English - Odin Teatret

ODIN TE­A­TRET
NOR­DISK TE­A­TER­LA­BO­RA­TO­RIUM
særkærparken 144 · POST­BOKS 1283
DK-7500 HOL­STE­BRO · DENMARK
TEL. +45 97 42 47 77 · FAX +45 97 41 04 82
E-MAIL odin@odinteatret.dk · http://www.odinteatret.dk
Rounborgs grafiske hus, Holstebro
SALT
A female odyssey. A woman travels from one Greek island to another in search
of a vanished lover. A phantom accompanies her in a dance, bringing her closer
to an awareness of a defining loss.
Based on the short story ”Letter in the wind”
from Si Sta Facendo Sempre Più Tardi, a novel in the form of letters
by Antonio Tabucchi
Actors: Roberta Carreri, Jan Ferslev
Music: Jan Ferslev
Scenic design: Antonella Diana and Odin Teatret
Costumes: Odin Teatret
Light designer: Jesper Kongshaug
Graphics: Marco Donati
Assistant director: Raúl Iaiza
Literary adviser: Nando Taviani
Scenic adaptation and direction: Eugenio Barba
Odin Teatret thanks Thomas Bredsdorff, Knud Erik Knudsen, Raphaëlle Doyon,
Kaj Kok and Nathan Meister.
Odin Teatret: Patricia Alves, Eugenio Barba, Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Philip Doolan,
Jan Ferslev, Adrian Jensen, Ivan Joergensen, Søren Kjems, Tage Larsen, Else Marie Laukvik, Karen Lind, Sigrid Post, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Pushparajah Sinnathamby, Rina Skeel,
Ulrik Skeel, Nando Taviani, Julia Varley, Torgeir Wethal, Frans Winther and Lone Ørnskov.
Co-production: Fondazione Pontedera Teatro and Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, September 2002
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Antonio Tabucchi
*
THE VOICE, THE BODY
Reflections after a rehearsal of SALT
The voice is truly mysterious. Of course, John attributed creative power to it at
the start of his gospel: in the beginning was the Word, and with the word was life.
Voice, life. Phonologists claim that the voice imitates life’s rhythm, because it follows the principle of breathing. Each phrase we pronounce is born, expands, stabilizes, diminishes, and dies. It breathes with us.
The voice creates and the voice saves. The voice has a magical power,
which was described in the oldest Greek myth, the one about Orpheus. Orpheus
sings and thereby frees the magical power of his voice, taming the monsters of hell
as he descends into the underworld to awaken Euridice from her eternal sleep. The
voice evokes. Ex-vocare: to call out. The voice can evoke the dead, pulling them
out of darkness. The voice is so mysterious that it can evade the sound waves reproduced by the phonograph and studied by phonologists, because it resonates inside
our hearts or our heads. It ‘resounds inside us’, as Kavafis said, and only we can
hear it. And we don’t hear it with our ears, we hear it with our soul. “Imagine beloved voices / which are dead or like the dead / for us lost. // Sometimes they speak
to us in dreams / sometimes they vibrate in our chest. // And with the sound for an
instant returns the echo of the first poem of our life / like distant music that dissolves into the night.” The Fathers of the Church created a word for those who hear
these internal voices. They called them Acusmata. An acusmaton is one who hears
voices from within. The saints and the mystics heard them. Saint Cecilia heard the
voices of the angels within herself while she was undergoing martyrdom, and thus
became the patron saint of music. Music is voice.
But we are all a little bit ‘acusmat’”. One day we recall someone who is no
longer with us and suddenly we 'hear' their voice. Where does it come from? Or we
receive a letter and that letter is accompanied by the voice of the person who wrote
it. Sometimes letters 'speak'. We read a letter from someone who was dear to us,
and our internal ear opens up and their voice echoes inside us.
It is not uncommon for writers to 'hear' the voices of their characters. In
strictly psychiatric terms this is defined as sound hallucination. When it becomes
exaggerated, a dangerous line is crossed. To write means to manage to sail along
that line without crossing it. But the voices that the writer translates into words on
the page are no longer audible when they arrive on the sheet of paper. Their timbre,
so personal, so differentiated, so distinguishable, has become writing. And writing
is deaf. Writing captures voices, and extinguishes them.
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Eugenio Barba is by convention a theatre director. Some add anthropologist, choreographer, musicologist. And all this is certainly true. But I suspect his function is
really something different. It is what the ancients had in mind when they entrusted
priests with the task of orchestrating rituals and marrying the voice with the body,
the air with the earth, and the senses with the spirit. It is what Shakespeare intended
when he placed the wand in Prospero’s hand so that he could direct the mystery of
the fusion of the elements. There is magic to be accomplished and the Master takes
the wand. What is the strange ritual that he is enacting? What alchemy is being
compounded? What are the signs he is tracing in the air? There is a transformation occurring, we can feel it but it is impossible to know its nature. It is not unlike
alchemy. Whether priest, magician, or just simple illusionist, that person has been
invested with mysterious power, and he is performing the miracle of an ancient and
renewable ritual before our eyes.
*
Roberta Carreri, following the tracings in the air of the Master’s wand, has given
my letters voice again. She has penetrated the opaque mirror of the writing. I see
her: she is leaping inside a circle of gestures and words. It is the magical circle of
Alice, who has decided to prolong her journey beyond Wonderland in order to become Ariadne. It is a trip through a blind labyrinth, behind the thread of the days of
her life, searching for the sound that has been the cause of her suffering -- the dull
bellowing of the Minataur.
Jan Ferslav suggests, with the sound of a nineteenth century mandolin
purchased in a little Neapolitan shop, that the doleful notes of a woman’s voice
are also his own – those of an elegant Theseus in a panama hat and a linen suit
– because betrayal can also provoke suffering in the betrayer. On the other hand, he
probably had no say in the matter, for this was a role assigned to him by myth, and
we cannot escape the roles that destiny imposes upon us.
And so a Moebius ring is formed on stage: a spiral that begins where it
ends, like the mysterious words of that pre-Socratic fragment according to which
all things return whence they came, paying one another penance for having appeared according to Time's unjust order.
English translation by Tom Kingdon
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Roberta Carreri
THERE ARE RIVERS AND THERE ARE VOLCANOES
-A modest genesis of a performance To Sanjukta and to Zé
September, 1995.
The performance is being given in the church of an old convent. We actors change
in the sacristy. We are about to present Kaosmos in Portugal, at Montemor-o-Novo.
The organiser has told me that Antonio Tabucchi is attending a conference in the
same city. I immediately ask him to be invited to the performance.
At the end of the performance we close the doors of the sacristy behind us.
