The Fiction of Duality

Abstract

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret, and more recently with the International School of Theatre Anthropology, has always been substantiated by a body of developed critical theory, and in NTQ he has specifically developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual. In NTQ1 (1985), he outlined the problems involved in analyzing theatre-works rooted in performance rather than the written word; in NTQ4 (1985) he discussed his concept of the ‘dilated body’, through which the performed taps the wellsprings of art and experience; and in NTQ16 (1988), he expanded his idea of the ‘body-in-life’, describing the balance of energies which is essential for the actor to be fully realized. Here, he looks at the way in which the body is falsely perceived as the ‘actor's instrument’, as somehow separate from himself, and discusses the processes of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ – which give the actor a true ‘second-nature’, and distinguish his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’.