A Poetics of Third Theatre

Performer Training, Dramaturgy, Cultural Action

Jane Turner, Patrick Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351995986
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

A Poetics of Third Theatre offers an in-depth, critical analysis of Third Theatre, a transnational community of theatre groups and artists united by a shared set of values and a laboratory attitude.

This book takes a genealogical account of Third Theatre as a concept and a practice that draws attention to the historical Third Theatre Encounters that have taken place across Europe and Latin America since the 1970s. The work of renowned Third Theatre groups and organisations, such as LUME (Brazil), Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru), Triangle Theatre (UK) and Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – NTL (Denmark), are explored to reveal how a multifarious poetics of Third Theatre is manifest through these artists' approaches to performer training, dramaturgy and cultural action. Three critical pillars – unconditional hospitality, artisanal craft and (re)enchantment – are employed in order to illuminate the shared ethos of the Third Theatre community and its exemplification as a mode of cultural performance.

This informative text will be of great use to students and scholars of drama and theatre studies, and its dedicated section on performer training exercises offers the reader pathways into an experiential engagement with Third Theatre craft.

PART 1

Preface

We are aware that the very use of the term ‘Third’ in ‘Third Theatre’ requires reconsideration. The term can seem problematic today; anachronistic even. Resonant of the 1970s and similar movements such as ‘Third Cinema’, it evokes the spectre of the so-called ‘Third World’, a geo-political categorisation that no longer has the same currency that it once did. How can such a term persist in today’s globalised, mediatised theatrical context, characterised by a fusion of forms and discourses, by the blurring of high and low art, of the mainstream and the so-called avant-garde? Given the proliferation of psychophysical approaches to acting, the acceptance of physically led and visually potent aesthetics as part of the toolkit available to even the most traditional of theatrical metteurs-en-scene, and Barba and the Odin’s own canonisation within theatre academia, what radical currency can the term ‘Third Theatre’ have for us today? Isn’t the very homogenisation of an overarching ‘tradition’ problematic? Do we not risk effacing the uniqueness of each of the multifaceted groups we are researching?

The aim of Part 1 is to address these questions. Chapter 1, ‘Third Theatre: A genealogy of the concept’, maps out the cultural material contexts that led to the emergence of Third Theatre as a community, in relation to Barba’s writing. Our aim over the course of this chapter is to importantly articulate a critical genealogy of Third Theatre as a shifting concept. We then analyse the use of the term ‘third’ in dialogue with other scholars, in order to rigorously assess the currency of the concept today. Chapter 2, ‘Third Theatre: A genealogy of the practice’, traces out a genealogical consideration of Third Theatre by focusing on key praxical approaches such as knowledge exchange events, Theatre Anthropology and barter, before analysing the Encounters that have taken place in Europe and Latin America since the 1970s. Thus, a critical genealogy of Third Theatre as a shifting example of cultural performance is importantly articulated over the course of this part of the book, providing a historiographic account of the development of this transnational community of practice.

1
THIRD THEATRE

A genealogy of the concept

As alluded to in the Preface, the aim of this chapter is to articulate a critical genealogy of Third Theatre as a shifting concept. We particularly review Eugenio Barba’s writing on the subject, whilst importantly framing this material within the wider cultural material contexts in which Third Theatre developed, both in Europe and Latin America.¹ Furthermore, by reflecting on the ways in which the use of the term ‘Third’ has been employed in parallel within other scholarly contexts, we are able to assert the continual currency of ‘Third Theatre’ as a concept today.

Barba, who first coined the term ‘Third Theatre’ and has written extensively about the phenomenon over the years, suggests in his historical Manifesto that Third Theatre is a new way of ‘being present’ (Barba, 1999: 170), of creating different human relationships characterised by the primacy of action and an ‘ethical imperative’ (1999: 170) that extends throughout the whole of daily life. Barba ends the Manifesto by suggesting that the ‘paradox’ of Third Theatre is ‘… to submerge oneself, as a group, in the universe of fiction in order to find the courage not to pretend’ (1999: 170). Theatre thus becomes a pretext, a smoke screen, for a way of life that is inherently creative, processual, countercultural, and restorative.

