Sara Regina Fonseca

ANTHROPOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE:

DEFEATING A COMMON ENEMY

INTRODUCTION

1.1. Motivation
When I moved from Colombia to Sweden, I became more aware
of the postmodern phenomenon by which a great number of cultural
products from non-Western cultures were accessible for appropriation and
use by Western artists and art consumers. This understanding was
shocking because I felt that the velocity, facility and superficiality with
which these cultural forms were used caused a weird effect: traditional
meanings grounded in organic and long processes were of no interest, and
that which was a symbol of spirituality or sorrow for many people at one
end of the world, could rapidly become a toy for entertainment or a simple
decorative object to be consumed at the other end of the world. At the
midst of this judgmental attitude I had a further revelation: Artists who are
little less than idols for me were using ‘exotic’i performance forms in their
work! Furthermore, I was myself performing intercultural representation in
my own dance pieces, without questioning the ethics of my process! These
revelations have been the strongest motivations for writing this paper all
the way through.

1.2. Argumentation and Purpose

Regardless of their purposes, intercultural performance and
cultural anthropology have a common ground in their procedure: they
study and represent a defined ‘other’ii. This procedure gives both
disciplines the power to construct a view of ‘the other’ in ways that run the
risk of enhancing colonialist attitudes. Thus, I would like to argue that
cultural anthropology and intercultural performance share a common
enemy, whose invisibility and pervasiveness makes it hard to defeat. This

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enemy is colonialism, and it is manifested in different kinds of

ethnocentrisms and exploitations that provoke the arousal of ethical
discussions about issues like the exotization of non-Western cultures or the
advantaged position of Western academics and artists over the ‘native
others’. As it usually happens with ethics, a discussion about the fairness of
intercultural representation in anthropology and performance is hardly a
straight forwards one. However, I believe that the input of postcolonialismiii
in the theory and practice of anthropology from the 1960’s onwards, shows
us that a constant auto-criticism is not only relevant but also fruitful in the
fight against colonialism. Indeed, postcolonialism has not only been
influential in anthropology but also in performance, to the point that there
have emerged genres such as ‘postcolonial performance’iv. Besides the
political agenda of postcolonial criticism, other humanistic and aesthetic
concerns have led to significant interdisciplinary exchanges between
anthropology and performance studies, giving birth to hybrid areas of
study such as ‘theatre anthropology’v. It is my purpose here to contribute
to such exchanges, thereby presenting and discussing arguments which
are directly concerned with the ethics of intercultural representation in
theatrical performance.

1.3. Methodology and Disposition

In general, my methodology will consist in using existing

literature on anthropology and colonialism in order to clarify concepts and
identify issues that can be relevant for a discussion about ethics of
intercultural performance. My starting point is the argument that the
process of representation implicit in cultural anthropology and intercultural
performance can enhance colonialist attitudes and prejudices. For this
same reason, the argument goes that these two disciplines can share
strategies in order to defeat the colonialist attitudes that pervade them.
After comparing and exchanging postcolonial criticisms to anthropology
with postcolonial criticisms to the work of distinguished artists, I will test

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the usefulness of this comparison thereby using the questions discussed in

order challenge the creating process of a specific dance work.

Thus, the disposition of this essay will look like this: In the following
chapter ‘Making Connections’, I will present a theoretical and historical
framework in order to introduce notions of anthropology, universalism,
race, culture and colonialism, among others. In the same chapter, I will try
to establish possible relationships between anthropology, colonialism and
art, providing grounds for further discussions about the ethics of
intercultural representation. In the third chapter ‘The Ethics of
Representation in the Work of Eugenio Barba and the Odin’, I will focus on
the work of Eugenio Barba, first discussing concepts like historicity,
language and meaning, and then looking closer to activities organized by
the Odin like the ISTA, the barters and the festuges. Finally, I will use the
production of The Million in order to provide a postcolonial criticism of it.
The last chapter ‘Defeating Colonialism: Cumbia-Kumbé, is a personal
account of the creative process of a dance work, in which the ethics of
interculturalism have been a main concern. In this chapter, I hope to
visualize ways of applying the discussions developed along the paper to
the actual making of a dance work.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Anthropology, Colonialism and Art

The institutionalization of modern anthropology in Europe is
often claimed to date back to the 17th and 18th centuries, the European
age of the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern sciences. During
this time, European thinkers developed the principles of Rationalism,
defending the individual’s right and capacity to self-governance and ethic
judgment. In this vein, Immanuel Kant wrote his Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View, advocating for an anthropology which aimed at knowing:

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what ‘man, as a free agent makes, or can, or should make of himself…

knowledge of man as a citizen of the world.vi

Kant’s view of anthropology and his sympathy with the

Enlightenment ideas are often seen in relation to the concept of
‘cosmopolitan’, and the belief in the search for international agreements
which secure justice, freedom and peace for mankind. However, the very
assumption of the existence of universal principles has been and is the
centre of diverse criticisms that question the evolutionist ideas implicit in
such an assumption. In his discussion about universalism and
evolutionism, scholar Adam T. Smith describes evolutionism as:

A prospect on human history that visualizes an overall shape to social human

development, a progress towards increasing complexity that can be explained in
reference to a set of rational determinants.vii

Further in his discussion, Smith explains the problem of the universalist-

evolutionist perspectives inherited from the Enlightenment, claiming that:

Paradoxically, the hope for human freedom (within an evolutionist framework) rests on
enslavement to an overriding metahistoryviii.