A few seconds later we hear knocking and our organizer enters followed by a little
man with an agonized expression. He asks for some water in order to take some
pills for the headache that is tormenting him. I turn irritably toward the intruder,
and then rush towards him offering my bottle of water, saying to his astonishment,
“Are you Antonio Tabucchi? I am one of your fans.”
We meet later the same evening at a dinner with local artists. There I meet
Zé, Antonio’s wife and muse, with her shining black eyes and the smile of someone
who has known you forever. After Montemor-o-Novo we go to Lisbon where, in
their house on Rua do Monte Olivete, Antonio and Zé play a recording of a very
sweet fado, which Antonio appreciates very much. It is Lagrima by Amalia Rodriguez, sung by Dulce Pontes. This song settles inside me as light as a sigh.
April, 1996
For this year’s ISTA, Eugenio asks me to prepare a twenty-minute work-demonstration on the relationship between theatre and dance. I choose to work on the first
page of Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses by James Joyce. Starting from this
text, I create a series of actions. Then I call Jan so that he can help me transform the
actions into dance through some of his music. For the ending, I write a text, a necklace of thoughts, in which I mention my Milanese childhood dream of entering La
Scala, my first meeting with Odin Teatret, and the influence of the oriental masters
of ISTA on my development as an actress. From my meeting with Jan a 'postcard' is
born, which is tinged with nostalgia. And in both of us is born the desire to explore
this nostalgia.
September
Tour in Buenos Aires. In this country of immigrants I visit San Telmo’s market
where ten years ago I found the costume for Judith. Now I find a little wrought iron
antique stool, a celluloid doll, an old cardboard suitcase, and a little carved crystal
bottle. They have the scent of nostalgia and I buy them intending to use them in the
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work with Jan, even if I don’t yet know how or why.
November
We perform Kaosmos at the Teatro Studio in Milan. Antonio is visiting Milan and
we agree to meet at the studio of a friend of his, the painter Davide Benati. In that
house in the centre of Milan, surrounded by a whirl of ink, Antonio, Ze, Davide,
Torgeir and I celebrate being together. Davide mentions a special book that Antonio
is writing. A special book he says, his eyes sparkling.
June, 1997
On the day I learn of Sanjukta’s death I am in my house on vacation. It is a glorious
Danish summer’s day. The first thing that comes to mind is: without her the world
is poorer. Sanjukta Panigrahi had founded ISTA with Eugenio in 1980 and had become its queen. For years her Orissi dances have illuminated Theatrum Mundi and
filled the hearts of the spectators with power and beauty.
The ache is too great to bear alone. I invite my colleagues from Odin
Teatret to dinner. I prepare soup and bake bread and a cake. I gather roses and put
them in a basket.
When the colleagues arrive, I ask them to take a rose and lead them to the
big beech trees at the end of the garden beside a running stream. We place ourselves
in a row on the bank and think of Sanjukta as we throw our flowers into the water,
knowing that they will reach her ashes scattered on the Ganges, because all the
waters of the world are connected. The waters of the stream flow into the river. The
waters of the river flow to the sea. The waters of the sea flow to the ocean. And the
waters of the oceans meet.
To believe in the necessity of your work and to take responsibility for this
need is what Sanjukta had been teaching me by her example
September, 1998
ISTA in Portugal. The first ISTA without Sanjukta. Eugenio entitles the Theatrum
Mundi performance: Four Poems for Sanjukta. During the performance I sing Lagrima, the fado that Antonio played for me the first time I visited his house in Rua
do Monte Olivete.
After the performance I cry from the pain of Sanjukta’s absence.
1998 - 1999 - 2000
In the few precious intervals between tours, Jan and I meet in the work room to
develop our 'dream'. Jan experiments with musical instruments he has never played
before and composes new music.
We don’t know what we are looking for. We follow the invisible thread
of our nostalgia. It is a silent thread. You have to create silence inside yourself in
order to be able to hear it. We read Pessoa. I superimpose the text of Ode Marit6
tima, translated by Antonio Tabucchi, onto a piece of Jan’s music. Eventually, the
work leads us to the theme of immigration, of travelling out of love or necessity. In
a book by Jeanette Winterson, I read this phrase, “What is salted up in the memory
of you?” and the image of salt lodges in my mind. The salt of the sea that divides,
the salt of tears. I fill my suitcase with salt.
I am being prompted by a profound need. I stopped training in 1989, at
the very moment when I created Traces in the Snow -- my work-demonstration
about physical and vocal training and the creation of characters. From that moment
on, my training has slid from working on exercises to searching for a situation that
allows me to continue to evolve as an actress. To undertake the creation of a story
is for me the ultimate challenge. It is something greater than me, driving me to
overcome my limits. Whether I will succeed or not doesn’t concern me for the time
being. The important thing is to have found the challenge that will keep my interest
in the profession alive.
I am being driven by a power that is like a volcano erupting within me. The
example of Sanjukta’s life has helped me to appreciate this drive, this need, and to
respect it. But as an actress I depend on a director to give form and freedom to this
drive, this need, this nostalgia.
January, February, March,2001
Jan and I decide to stop giving seminars and touring solo performances in order to
devote ourselves to our common dream. Every morning we enter the workspace.
Jan tunes his instruments while I do exercises to warm up my body. Then Jan starts
to improvise and I start to move and dance following his music. Often I seize a
prop, one of the objects that I bought on tour, and try to integrate it in the work: a
stick that does something more than simply support me, a suitcase, a chair that I
don’t use only for sitting on, and so on. Led by Jan’s music I am like a rat following
the Pied Piper.
In the evening I go home and scour the art books on my bookshelves for
images that match the music I have been hearing. In the morning I make photocopies of the selected images. I enter the workspace and start reproducing them with
my body. Jan’s music creates sound scenographies inside me which I act out, creating concrete images that move in the space. Each time I hear a new piece of music
I ask, “What’s it called?” Jan replies, “I don’t know.” So it is left to me to name the
piece of music that has inspired a particular dance or led me to work with a specific
prop. Lisbon, Drops of Rain, The Dance of the Shoreline, The Little Mermaid, The
Dance of the Book, Guernica.
And all the time inside me the question persists: what is the story that we
are trying to tell? Is it The Little Mermaid? And so we start to interpret the work
that we have already created in the light of that story. Is it Tristan and Isolde? And
we do the same. But the story escapes us. What is left is the sensation of nostalgia
that was evoked by our 'postcard' for ISTA in 1996.
7
I called Jan’s first piece of music Lisbon because it was sunny, sunny and
melancholy like that city, the cradle of the saudade. The first texts I memorised
were those of Pessoa. One of the first props was the coffee machine that I had
bought in Lisbon.
