimate motives, appetites, obsessions, fortuitous meetings – that triggered your first step? Which house did you burn within you?

I started to do theatre while trying to find out, in a physical, technical and emotional way, what ‘doing theatre’ involved. Composing performances taught me, as an autodidact, to ask myself questions about the history of theatre as it is usually written, to question well-known or insignificant facts, to weigh and translate for myself the professional terms which I heard and read, to conceal in my working process a performance which had fascinated me or which I reconstructed with my imagination. My insecurity and the limits of my knowledge incited me to search again and again among the procedures of how to do.

There existed dark forces within me which influenced my choices. They rode me suddenly, they sensed an affinity with a person just met, they persisted in refusing reasonable solutions. Much more than ideas, aesthetics or conceptual categories, these forces have steered me through the tangle of circumstances. They have forged lasting loyalties with dead and living people, with ideals and dreams, with places and books; they have distilled superstitions which I have justified to myself and to others with logical, political and artistic arguments.

These forces constituted the secret magma which infiltrated my professional life, the technical meticulousness and the creative storm of my work as director, my craft’s ethos and my obstinacy to remain a foreigner.

With the years I have become more and more aware of this intimate magma. I was no longer intimidated by it; I considered it less intangible and translated it into words. Each of us who does theatre possesses a handful of terms which sieve our personal intuition and professional know-how. These terms have accumulated in our pockets, almost without our will. Work and habit have made them smooth like pebbles.

I have always felt the need to question again and again these word bridges between the concrete practice of theatre and my secret magma, to scratch them with naive questions in order to chip their surface and affect their solidity. I have treated these words as annoying and malevolent fetishes.

When I have tried to translate my tacit knowledge into concepts, assimilated through years of practice, misunderstandings and errors, I resorted to my word bridges. These seemed neutral terms, clear and comprehensible to everybody. For me they were vacuous words demanding to be filled with my own sense. They concerned what for me was the essence of the theatre: revolt, empty ritual, dissidence, vulnerability (which is the reality of solitude), transcendence or, as I like to say today, superstition. Others were technical words referring to aspects of the craft which had always fascinated me: sats (impulse), kraft (power), organic effect, energy, rhythm, flow, dramaturgy, dance.

I had met some of these words unintentionally and they had confronted me with experiences buried deeply within me, with needs that I was incapable of explaining to myself. Perhaps these were the experiences and needs on which my diversity was rooted. Diversity was one of the vacuous words which I tried to fill with a sense of my own. More of these words: refusal, craft, floating island, barter, emigration, wound, origin. And also serendipity.

From this heterogeneous handful of words, I have chosen two: dramaturgy and origin.

Where do I come from?

We have many origins because many are the lives in our life. We meet our origins on our path, just as we meet our identities and our true family. Narrating a life demands leaps of perspective, repudiating the idea of only one origin which is unravelled in a chronological thread.

Where do I come from?

I come from a world that fell to pieces and found its normality in that fall. 1940–1945, times of war: many houses became empty, others filled with evacuees. Still others collapsed under the bombs and I woke in the morning to see them shattered, like obscene creatures exhibiting their shames. Sometimes their ruins were shaken by laments. The adults spoke of people being buried alive, of survivors being miraculously unearthed, of unrecognisable corpses. Day and night, a voice could be heard from under the rubble. Only after a couple of days did it fall silent.

For the child who listened to these stories, they were like those of fairies and heroes imprisoned in trees. Like the fairy tales, the stories of the heaps of rubble also turned by night into dreams and fears.

It was the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship and of his mirage of a fascist empire. Bari was invaded by the army – Americans, Canadians, Poles, Moroccans. The school in front of our house was a barracks for coal-black Sudanese soldiers. Leaning over the balconies they nibbled at white bread, laughing at the girls who waited at the front door. At home, my father, a high-ranking fascist officer, was very ill. The family whispered to my brother and me to play quietly.

On some days my mother and I played a secret game together. She called me aside, combed my hair, made sure that I was tidy and properly dressed, embraced me and then sent me out into the nearby streets, on the seafront. The game was this: I had to hold out my hand and ask for money. I begged. But my mother and I called it fortune-seeking. Those were days when our home lacked even the few coins to pay for food and medicine.

I come from this solitary fortune-seeking.