In the context of evolutionism, a ‘meta-historical’ polarization

of the ‘primitive’ versus the ‘civilized’ appears, putting the ‘primitive’ non-
Western societies at the beginning of the developmental line, and the
‘civilized’ Western societies at the end of it. Hence, it is often claimed that
the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment served and still serve as a
justification for European colonization and for imperialism in general,
thereby assigning Westerners the mission to civilize the rest of the world.
It is significant that notwithstanding the strong influence of the
Enlightenment premises about freedom and justice in Europe, Spain had
achieved its greatest colonial expansion in America by the 18th century, and
Britain and France had respectively colonized India and most of Africa by
the 19th century. Needless to say, colonial expansion meant natural,
human and cultural exploitation in the form of military invasion,
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ideological imposition and slavery, among others. In his historical

perspective of the Enlightenment, Joan Vincent argues that:

The almost excessive ideological emphasis that Enlightenment scholars placed on reason
in the global affairs of human kind alert us to the problematic political and economical
conditions around them that appeared to rest on neither reason nor recognition of the
unity of mankind. Among them were slavery and the slave trade, wars of religion between
European nations, and struggles between them for territorial possessions in the Americas
and the Orient, an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor in the civilized
Western European world, and an even wider gap between the civilizations of the Western
Atlantic nation states and the savagery and barbarism of those its citizens encountered in
the world beyond their shoresix.

The complex relationship between the Enlightenment and

colonialism can be said to have constituted a dynamic force in numerous
and nuanced discussions that remain alive in contemporary cultural
studies. One of the important results of past critical revisions of the
Enlightenment thought is the broadly accepted use of the concept of
‘culture’, which was put at the centre of discussion by Kant’s disciple
Johann Gottfried Herder, among others. ‘Culture’, as we know, is still a
central concept in anthropology, history, sociology and most of human
sciences nowadays. Thus, instead of advocating for universalist ideas that
might justify the violent imposition of Europe over the rest of the world,
the concept of ‘culture’ gives recognition to the diversity of paths taken by
different groups of people according to their particular views of the world.
This premise sets the basis for pluralistic understandings of human kind
and for more contemporary concepts such as ‘multiculturalism’. However,
other scholars believe that the cultural relativism flagged by Herder and
later by Franz Boas in the 19th century maintains the evolutionist
perspective which these pioneers claimed to criticize. As Dell Hymes put it:

But Boas and the Boasians remained evolutionists in the typological sense.
The Boas who wrote The Mind of Primitive Man to demonstrate the potential equality of
all mankind still retained a clear conception of “primitive” vs. “civilized”…When Leslie
White and others pointed out the obvious and inescapable after the World War II, there
was a collapse within a position of science. Now almost everyone could be a cultural
evolutionist again.x

Indeed, a simplistic identification of the Enlightenment with the

evilness of colonialism has been problematized, among others, by means
of theoretical challenges to the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘identity’. During
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his life-long commitment to postcolonial activism, Edward Said denounced

the danger of fixing identities, and declared a need to abolish the
separation between West and East in political and cultural termsxi.
Similarly, contemporary anthropologists like Keith Hart propose a return to
Kantian ideas about cosmopolitanism as a way towards a ‘socially
engaged anthropology in the 21st century’.xii As we have seen, the
movements of thought that fed the development of Anthropology during
the Enlightenment are diverse and complex in their relationships.
However, we could say that, in general, discussions about the
commonalities and differences between peoples, the capacity of every
human being to discern what is good and bad and the right of certain
cultures to scrutinize, judge and control other cultures have long been at
the centre of anthropological enquiry.