April
I find a little package in my mailbox. It comes from Italy, from the publishing
house of Feltrinelli. I open it and find a book with a hypnotic cover. My eyes can’t
break its embrace. It is Si Sta Facendo Sempre Più Tardi (It Is Getting Later and
Later) by Antonio Tabucchi. The instant I open it, I realise that this is the book
mentioned by Davide Benati in November 1996.
May
Eugenio announces that he wants to intervene in our montage and turn it into a performance based on the book by Antonio Tabucchi, which he has also received from
the author. Five years have passed between conception of this performance and the
moment in which Eugenio has decided to put his hands to it.
Without the intervention of Eugenio my nostalgia remains only mine, it
doesn’t get to transcend the limits of my story, of my fantasies, of my 'I'. Only when
the obsessions, nostalgia, and dreams of the actors meet the madness of Eugenio
can a performance be born, which can then be shared with spectators. Offering Eugenio these five years has been the only way Jan and I could get our work to reach
other people.
Eighteen months have passed from the moment in which Eugenio began to
work on the performance to its opening night. During this time the performance has
experienced several metamorphoses. Each time that Eugenio changed a scene I was
sure it was the final version and the right one. Until the moment Eugenio changed
it once again. The text has gone through as many metamorphoses as well.
The meeting with Ze and Antonio Tabucchi, the death of Sanjukta and the
inspiration of her example, the collaboration with Jan, the discovery of a chair in
Buenos Aires, of a machine for making coffee in Lisbon, of a walking stick in the
Odin Teatret store room… are events that occurred in different times and places,
but, like different rivers, they flow into the same sea.
August, 2002
The Journey, this was the first title that I gave our work in 1998, and the journey
that has brought Jan and me to Salt has lasted more than six years. After the first
phase in which we began the creative process, came the second phase in which
Eugenio took creative control. At the start of September the performance will be
launched and a new journey will begin for Salt.
English translation by Tom Kingdon
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SALT
Based on the short story 'Lettera al vento' ('Letter in the Wind')
from Si Sta Facendo Sempre Piú Tardi (It Is Getting Later and Later),
a novel in the form of letters by Antonio Tabbuchi
Scenic adaption by Eugenio Barba
English translation: Tom Kingdon and Nathan Meister
I want to write him a letter, a truthful letter,
Through the layers of lava and clay that life has poured over everything.
I would say that I am still myself, hoarding dreams.
I would tell him that I love him still even though my senses are tired.
I would tell him: look, all that has happened in this meantime -Impossible as it is to decipher -- all this is nothing.
I
I have come ashore, on this island, at the end of the afternoon.
From the ferry I saw the white village growing closer and thought: perhaps he is
there?
While I was walking through the narrow alleys with my luggage of dried tears,
I kept repeating: perhaps he is here?
There is a popular restaurant in the square, beneath the castle.
I sat down at a table and ordered a dish, which is the island’s speciality.
Night was falling.
The lights in the village of Paros were reflected on the sea,
Making it seem only two steps away.
I have been searching for you, my beloved, in every atom of you spread out across
the universe.
I have been gathering as many as possible on the earth, in the air,
In the sea, and in the looks and gestures of men.
Yesterday in Paros I met a doctor. He comes from the south, from Crete.
I was contemplating the horizon, and he asked me if I was contemplating the horizon.
I am contemplating the horizon, I replied.
He said, the only line which breaks the horizon is the rainbow.
An optical reflection, a pure illusion.
We spoke about illusions, and without wanting to, I spoke about you.
He told me he knew you, because he had stitched up your veins
The day you’d slashed your wrists.
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I did not know this so I was deeply moved.
I thought that I had found something of you in him,
Because he had known your blood.
So I followed him to his hotel.
He was gentle, and undressed shyly. He had a small member, a little bent,
Like certain clay satyrs in the museum in Athens.
He didn’t really want a woman but, rather, comforting words.
And I pretended to give them to him out of human mercy.
And a light of complicity shone in his eyes, as if he understood,
As if he knew who I was and who I was looking for, that I was looking for you.
Without saying a word, he offered his hand and I took it.
And for a moment a light shone in his eyes.
I put them in my pocket, look I have them with me.
I could place them right here on the table on this terrace where I am dining.
They are two more pieces of the mosaic of crumbs
That I am gathering to reconstruct you,
Including the smell of the man with whom I passed the night,
The rainbow on the horizon, and this blue ocean that surrounds me.
I have gathered every bit of you: crumbs, dust, fragments, traces,
Your accent lingering in the voices of others,
Some grains of sand, a sea shell, your past as I have imagined it, our future,
That which I would have wanted from you, that which you had promised me.
I have gathered my childhood dreams,
The love I felt for my father when I was a child,
Certain silly rhymes from my youth.
I don’t know whether you have planted your seed in me or vice-versa.
But no, no seed from us has ever flourished.
People are only themselves without the transmission of future flesh,
Especially me, without anyone close in my old age.
There is a boat on the horizon, which leaves a trail of white foam.
Could that be you too?
The water is wide I cannot cross over
Neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will cross my true love and I.
Oh love is handsome and love is kind,
Gay as a jewel when it is young.
But love grows old and waxes cold
And flies away like morning dew.
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II
My beloved,
Do you remember when we didn’t go to Samarcand?
We chose the best season of the year, the beginning of autumn,
When the forest and the bushes around Samarcand
Were burning with red and ochre leaves, and the climate was lovely.
One can arrive at Samarcand in different ways you said,
But it was preferable to travel overland, by train,
And that is what we decided : The Orient-Express.
From where else does one take the Orient-Express
But from Gare De Lyon! And what’s in that marvellous station?
Le Train Bleu, the most fascinating restaurant in Paris!
We ordered oysters and champagne, because, surely, two people who
Do not leave for Samarcand have the right to start like that, no?
To leave is always to die a little -- Is what we said looking at the passengers
That were leaning out of the small illuminated windows.
So many memories, so many images
Are awakened by that voyage to Samarcand, which we did not make
But that we imagined in the smallest detail
Our travel companions…
That lady who was an expert on Chekhov….
Do you remember the speech she made on the last words of the Russian writer?
It took our breath away.
Neither you nor I ever knew that Chekhov’s last words were
“Ich sterbe!” “I am dying!”
He died in a language not his own.
How strange. He loved in Russian, suffered in Russian,
Hated in Russian, smiled in Russian, lived in Russian,
And died in German.
Do you remember our inappropriate use of Chekov’s words in Samarcand?!
I began it and then you imitated me.
The first time was in that Tower of Babel called the Siab Bazaar -The smell, the spices, the head cloths, the tapestries, the screaming, the crowd -Where Turkestan, Europe, and Afghanistan comingle.
I stood there astonished and shouted “Ich sterbe!”
And from then 'to sterb' became a password,
An obligation, nearly a vice.
We sterbed together in front of the mausoleum of Gur-I-Emir.