Barba’s writings around Third Theatre are frequently poetic in register, and are often not located in a concrete material context. Furthermore, Barba has insisted on the heterogeneity of Third Theatre, and has always resisted attempts to tie his concept to any one aesthetic or praxis, including that of his own group, Odin Teatret.² Nevertheless, he does attempt to trace a lineage of Third Theatre by citing key theatrical practitioners and evoking, through metaphor, historical moments in the social development of humankind that resonate with what he sees as Third Theatre’s status as a countercultural force opposing the disenchantment of late global capitalism.

Cultural material context

In Western Europe and North America, the period ranging from 1958–1974, which Marwick (1998) has termed ‘the long 1960s’, was a time of momentous cultural, social and political transformation. The emergence of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, gay liberation and youth culture, a search for spirituality predicated on eastern religious belief, free love, popular music, a relaxation of censorship and the rise of counterculture all indelibly impacted and reshaped western society. The ongoing sense of foreboding provoked by the backdrop of the Cold War notwithstanding, economic progress increased over this period, social ascension burgeoned and scientific and technological innovation continued to flourish.

After the devastation of two World Wars, the horrors of the Holocaust and the dawn of the Atomic Age, the long 1960s represented a newfound sense of hope and renewal to those on the Left, and social degradation and amorality to those on the Right. The period perhaps reached its zenith with the Paris protests of 1968, which were followed by widespread disillusionment among the Left after the quashing of the Prague Spring by the Soviets. By the mid-1970s, a lingering sense of alienation and de-politicisation had begun to permeate intellectual circles and, compounded by the economic slump of the 1973 Oil Crisis, the utopian drive that had characterised much of the former decade was dampened (Marwick, 1998).

In an article on barter and the Third Theatre, Maria Shevtsova stresses the influence of the 1960s on the community’s praxis, placing special emphasis on Barba’s work in particular:

… Third Theatre might be described as a fusion of Mauss with Kroptokin, the former’s depiction of the system of tribal exchange blending into the latter’s aspirations to reach Arcadia. Flower power could not have imagined it better and, in this, as in other aspects, Barba and the whole enterprise for which the name Odin stands – Odin means ‘one’ – are very much children of the 1960s; all the more so, because the Arcadia sought during these years was tribal-collective, and without the sanctions of anything other than its self-devised momentum.

(Shevtsova, 2002: 118)

Shevtsova here picks up on a number of underlying tendencies that have guided Third Theatre practice and indelibly shaped the community as a whole. Creative exchange, a search for rootedness in an increasingly disenchanted, globalised world and a focus on the importance of the collective are all key principles guiding the work. In his text, ‘The Mutation’, first published in 1977, Barba makes similar associative links between Third Theatre, the phenomenon of barter and the Latin American theatre groups that Odin Teatret had encountered during their 1974 tour of Caracas, Venezuela. Barba uses the metaphor of ‘mutation’ to attempt to encapsulate the changing face of contemporary group theatre as he experienced it at the time. According to Barba:

I glimpsed a way of rejecting compromise, wear and tear, the inner conflicts deriving from political activity. Theatre as revolt, as a search for identity, as uncertain ground for the cultivation of one’s own anger, one’s own needs, one’s own inadequacy. Out of these questions and encounters was born the idea of the Third Theatre. I realise that it is not an artistically decipherable phenomenon. It is the fruit of men and women who are confusedly living the mutation from fish to crab, the transition of theatre as we have known it until now into something like social blasphemy or atheistic prayer, something which we are still unable to name.

(Barba, 1999: 174)

Whilst the metaphor of the fish mutating into a crab is somewhat obtuse, fruitful connections are made here between the political thrust of Third Theatre, its liminal, slippery nature and association with a secular desire for an experience akin to spiritual revelation. In many ways, Barba is articulating a desire to escape the alienation and depoliticisation gripping Europe at the time, and to relocate the values of the countercultural movements of the long 1960s in the laboratory group theatres that he was encountering at the time in Europe and Latin America.