Let us now try to put art within this puzzle, going back to one
of the main features of Europe during the 19th century: the development
of Romanticism. Often explained as a reaction against the prevailing
supremacy of reason and the consequences of industrialization in Europe,
the Romantic Movement encouraged artists and intellectuals to turn their
attention towards remote societies with pre-industrial values. These
societies were seen as being positively contrasting to civilization in their
embodiment of the instinctive, the organic, the magic, the sensuous, and
of other aspects which were oppressed and therefore desired at home.
The Romantics, one could say, were inspired by a desire for what Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s called the noble savagexiii; a desire which was in tune
with their opposition to the ideological basis underlying the enterprises of
the Enlightenment, including the industrialization and colonization of
societies. Ironically, it was the industrial development which made it
physically possible for several Europeans to travel abroad to colonies or
ex-colonies in order to get new inspiration for their intellectual and artistic
work. It was in the 19th century that French artist Paul Gauguin lived in
Thaiti –by then a ‘protectorate’ of France- and developed his primitivist
style, which would continue to influence artists of the 20th century and
even artists of today. Similarly, some Romantic ballets of the 19th century
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are good illustrations of the exoticxiv fantasies prevailing at the time. Their
exoticism is manifested, for example, in the evocation of next door
‘others’, as in the Scottish context of La Sylphidexv, or in Fanny Elssler’s
personification of a Spanish-Moorish woman in La Cachuchaxvi.

Indeed, there exists a substantial work of critical analysis which

relates the vision of Romantic art to exoticism and imperialistic mentality.
One of the most influential criticisms in this direction is the work of Said in
Orientalism (1978) and later in Culture and Imperialism (1993). Followed
and furthered by a great number of scholars, Said’s criticism has also been
attenuated by scholars like Mohammed Sharafuddin, who considers that
reducing Romantic art to its relation to colonialism is an error:

Beckford, Byron, Conrad and Kipling, among others, were products of their imperial
culture…but if we judge them to be no more than that, then we have condemned a
segment of society as a bunch of authors who were misguided by their ambitions and
imperial conspiracies. This accusation, attractive as it is to modern audiences concerned
mainly with change and radical opposition, is not only faulty, but also misleading, as it
obliterates certain important aspects of authors who would otherwise be viewed as rebels
against their age’s prejudices and blindness to other cultures.xvii

Not exclusive of the 19th century, exotic fantasies are central

themes in the dance history canon of the 20th century, which provides
several cases of cultural representation of distant ‘others’. Minding the
differences between their works, the orientalist styles –as understood in
Said’s orientalism- of Vaslav Nijinsky and Ruth Saint-Denis are two
common examples of this kind of intercultural representation during the
20th centuryxviii.

Being aware of the great complexity which underlines the

diverse relationships between anthropology, colonization and art; I will
now dare to choose a position that will hopefully serve as point of
departure for further discussion. In their ideological rejection to the values
inherited from the Enlightenment –like the objectivism of sciences and the
industrialization of societies-, Romantic artists turned their attention to
people, countries or cultures which they could have never thought of
without the advancements of colonialism, industrialization and modern
sciences. Furthermore, the Romantic disgust for reason and the desire of

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the ‘noble savage’ might have implied a support to colonialist attitudes

which strived to maintain the opposition between the ‘civilized’ and ‘the
primitive’; an opposition without which artists would have run out of their
‘virgin’ sources of inspiration. My immediate reflection is: Should not
intercultural artists –the Romantic, the Modern and the Postmodern- ask
themselves why they have had the privilege of going to other countries to
find ‘inspiration’, or why they have had the possibility of observing remote
cultures in their hometowns? Pablo Picasso did a great deal of his
observations of ‘African Art’ at ethnographic museums in Paris at the time
in which the French empire was expanding into Africa. Similarly,
contemporary performers make great use of ‘world music’ found at local
libraries and of ‘ethnic’ dances taught at local dance schools xix, out of their
fascination for non-Western, undeveloped countries. Now, once a historical
awareness of colonialism is acquired, what are artists supposed to do in
order to be ethical? And when are they entitled to represent ‘others’?

I will come back to these questions later on. Meanwhile, I would

like to suggest that the relationship between intercultural art and
colonialism is comparable to the relationship between anthropology and
colonialism. About the latter, Talal Asads states that:

The knowledge they produced –anthropologists- was often too esoteric for government
use, and even where it was usable it was marginal in comparison to the vast body of
information routinely accumulated by merchants, missionaries, and administrators. But if
the role of anthropology for colonialism was relatively unimportant, the reverse
proposition does not hold...It is not merely that anthropological fieldwork was facilitated
by European colonial power...it is that the fact of European power, as discourse and
practice, was always part of the reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the
way they sought to understand it. xx

Similarly, we could claim that intercultural artists create art

based on their fantasies about an ‘other’ which has been determined
within colonial and imperial systems. Furthermore, we could claim that
intercultural artists, like colonialists and anthropologists, need an ‘other’
which in a Western context is often imagined as being mystical, eternal,
mysterious, savage, spontaneous, instinctive and essentially non-modern.
Thus, whilst colonialism exploits natural and human resources by means of
militarism and slavery, anthropology and intercultural art might run the
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risk of perpetuating cultural exploitation by means of ethnocentric

‘representation’. As Michael Foucault and later Edward Said have warned
us, language and representation are far from being innocent, objective or
passive. In this sense, we could say that performance and ethnography
work as specific constructions of reality which might be appreciative or
deplorative about the represented ‘other’.