“Ich sterbe!”
And we sterbed in the square of Rejistan.
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“Ich sterbe!”
And we sterbed in front of the ceramic mosaics of the mosque of Ulug Beg.
My beloved, in the last little while
I have started to learn some Uzbek.
You remember how funny that language seemed to us when we heard it spoken?
For example, 'farewell' seems almost Spanish, you say alvido.
But maybe the funniest expression is men olmdan ko’z yaemapman.
It’s a verb. It means 'Ich sterbe',
I am dying, my beloved.
*
You called me, ‘my clear eyes’ ‘my hair of honey’,
And repeated that you desired me from the first day you saw me.
Then, a hundred years ago, when I was a blossoming young girl
And you were an austere gentleman my father’s age,
We saw each other every winter at the family holiday resort.
You were writing in a provincial newspaper.
The moral and intellectual prestige of someone who is fighting for the just side
Gave you the sort of halo of a romantic hero in the eyes of us young people of the
left.
And then we admired your way of confronting the steepest slope.
You, a fifty year-old with this elegant and mysterious manner,
You, a fifty year-old with this elegant and mysterious manner,
You were more audacious than us in our twenties, glued to the fireplace
As soon as snowflakes began to fall.
Only I dared to keep up with you on those wild steep hills.
I remember one morning, not so much because the downhill run was rash,
But because, when I caught up with you, panting,
My cheeks burning, my ski jacket covered with snow,
I had to hug the trunk of the pine tree where you were standing, to stop my descent.
We broke out in laughter like children, partly because our skiing had proved so
thrillingly successful,
But in reality because I was a young girl, and I really was.
We looked at each other, like schoolmates
Who’d gotten into mischief. With complicity.
Three years later, I was a young wife
With my first fruit in my womb and
With a nice husband -A young, well-educated man preoccupied by my maternity.
The four of us were strolling on the paths of caked snow.
You talked demurely with my husband
While I listened to the advice of your, then, wife.
I remember the year when you arrived with a new wife.
This new love had rejuvenated you.
You’d cut your hair so short, leaving only one lock across the forehead.
You had published a new novel, which had won a prize.
We discussed it in the evening, over supper.
The winters passed, my children grew tall,
Your friendship with my father became even closer,
I grew old and became a good housewife.
Scarlet Tongue is so-named because it becomes a beautiful red colour -And it is, in appearance and taste, a perfect dish.
You take the tongue of a large animal, rub it with thirty grams of saltpeter,
And twenty-four hours later rinse it in cold water.
Rinse it several times and, while still moist, rub it with a good deal of salt,
And leave it for eight days.
Stir it every morning in the liquid produced by the salt,
Which will dissolve slowly in water,
And then boil it. Boil it for three or four hours
Then tear off the skin while it is still boiling hot. Serve it cold in jelly,
And it will prove an excellent dish.
It happened in a natural way,
Just like the moon rising or the snow falling.
The hotel was deserted,
Everybody had gone to the exhibition of that painter, who was our friend.
I stayed behind because of the children.
I was standing in front of the glass door, which was open facing the valley,
When somebody came up behind me on his tip-toes,
Caressed my neck and whispered: “hair of honey…”
I turned around and kissed you.
Then, with my index finger on the lips that had touched you,
I whispered: “sssssshhh”.
And kissed you again.
Maybe it was with that look that everything began.
I thought about you every day.
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The few hours of the year when I could see you in that mountain hotel
Were nearly a torment. You, in the meantime, were happy.
Because people can be happy in their meantimes. Even I.
Meanwhile, I had begun to write and to have my books published,
And I offered them to you, always with the same dedication:
'To you, with the complicity that unites us.'
The moments of love I lived with you
Have been sublime, even though they were rare,
Punctuated by intervals that seemed too long to me,
And reserved for some privileged meeting that we tried to make look casual.
In those moments (,) I had the highest peaks of carnal love I’ve ever experienced ,
A storm of passion, a complete ecstasy, within reach.
My beloved.
Please forgive me for calling you what I used to call you,
After all these years,
But I really don’t know how else to address you.
How do you address yourself to the loved one who said “goodbye, see you tomorrow”, and then disappeared without even a note of explanation?
You have been my beloved all my life, and also my one, real lover.
With a few other men I had stolen meetings to cheat the flesh.
But every night, when I tried to fall asleep alone in my bed,
I embraced the air beside me,
And said, “my beloved one”, and imagined reliving the miracle
Of holding you in my arms.
Like a bird in a cage, I am waiting for your return!
Bird in a cage, love / bird in a cage
Waiting for Willie / to come back to me.
Roses are red, love, / violets are blue.
God in heaven / knows I love you.
Write me a letter, / send it by mail.
Send and direct it / to Lexington jail.
Bird in a cage, love, / bird in a cage
Waiting for Willie / to come back to me.
III
I am searching for you in the sparkle of this ocean
Because you have seen it,
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And in the eyes of the haberdasher, the pharmacist,
The old man selling iced coffee in this little square,
Because they may have seen you.
I have also put these things in my pocket,
In this pocket, which is myself and my senses.
Do we want to make the memories prettier? Or to fake them? Memory is here for
this reason.
In our stone house, on the table, there is a blue folder tied up with a white ribbon,
And I open it with slow and cautious movements,
As if in some ancient ceremony that has been awaiting me for years.
A rectangle of paper in the blue folder contains life: A photograph.
It is a portrait of us together, on a vast, rocky beach overhanging the sea,
You on a wooden horse, I, at your side, holding the reins.
On the back of the photo I recognize a message -- a letter without a bottle
That has navigated, who knows what membrane of the world,
To land here, in this moment, in my memory.
You wrote:
“One can conserve youth eternally.
A very tempting theory advanced by Stella Cometa
(the renowned esoteric magazine)
According to which, the scalpel must pierce the dead to reawaken them.
But it is risky to prick cadavers with iron,
The corpse recoils from the metal, reawakens, and produces heartrending screams
in the night",
Thus, thus should be your voice when I possess you:
Like the chilling scream of the dead, who have been reawakened with iron.
You have all that vocal potential.”
No! You cannot betray me like that, cutting the thread,
With me not even knowing where your body is resting.
Twice you have betrayed me, the second time, when you hid your body from me.
Now I am here, at this table on the terrace, overlooking the sea, purposeless.
An old lazy Greek is singing an ancient song.
There are cats, kids and a lighthouse in the far distance.
I helped you out of the labyrinth, and you made me enter it and now I have no
way out,
Not even the extreme one. Because my life is over, and everything escapes me,
I have no connection leading me back to myself or to the world.
I am here, the breeze caresses my hair, and I stumble in the night.
I have lost my thread, the one I gave to you.