Interestingly, the lack of a clear Marxist ideology and the spectre of anarchy and Romanticism that Shevtsova detects in Third Theatre practice are both recurring critiques that have been levelled at Barba and other Third Theatre practitioners over the years. An underlying ambivalence within Third Theatre circles regarding Marxist doctrine, and particularly Marxism-Leninism as a valid political alternative, can be traced back to the central role that Barba has played as a pioneer and leading figure within the community. Barba has spoken previously of his disillusionment with the policies of the Eastern Block, and how his initial espousal of Marxist ideals was challenged by the persecution suffered by Grotowski and his actors under Communism, his own experience as persona non grata in Poland, and later by momentous events such as the crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact troops (Barba in Rasmussen, 2017). According to Barba:

I had arrived in Poland as a prudent Marxist linking socialism with justice. I was witness to an obtuse bureaucracy that confused and weakened my political ardour. I gradually became immune to socialist rhetoric, but not to social indignation.

(Barba in Rasmussen, 2017: 26)

A distrust in political rhetoric and the advocacy of a more idiosyncratic, pragmatic approach to community building and social justice would become hallmarks of Third Theatre group culture, underpinning key activities such as cultural action, as shall become apparent over the course of the book.

Latin America

Third Theatre may have emerged in Europe out of the International Workshop of Theatre Research, which took place in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1976, but as we shall see in Chapter 2, it came of age in Latin America; the Latin American Group Theatre Encounters, starting with Ayacucho ’78, would fundamentally shape a growing sense of a transnational Third Theatre identity. Thus, it is important to have an awareness of the political and cultural landscape of the region prior to the 1978 event, in order to assess the material impact that these factors have had on the Third Theatre community as a whole.

If the long 1960s in Western Europe were a time of cultural effervescence and transformation, Latin America had been rocked during this period by revolution on the one hand, and military coups on the other. Whilst the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had provided many on the Left with a newfound sense of hope and belief in Communism, a wave of right-wing, US-sponsored military dictatorships swept across Brazil (1964–1985), Bolivia (1964–1982), Chile (1973–1990) and later Argentina (1976–1983) in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This civil upheaval ushered in a period of oppression and bloodshed in poli-ties across the continent as the military declared de facto war on sections of its own citizenry. The CIA’s activities in the 1960s and 1970s mirrored earlier US counter-revolutionary interventions in Guatemala in 1954, continuing a tradition of US interference in Central and South American politics stretching back to the nineteenth century (Dunkerley, 2004).

Given these extreme circumstances, and a legacy of socio-economic, racial and sexual inequality and violence inherited from the colonial period, Latin American theatre has necessarily had to focus on and respond to pressing historical, social, political and economic factors that have not affected Western European practitioners to the same extent. It is hardly surprising then that small-scale Latin American theatre during the period of the long 1960s was, by necessity, almost always political in nature. Frequently characterised by agit-prop performances that often verged on the demagogic, theatre practice of the period was also influenced by a socialist inflected tradition of creación colectiva (collective creation) which had started to spread across the continent at this time, inspired in part by the Columbian group theatre movement (Perales, 1989).

According to Mario Delgado, the Peruvian director of renowned Third Theatre group Cuatrotablas and organiser of the Ayacucho Encounters, Third Theatre as a movement preceded Barba’s coining of the term in 1976. Delgado suggests that politicised Latin American artists such as Santiago García, Augusto Boal and María Escudero should be considered pioneers of Third Theatre, and mentions the 1968 University Theatre Festival of Manizales in Columbia as a key moment when independent theatre groups from across Latin America, often linked to amateur societies based at universities, congregated and began to develop a sense of a shared identity, characterised by a focus on social justice and aesthetic innovation (Delgado in Perales, 1989).

Ian Watson (1987) suggests that Latin American group theatre as a phenomenon has been an integral part of the region’s theatre since at least the 1950s. Independent theatres, working primarily and experimentally with texts to begin with, such as Teatro El Galpón (founded in Uruguay in 1949) and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Conclusion
• Index