My father’s family enjoyed a certain prestige in Gallipoli, a small fishing town deep in the Gulf of Taranto in southern Italy. We went to live there among relatives who treated my mother as a stranger. The windows and balconies of our house overlooked the harbour and I watched the fishermen rowing out to sea at dawn. At night I counted their lampare, the lamps they used to attract octopus.

We had no running water, so we used the rainwater channelled from the roof into a cistern in the courtyard. It was my job to draw water and each time I was warned: take care not to catch the eel. It swam at the bottom, in darkness, feeding on bugs and parasites. If it died, the water would become undrinkable. I pulled up the bucket with closed eyes, held my breath, opened them again and, relieved, saw only water.

I come from the fear of trapping the sacred animal in the darkness of the well.

Gallipoli was an islet, connected to the mainland and the suburbs by a long, windy bridge: whichever way I turned, the sea looked different. Our house was in the old town. We were besieged by damp, the north wind and winter’s gloom when we spent the evenings indoors around glowing braziers, our hands devoured by chilblains. In summer we protected ourselves from the sun in the faint light of closed shutters, opening our windows to the sky only after sunset. I didn’t get bored. I played with buttons kept in a cardboard box where my mother had her sewing things. For entire afternoons I lined up buttons on the floor, and they became fleets of pirates, squadrons of airplanes, Roman legions, pioneers’ caravans.

I come from that box of buttons.

I come from a night that lasts a lifetime.

For three years I studied in a military college. At 14 I found myself in a barracks with a flock of other teenagers. We ate, slept, washed, went to school and even to the latrines together. I sank into an autistic form of refusal and I was punished with long periods in prison. I had few friends.

One day in the second year, my company’s captain summoned me to his office. Standing to attention, I was expecting the usual scolding. He went, instead, to a glass-fronted locker full of books, drew out a small key, opened it, took a volume and handed it to me. He gave me permission to read it in study time when normally any reading, with the exception of school manuals, was forbidden. Il fu Mattia Pascal by Pirandello fell into my head like a brick and I saw stars. After that, I longed to see more stars. I went to the office where the captain opened Ali Baba’s cavern with his tiny key and handed me a jewel.

I come from this glass-fronted locker which Captain Rossi opened with a doll’s key.

I dreamt of wrenching myself from the stagnant waters where I grew up. Of my mother’s two children, one cultivated the cult and the nostalgia for his southern roots along all his wandering life in Europe, America and Asia. He spoke constantly of the Bourbon dynasty, Gallipoli, and the military college in Naples where we had studied.

The other son displayed detachment and forgetfulness. Or rather, repression and reticence. I am the second son.

I come from that umbilical cord severed by my own hands. Does this also mean burning the house?

I have always kept up a conversation with my father, that unknown yet so intimately familiar man, whom at the age of 10 I saw in agony for hours until the final silence. I return every year to visit his grave in the small cemetery at Gallipoli. I would not call it a dialogue with my roots. It is more like talking to an old friend. We are the same age now, in fact I am older. I bring him news of his grandchildren whom he has never seen, of my life and work, of my worries of the moment and of trivialities that would make him laugh. I ask his advice, listen to his opinions. It is a dialogue with closed mouth, at times murmuring, as certain people do when deafness makes them loquacious.

I have become accustomed to talking with those who came Before me, instead of with the One on High. Is it the origin of my professional inclination to converse with the books of the masters? In front of the One on High we feel ourselves to be believers or unbelievers. In front of those who came Before we feel like children. And for children, intelligence coincides with the capacity to make mischief.

I come from a father who had no time to grow old and suffer because of an estranged son.

When we tried to appraise our genealogical tree, my brother and I didn’t speak of roots, but of the family flaw. It was the urge for suicide. We recalled our grandfather and our three great-uncles. Lucid and daring suicides, all successfully accomplished with a baroque imagination. My brother is dead, but not by his own hand. The same is true of my father. But there are many ways to refuse life.

I come from the family flaw.

Roots, origins: the more they are personal and sincere the more they seem the result of chance. I pursue symptoms, signals, fragments of memories, and images which are unable to fade completely into oblivion. There must be a reason – I tell myself – if they surface now and then in my mind.

It is not only the mind which remembers. There is also a memory in that knot of impulses in the small area between the coccyx and the solar plexus. It is a region which those who do theatre must learn to know, mapping out an empirical and personal science, an awareness and a superstition. Burning winds blow from this region to the nerves, the marrow and the so-called eyes of the mind.

I come from this region, from this knot of impulses.

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