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I have deciphered the epigraphs in all the likely cemeteries,
Searching for your beloved name
So at least I could mourn you.
Spring has passed for us, my beloved one.
Autumn has arrived.
In fact, it is full winter in this premature summer,
Refreshed by the breeze that is blowing tonight
On the terrace of this restaurant facing the harbour.
For the first time since you disappeared,
I have stopped thinking that obsessive thought,
That phrase you whispered to me once
And which has always resonated in my head:
“Love is a harp with many strings.”
What purpose is a harp with only one string,
When all the others are broken?
I want to write you a letter, a real letter,
Through the layers of lava and clay that life has poured over everything.
I would say that I am still myself, hoarding dreams.
The magnolia is flourishing. The children are also still growing.
I would tell you: time does not wait. It is made up of drops.
One drop too many and it spills onto the earth, the puddle swelling and vanishing.
I would tell you that I still love you, even though my senses are tired,
And that I have prepared the words for my tombstone: There are few,
Because between the dates of my birth and my death all the days are mine.
You are the salt of the earth,
You are the salt of the ocean.
You are the salt of the sweat of all my loves.
You are the salt under the sun,
You are the salt on the wound.
You are the salt of the tears, the salt of my life.
Then I would tell you that I wait for you,
Although one does not wait
For someone who cannot return.
I have visited so many of these islands, always looking for him.
And this one is not the last one.
And who can find him if not me?
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Eugenio Barba
THE TORRID ZONE OF MEMORY
We also travel inside our memories. Some of them become vast vertical landscapes.
At times we sink into them.
First we cross the cold zone of distance in which memory and simple
information about the past fades. Once we have succeeded in gathering together
some of the circumstances surrounding this information we say: “Now I remember”. But we remain distant. Our recollections are not yet a part of us.
They begin to belong to us when we enter into the humid zone of the emotions, or rather of our present reaction towards past emotions.
The journey through the vast country of memory confronts us with the
confusion between the feelings of the present and those of the past. We can seldom
differentiate between the emotions which belong to the past as we remember it, and
those which belong to the actual moment of remembering.
This second zone of memory’s boundless vertical landscape is such a conglomeration and intricate web of moods and humours that I refer to it as “humid”
rather than using the word viscous.
When we manage to disentangle ourselves, we enter into the fertile zone
in which actions, passions, events and past circumstances release their pollen towards the present day. Memory no longer belongs to what we were; it is no longer
sentiment, but flesh and blood. It is an integral part of what we are and will be. It
is the fruitful zone of integrity between past and present, where memory is not an
illusory place to which we return but the springlike part of us that grows.
From there - in rare cases - we cross into the torrid zone where extremes
meet in an embrace. Here the sun is both a divinity and an inferno in the heavens,
appearances burn up and apparitions emerge. We are dazzled, seduced, sometimes
burned. We no longer ask questions about the past and the present. We gaze in
wonder and feel a weight in the pit of our stomachs forcing us to look away.
When I talk of the torrid zone of memory, I picture in my mind a nocturnal
scene from a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. And I visualise my dream of
theatre, its Himalayas.
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21
A Castle of Perfumes
Experience must be passed on in a way that is useful. It cannot simply be described
as an emotion belonging only to the person who lived through it. I have always tried
to respect the following precept: you must be able to explain. At the same time I am
aware that the need to explain sometimes leads us into obscurity. Theatre work too
has its phases and zones, some of which can be shared, others not. Some are fertile
and suitable for passing on, while others are solitary and incommunicable.
In my own work, the torrid zone is the zone of “the wound”.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk of “wounds” in the plural.
The “wounds” are stories that do not wish to be told. Whenever we try to tell them,
they turn their backs on us and distance themselves. We glimpse their bent backs,
like greyish or radiant humps: our rucksacks. Our “wounds” refuse to be danced
or mimed. Perhaps because they know their destiny is elsewhere, to be poured into
another story, the smokescreen which allows us to evoke and conceal them at one
and the same time.
Mentally I run through the list of my productions. Each one has widened
my horizon in the sense that it has opened my eyes. Sometimes with regard to technical problems. Usually, seeing them again and again has made me aware of other
zones of myself.
They never speak of me. There is no trace of autobiography in them. I
once made a production whose title was the name of the ship on which I was a
seaman when I emigrated to Norway. It was called Talabot, but its main theme was
the autobiography of a Danish anthropologist, Kirsten Hastrup, who had agreed to
write a series of episodes from her life for Odin Teatret.
The traveller encounters something new, but s/he never forgets that which
s/he has left behind. The horizon of knowledge widens but it is not a question of
genuine discoveries. The true discovery happens when that from which the journey
seems to liberate us slowly surfaces: the greyish or radiant hump, the “wounds”.
Our eyes are opened at the very moment when our gaze is directed elsewhere.
I ask myself if this is an experience common to all who practise a craft
we pompously call “creative”. What are we creating? Dark corners and moments
of silence. A few corners in huge buildings and brief moments out of an hour. The
darkness comprises the expectation and threat of a sudden flash of light. The silence consists of resonance.
The rest is craft, the most important and necessary prerequisite, yet not
the essential one. Without craft nothing can be achieved; there is no departure, no
journey, no arrival. A castle of expertly blended perfumes is needed to create a single
small room in which to experience the absence of any one perfume. Is this the essence? We become aware of the essential in the form of something that escapes us.
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23
There was once a castle whose perfumes told stories. Thomas Edward
Lawrence was a witness to this on one of his first voyages to the Middle East to
study the archaeology of the Crusades before becoming Lawrence of Arabia, a crusader B rebours. He was taken to visit a castle. The mud of its walls had been mixed
with perfumed water. The centuries had gone by and still each room conserved its
own particular perfume. The castle, though bare, was a magnificent sight. But it
was built for the olfactory sense, not for the eyes. To move about in it was to venture
into a universe of fragrances, from the most intense to the most subtle, in an intoxicatingly elaborate blend. Through scents Lawrence experienced a true narrative.
He asked himself what the climax would be. In the last room he found the synthesis
of the entire journey. No perfumed essence had been used to mix the mud of these
walls. Here the essential stark aroma of a mineral world triumphed, with no trace of
human manipulation.
Do similar methods and stratagems exist that can be applied to the actor’s
technique and to dramaturgy?
Concrete and subtle questions
“I shall call you Eugenio, not Barba.” And she added: “I hate to pretend there is a
distance between us which does not exist”.
The interview started well, only to be precipitated into failure.
The questions of the interviewer who did not want to “pretend there was a
distance which did not exist” obliged me to start with complicate problems. Once
again I felt a bitter taste in my mouth as I attempted to recount the long journey that
a new production represents.
