The Dilated Body: on the Energies of Acting

Abstract

All too many teachers and theorists treat acting as if it were a sort of puzzle to be solved, a role as a sort of summit to be conquered. Eugenio Barba sees it rather as a process, involving the use of trained energies which often work intuitively, even contradictorily, in search of new relationships between actions and ideas. Using examples as diverse as the legend of the Flying Dutchman and his own company's work on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Barba explores the way in which the mutation of a narrative line can interweave with the presence of the actor to create that ‘sudden dilation of the senses’ which he sees as the essence of the theatrical experience. Eugenio Barba has just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his formation of Odin Teatret, now based in Holstebro, and is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.