Self-penetration. Eugenio Barba / Odin Teatret

Co-produced with the Polo Biblio-Museale di Puglia, this exhibition is about the playwright and theatre scholar Eugenio Barba (Brindisi, Italy, 1936) and his Norwegian-Danish company Odin Teatret, founded in 1964. It represents the first national and international museum presentation of this key experience for understanding the relations, tensions and borrowings that occurred between the theatre scenes of Latin America, Europe and North America at the end of the Cold War. 

Besides setting up Odin Teatret, and later in 1979 the ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology), Barba’s emblematic text ‘Third Theatre’ (1977)―which is opposed to the first, institutional, and the second, exploratory―drew attention to a multiplicity of groups that operated in the 1970s far from the capitals on the fringes of academia and avant-gardism. These groups defended old traditions of collective creation and the non-hierarchical division of labour. 

Although the company is still active, the exhibition follows its activity between 1971 and 1979, eight years in which Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret supported, though not without controversy, dissident forms that began with training and self-demand and ended with taking to the streets in any place throughout the world.

Curator: Roger Bernat