The journey metaphor should not be exaggerated. However long and
complicated it may be, a journey is undertaken within an objective geography that
is also recognisable for the listener. A journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for
example, can be recounted in a few minutes or it can take ten hours and yet each
of its multiple versions will be understandable. The unique experiences of the traveller can never be translated into words, but they can at least tell something that
everyone can relate back to their own personal knowledge. However when you are
speaking of the growth of a production, what then is the geography common both
to the listener as well as the person attempting to describe the “journey”?
The interviewer had often watched my work and we had discussed it at
length. She did not have the stranger’s naive curiosity, the usual lack of understanding or misinterpretation when questioning me about my theatre. As she so rightly
said, she could not ask the elementary questions for the simple reason that she already knew the answers. Yet I needed those questions in order to be able to explain
myself clearly. It is the “stranger” who obliges us to formulate that which seems
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obvious to us in our work, but which indicates useful and recognisable points of
reference for others.
She was interested in concrete and subtle problems. Consequently my answers were drowned in a sea of details to the point of absurdity.
- How is it that you only reveal the sense of your productions right at the
end? How come you ask yourself what they mean?
- Why do you repeatedly say that when you have finished work on a production, you discover that it corresponds to the colour, perfume or image from
which the work started out. Yet during the rehearsals you and your companions
have moved on a long way from there, losing sight of these? How come that, on this
point, your actors are almost always in agreement with you?
What hides behind the serendipity effect? You like to make much of this
when your spectators question you about the process that formed the sharpest and
most intense images in the performance.
Why do both you and your actors take such pleasure in disclosing the
banal and fortuitous anecdotes that lead you to those clusters of images which become saturated with meaning and enigmas for the spectator?
Why do you talk so much about your productions once they are finished,
and yet you never explain their meaning objectively? You only answer in the first
person. You say what you think, what you associate with one scene or another, as
though you were just another spectator and not the author who is supposed to have
the authority to define the significations and the implications of his work.
How come that, since Talabot, you find the title first and then the performance?
Why, in the cases of Talabot, Kaosmos, Mythos and Salt, were the words to be spoken by the actors chosen even before the true theme of the performance emerged?
I tried to find answers. These questions send me off on a somewhat dark
and confused path. The different elements and levels blend into one another. Rather
than lead the way along this path, I suffer under it. I have learnt to endure it and to
use to the full its unpredictable fertility. I know there is no other way. But I am unable to transform it into a method.
In this failed interview I heaped images, examples and episodes one on
top of another. The journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway mingled with the title of
a poem by Thomas Hardy which then led me on to a landscape filled with icebergs.
The confusion of topics which hampered the discussion and rendered it useless
corresponded to the experience that I was trying to describe. Rather than shedding
light on it, my prolific explanations only obscured it.
The interviewer and I both realised that whoever read the questions and
answers would only find a miscellany of images. They would have a sense of being
25
satiated without being nourished. So we agreed to drop the whole thing. I told her
I found this failure interesting and that I could use it as an example. She consented,
as long as I didn’t mention her name.
That long failed interview did not dampen our spirits. I don’t know what
she gained from it, that nice interviewer who did not want to ask me questions to
which she thought she knew the answers. For my part, it caused me to reflect on the
concept of “method” and what it is.
I have repeatedly said that I do not have a method. I no longer believe
this is true. Nor is it true, however, that I follow a method of working in the form
of conceptually definable procedures, a list of rules, precepts, norms or conventions. A method is something quite different: a collection of organic impulses that
have to be rediscovered - or reinvented – within us. Individual experiences and acquired knowledge constitute a shell within whose depths there exist lesions. These
“wounds” are part of the method.
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Does this mean that a method is absolutely personal and impossible to
pass on? This is not true either. It can be transmitted by means of that long route
consisting of contradictions and apparent betrayals that is a process of symbiosis. If
the method is passed on, it becomes unrecognisable. When it is recognisable, then
it is an illusion, a crutch or a parody.
Complexity is what remains
To what extent are complexity and confusion equivalent in practice? And when,
on the other hand, do they become a cross-roads which leads in one direction to a
confused mixture of unrealised potential and in the other to the possibility of an
encounter with the mysterious complexity of a living organism?
Disparate and heterogeneous material obstructs the theatre’s space and
my thoughts. In the midst of this I can only swim as in a dark underwater dream
illuminated by sudden flashes, or by invisible presences which brush against me,
filling me with disgust or fear. This is confusion. But it is also an intricate web of
potentiality.
In some cases I succeed in providing the actor with clear and shared guidelines. But more frequently we throw ourselves together into the abyss. We swim
each in our own direction under water, sending out signals. Whenever possible we
surface for air and, looking around, are under the impression we are alone. The
material grows like rushes of energy which our temperature fixes in small blocks
of ice in order to preserve and work on them. These we call “scores”. Some of them
contain a dream, a programme or an illusion. Each one of us sees how intentions
and possibilities that had emerged from the work are wrecked. Finally, a few of the
ice blocks collide and join together forming a solid mountain. This iceberg delineates a landscape which, only then, can be organised through the lucid and precise
technique of the architect.
Generally I have certain points of reference. These consist of questions I
wish to confront, or stories and books which interrogate me or present me with a
challenge since they remain in my mind without any apparent motive. There are
many of these. I know that at some point they will prove to be too many.
My companions and I are not accustomed to asking ourselves too many
questions or treating the points of departure as definitive. We know very well that
this cannot be so. We are used to using care and attention as though everything
was clear even though we know we are working in the dark. The material accumulates and becomes a collection of prospects, stories, actions, accessories, texts and
scores that are dear to us. The time comes when we realise we are navigating in the
superfluous.
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This is the moment to change course. What use is this great abundance?
Only to be discarded, pared down. It forms the mass on which the axe and the chisel
will work. Only then can we begin to sculpt time, space and the necessary relationships. There is much peeling away and cutting down to be done.
The complexity is what remains.
The time of the axe
Often, in the course of the work the scenic space becomes overburdened. Filled
with accessories, some humble, some precious. A professional love of props urges
us to dig them up from the theatre’s storeroom, from old family trunks, to pick them
up on our travels, put them to one side, discover how to adapt them to us and us to
them, to say “I want to work with this in the next production”.
Accessory is really the wrong word. They are partners. And they are not
mute and passive as may appear from the outside. When the moment for the axe
and the chisel arrives, separation from them can be hard.
The humus of the profession is made up of these loves and idiosyncrasies
which may seem infantile to the uninitiated observer on the outside. But without
them nothing can grow.
Especially in the productions involving only one or two actors, the scenic
space tends to be encumbered with objects-partners and to become overcrowded. It
is a form of compensation. This happened during the work on Salt, for example. At
a certain point the scenic space became suffocating. The two actors were like fish
swimming in an aquarium that was too small. The eyes were satiated, but the heart
and the mind received no nourishment. In such cases the axe must be particularly
merciless. Is it me wielding the axe, or the axe manoeuvering me? At times it is
disconcerting and painful because the director seems to be moved by a sort of cynical enthusiasm for slaughter.
