The Book of Dances
There is no story, but there are
many characters: dwarfs, warriors, tall ladies on stilts, a dancing
town crier who is taken prisoner. The performance is born out of
the individual training of the actors, transformed through
costumes, masks, music, banners and songs, and fixed in precise
scores of actions, reactions and relationships. Rudimentary music:
drums and a xylophone made out of bottles filled with differing
amounts of water.
For the final scene, Eugenio Barba
and Torgeir Wethal worked on the acrobatic exercises in the
training to reach a crescendo of solitary aggressivity. A dance of
leaps and falls which apparently leaves the actor exhausted. The
music becomes more impelling and the actor begins again. This
grotesque acrobatic number is transformed into the final act of a
bullfight, a killing, a cockfight. With ferocious spectacularity
the actor flies through the air once more, falls, loses his mask,
hides his face, flies into the air yet again and crashes to the
ground on his back after a final somersault.
One of the paradoxes of the actor
is that his "violence" is also his "vulnerability". Dance as
virtuosity and virtue; vitality, colour, vehemence; soliloquy: "I'm
afraid/ The earth is grey/ And the sky's sadness gapes open/ Like
the mouth of a skull.
Created in a courtyard in Carpignano, in southern Italy, during
the summer of 1974 when the Odin has completed its first ten years
of life and radically changes direction.
Sometimes performed indoors but more often in the open air, in
theatres and in squares; in the centres of big cities and in their
suburbs; in psychiatric hospitals and prisons; at home (in
Holstebro) and - its antipode - in Venezuelan Amazonia, in a
shabono belonging to the Yanomami tribe of Karohi with whom the
French anthropologist, Jacques Lizot, was living when he helped the
Odin to penetrate into the "heart of darkness". It was with this
performance that the Odin carried out all of its first theatre
barters.
Actors
Roberta Carreri, Tom Fjordefalk, Tage Larsen, Else Marie
Laukvik, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Torgeir Wethal.
(During the first few months Elsa Kvamme and Odd Strøm were also
in the performance.)
Eugenio Barba's mise-en-scène consisted of a montage of
numbers.
Number of spectators per performance: No
limit
350 performances from July 1974 to January
1980
On Tour
Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy,
Japan, Norway, Peru, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, Wales,
Yugoslavia