Something similar happened with Mythos, a production that involved all
the Odin actors. In this case we fell in love with too many of the poet’s lines. We became aware of it when work on the production was finished. Thus many of Henrik
Norbrandt’s splendid images, many of our loves, were sacrificed. What is the use
of explaining this? It can’t be taught. It can’t be programmed. After years of experience I still live the “time of the axe” as a last resort, an angry reaction against the
impasse into which the work process has driven me. Talking about it only serves to
point out that this phase in the work will always arrive. It helps to be able to identify
the symptoms in order to renounce the abundance of possibilities and grasp the axe
and the chisel.
The important question, however, is another: why is the complexity that
which remains?
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The long road of accumulation and destruction
Among Thomas Hardy’s last poems there is one entitled Convergence of the Twain.
Literature is full of stories telling of the disastrous consequences of the encounter between a man and his double. Thomas Hardy’s poem does not deal with this
theme. For him the “two” are different and distant, meant never to meet. The subject of his poem is, in fact, the tragedy of the Titanic. It consists of eleven tercets
and begins as follows:
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
He describes how the sea works on the luxurious wreck of the transatlantic liner,
raising mute questions about the will that had built her to satisfy a desire for glory.
Then the poet turns his gaze in quite another direction. He sees at work, amid the
polar ice, what he calls the Imminent Will that stirs and urges everything. This Will
makes an iceberg grow in all humility while, at the same time, the transatlantic
liner is taking form amid the din of the shipyard. These two foreign bodies are then
viewed in the light of the future – a destiny that no one could ever have imagined.
No mortal eye could have foreseen how the two stories could merge so as to become twin halves of one August event. The last tercet reads:
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Thomas Hardy’s tercets demonstrate the quintessence of an important aspect of
creative work. It is not pure coincidence that ignites unexpected meanings, unintended connections and clusters of images that surface from time to time and question us on things about which we do not speak.
Therefore I know that I have to subject myself to the exhausting experience of waste by following the long path of accumulation and then destruction.
The short path, from planning to realisation, from the director’s intentions to their
implementation, can produce excellent results but it does not easily allow us suddenly to step into the torrid zone of that art of memory which is theatre.
Fortuitousness, especially if we denote it by such an exotic and learned name as
serendipity, evokes the impression of luck. We talk of being smiled upon by fortune. But it is not a smile. It is salt. The stinging feeling tells us of the existence of
a hidden wound.
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Thomas Hardy’s poem about the unforeseeable collision between the iceberg and the gigantic liner built to cross oceans like an unsinkable city, comes from
a collection of poems published in 1914 which the poet named Satires of Circumstance.
In the artist’s work, a particular aspect of our creativity consists in generating circumstances in which “two”, who do not appear to be destined to meet,
collide. We must be capable of creating conditions in which the actions’ trajectories
come into contact with each other in such a way that they make a mockery of our
rigid way of thinking and feeling.
This derision does not merely arouse laughter. In the torrid zone pain is
mixed together with laughter. A mocking attitude destroys the reassuring distinctions and the distance which anaesthetise our wounds. Extremes cling to one another, obliging us to stare, wide-eyed, while at the same time we want to look away.
When work in the theatre presents us with moments like these, it is as
though it was saying “Now!” As they clash, the actions suddenly acquire an unimaginable force, welding together two hemispheres which were never intended to
meet. They explode, but as energy in our senses.
Love Stories
Instead of speaking of theatre using the image of a journey, for once I shall use
journey as a metaphor for theatre.
I had always dreamed of travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1982
I succeeded. It was in second class since foreigners were forbidden access to the
third class. The frontiers of the Soviet Empire were still zones that were difficult to
cross.
I remember the litany of the stations: Moscow, Iaroslavl, Danilov, Buy,
Poloma, Sharya, Kotelnich, Kirov, Balesino, Perm, Shalya, Sverdlovsk (where the
Urals begin and Europe ends, according to General De Gaulle’s political geography), Kamishlov, Tjumen, Ishim, Nazivayeskaya, Omsk, Barabinsk, Novosibirsk,
Taiga, Marinsk, Bogotol, Achinsk, Krasnojarsk, Uyar, Savjernaja, Kainsk-Jenissieiskj, Ilanskaya, Resheti, Gaishet, Inzhneudinsk, Tulun, Zima, Cheremkovo,
Angarsk, Irkutsk, Sliudyanka, Misovaya, Selenga, Ulán Udé (capital of Soviet
Mongolia), Pietrovski Zavod, Kilok, Mogsoi, Iablonovaya, Lesnoi, Chita, Darasun,
Karimskaya, Prinskovaya, Chernishevsk Zavod, Silovo, Ksenevskaya, Mogocha,
Amasar, Erofiei Pavlovich, Urusha, Taktamigda, Skorovodino, Bolshoi Never,
Taldan, Madgagachi, Tigda, Ushumun, Shimanovskaya, Bielogorsk, Zavitaya,
Bureya, Arkara, Kundur, Obluche, Isviestkovaya, Bira, Birobidzhan (the territory
chosen by Stalin as a state for the Jews and many of them were deported there), In
and Khabarovsk, capital of Soviet Central Asia. Here we foreigners were made to
30
descend and get on a special train to Nagodkha from where we proceeded by sea to
Japan. The Trans-Siberian continued as far as Vladivostock, almost a day’s journey
away, a military port which was closed to all but Soviet citizens.
I only have to repeat this list of names for images and episodes from the
“humid zone” of memory to spring to mind.
The guard at the Soviet frontier: a young woman with an impenetrable expression and long hair hidden beneath a military cap. Out of my bag she pulled the
pears, picked from the tree in my garden at home and carefully wrapped in paper by
my wife, Judy, so that they would keep for a long time and accompany me on my
journey. She took a knife from its sheath and cut them in half one by one, searching
for hidden forbidden substances. Then she applied herself to the books she found
in my baggage. She made out the title of one of them: The Brothers Karamazov by
Dostoyevski. She stopped rummaging and her expression melted, as though I were
a friend with whom she did not have the time to converse.
Golden birch trees like ikons.
The gentle grandmother from Achinsk who had crossed the whole of Russia to visit her grandchildren in Odessa, and the tubercular balalaika player from
the Irkutsk Symphony Orchestra who was returning from a state sanatorium in
Crimea.
Fjodor Pavlovich, a fastidious and bony old man who did nothing but eat.
He made fun of me every time they came round with free tea because I didn’t buy
the lumps of sugar. He blankly refused my explanation that I never used it. As the
days went by he became an odious presence. Finally we arrived at the station where
he was to get off. We were all asleep in our bunks. As he was about to leave, he
tugged at me so that I awoke and pressed my hand as if to scratch it. The train left.
I felt something between my fingers: a few roubles so that I too could pay for sugar
for my tea.
That little temporary community in a Trans-Siberian railway carriage became a fragment of oral underground history. My travelling companions exchanged
information linked to the geography of the land we were crossing and denied to
them by the political powers that be. One taciturn passenger tells that here, in Ussurskaja, there are big goldmines where he worked for fifteen years as a deportee.
The nurse from Vladivostok points out the factory in which a strike broke out, only
to be quelled within a few days. The train driver from Bielogorsk asks repeatedly
to see my passport. He scrutinises it, weighs it in his hand, refuses to believe that it
belongs to me personally and that I can use it at will. Nor does he believe me when
I tell him that Denmark has a queen as its head of state. Nowadays queens only exist
in fairy tales.
A pair of shy young newly-weds on their honeymoon board the train. The
31
groom’s mother accompanies them. Him, her and his mother – a typical farce situation. The bride feels hot. Standing, barely touching each other according to the
rhythm of the train, the husband slowly removes her jumper. A sensual caress that
transcends all modesty.
Not all of these images are confined to the past. This evening I shall go
and see Mythos, our production which has been playing since April 1998. Up until
the summer of 2002 it has been performed almost two hundred times. I have been
present as a spectator at two thirds of those performances. This evening I shall once
again see the mountain of severed hands – hands carved in wood that look like
bones or stones which, at a certain point, invade the space of the performance like
pebbles on a beach or flotsam of history.
These severed hands derive from the Trans-Siberian.
Mikail Chusid was an artist in a marionette theatre. We had met at a
friend’s house in Moscow. He wanted to continue our conversation, but the next
morning I had to leave on the Trans-Siberian. There was no time.
The train had barely left when Mikail appeared in my carriage. He accompanied me for three days as far as Sverdlovsk. It was the easiest way, he said, to take
the “liberty” of talking together. Mikail had with him a pair of small wooden hands
for a new puppet he was carving. He gave them to me. We said our goodbyes with
the intention of meeting again.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Mikail Chusid and his family emigrated
to the United States. There, at a theatre congress, we met fleetingly. Once more we
promised to correspond, to meet again to talk about the things that preoccupied us
and were closest to our hearts, apart from theatre. We heard nothing more of each
other.
But his hands continue to live and to speak in Odin Teatret’s performances.
They were symbols of the abuse of power in The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus,
the innocuous and infantile extension that concealed the claws of tyranny. They
proliferate in Mythos as severed hands that materialise the horror from which the
spirit of the time attempts to avert its gaze, worn out by an anxiety to change the
world.
Memories of the Trans-Siberian do not end here. There is one which makes
me stare in astonishment. And I still feel that weight in my stomach urging me to
look away. Yet another love story.
The freckled girl in our carriage boarded the train at Darasun and is going to Birobidzhan. She is patient because she knows that three days must go by
before she will meet her fiancé. She talks of this discreetly, with a shy smile and
gleaming eyes. There are still about a hundred kilometres to go before our arrival
and she calmly begins to pack her suitcase with the things she has used during the
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33
journey. The landscape the train passes through is nothing but snow. “When we
reach Birobidshan it will be pitch dark already – she says – but they are coming to
fetch me.” Behind this impersonal form of speech is him, her beloved. For a long
time she stands waiting close to the carriage door. When the train stops, I can’t
help following her with my gaze. There he is in the frosty air, white with mist. He
is enveloped in a large fur coat with a fur hat – a huge motionless bear. She rushes
into his arms.
Through the white veil of icy vapour shrouding the station I watch the
bear’s tenderness and the patient girl’s embrace explode with passion. In the exaltation of the moment, her hand knocks his hat to the ground and out of the voluminous fur coat emerges a smooth bald head. Its nudity contradicts the cold and
insults the surrounding world with the obscenity of a huge phallus exposed to the
night.
A shadow in the meantime
How does one work on a love story, the most hackneyed and common theme in
theatre? At the moment I am finishing work on Salt, a performance with only two
actors, Roberta Carreri and Jan Ferslev. It is a love story framed in a journey and
a memory.
The route we have just concluded has passed through many and different
temperatures. It has suffered earthquakes, and it has endured sufficient clashes to
give me hope that it has acquired an autonomous voice, mocking and revealing for
me, its first spectator.
I sense the presence of this voice and yet I don’t know how to interpret it.
There is no doubt that Salt is a love story, but without the slightest hint of obscenity.
Not all torrid zones are alike. It is a love relived by a woman through the memory
of real and imaginary journeys. The real journey is the most illusory because she
believes she has found traces of a man who has disappeared but who in reality
has carefully erased his tracks. We have taken the story for the performance from
a novel made up of letters – It’s getting ever later – by the Italian author Antonio
Tabucchi.
When I watch Salt I realise that alongside its narrative dramaturgy and
literal meaning a whole new life has grown up.
A curtain opens. Although the text hints at a Mediterranean world with its
sea and its light, we find ourselves facing a room immersed in darkness. On one
side there is a white mound. Is it sand? Snow? It is salt. Perhaps it is a grave.
A shaft of sunlight pierces the darkness illuminating a lone woman. Are
we on a Greek island, or perhaps inside a balagan, a travelling theatre’s tent at a
fair?
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The man who opened the curtain sits down and starts to play. He accompanies the woman who is searching for her lover. Or is he ignoring her and simply
playing for himself? Who is he? This question – that I wanted to remain unanswered – has guided me throughout the work.
Is he the man for whom the woman is searching? His ghost that attracts
her? Or is he the owner of the tent? And the woman, who is she? A fairground attraction, a monster who exhibits her guts, her inner self? Or is she a ghost beside
her tomb like in Japanese Nô theatre in which possessed and delirious women
return to find peace?
My eyes which are concentrated on the story of Salt suddenly see a shadow detach itself. It is a parallel drama in a tent in which the story of a woman who
is hopelessly in love all her life is performed. A woman of today, wise, cultivated,
tender, domineering, but driven by the winds of a passion that life is unable to
tame.
Perhaps the director of the balagan is a profiteer who exploits the dead to
entertain the living.
The torrid zone of the memory that is theatre is starting to show me a
hump.
Those who in the past condemned theatre from their pulpits often said
that the word obscene contained the word scene. They declared that obscenity was
inherent in the actions of men or women who exhibit themselves.
Today the pulpits are silent. The shadow remains. It wavers on the threshold of the torrid zone, animated by the impulses of a memory and with the burning
precision of a wound.
Translation: Judy Barba
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