Given this similarity, I would like to argued that anthropology

and intercultural performance can exchange and share strategies to fight
the common enemy of colonialism. On the one hand, intercultural artists
can learn from anthropologists and other social scientists that arts are part
of socio-political contexts and historical power relationships, regardless of
the personal wishes and intentions of individual artists. On the other hand,
anthropologists can learn from artists that the objective language of
sciences might be incomplete and even fallacious, so that biased views are
erroneously understood as universal truths. Indeed, anthropology has gone
through more or less radical auto-critical revisions along its history,
providing different kinds of strategies in order to counter-act the privilege
of Western researchers over non-Western people who serve as subjects of
study. These strategies include for example cultural relativism –which
restricts the judgmental power of Western researchers-, reflexive
ethnography –which recognizes and visualizes the subjective position of
the researcher-, multi-textual ethnography- which includes various and
even contradictive voices- and advocative anthropology- in which
researchers take a position and participate actively in the improvement of
the society he or she is studying. As far as I have understood it,
anthropologists have been much more concerned about fighting
colonialism than intercultural artists have. It is precisely for this reason
that I find it important for intercultural artists to make connections like the
ones I have tried to make above.

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From Race to Cultures of Choice

The only affinity connecting Theatre Anthropology to the methods and fields of study of
cultural anthropology is the awareness that what belongs to our tradition and appears
obvious to us can instead reveal itself to be a knot of unexplored problems. This implies a
displacement, a journey, a détour strategy which makes is possible for us to single out
that which is ‘our’ through confrontation with what we experience as ‘other’.xxi

The anthropological endeavor of studying ‘the human being’ can

be said to imply a comparative approach which requires the determination
of an ‘other’ that is somehow contrasting to ‘us’. Even the more complex
and politically aware anthropology of the last five decades needs an ‘other’
which can be encountered, exchanged with, identified with, questioned,
etc. That which has changed significantly through the history of
anthropology is the conditions under which the ‘other’ is determined, and
with this, a reconsideration of the power structures which frame this
discipline.

Thus, the concept of ‘race’, which was accepted in the 19th

century as a biological determination and as basic criteria for hierarchical
differentiation between human beings, was questioned and nearly
abolished in Europe during the 20th century. The consequences of fascism
and Nazism showed that ‘race’ as a concept was not only scientifically
dubious but also disastrous at a human level. After the second War World,
scholars with universalist views claimed that all human beings belonged to
one spicy, promoting fraternity among peoples from different nations and
cultures. As it had happened earlier with Kant’s cosmopolitan ideas, this
well-intended universalism was questioned for supporting Euro-centrist
ideas in the name of universal values. A renewed interest for the
recognition of diversity aroused, but the concept of diversity based on
‘race’ was and continues to be strongly questioned. There is not, one had
learnt, biological determinations of human superiority or inferiority. Based
on this new understanding, new cultural theorists claimed that the role and
value of human beings were concepts constructed within certain social
structures and power relationships. This claim has an important

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implication; namely, that social roles and hierarchies can be modified by

means of political agency. In this context, ‘the others’ are different from
‘us’, not because they are born different, but because they belong to
‘different cultures’.

Replacing the more segregating and negatively charged

concept of ‘race’ for the concept of ‘culture’ usually implies a celebration
of diversity, ideally in equal terms. As Western powers like Great Britain
and U.S.A. are populated by non-European ethnicities- like descendants
from African slaves- and by people coming from different countries –often
ex-colonies-; policies are adapted in order to handle ‘plurality’ and the idea
of ‘diversity in unity’. At this point, when ‘the other’ is at home, the
operation of ‘multiculturality’ consists in encouraging the harmonic
cohabitation of different and well-defined cultures within the boundaries of
the nation state. Arguably, diversity is controlled by clear classifications,
where the other non-white can be defined and predictable. The problem
that many critical theorists have identified here is that the non-Western
cultures –read as non-white European- are usually stereotyped and fixed
into the old models of the primitive and the exotic. Sadly enough, these
stereotypes are easily materialized in the so-called ‘ethnic’ music and
dance that many artists make use of. At a higher or lesser degree, the
multicultural world expects from a Brazilian to dance samba and from an
Argentinian to dance tango. Rustom Bharucha points out this problem
saying that: ‘Be othered or perish’ would seem to be the sine qua non of
multicultural survival’xxii. Hence, several scholars argue that the biological
determination underlying the concept of race runs the risk of being
replaced by a socio-cultural determination which underlines the concept of
multiculturalism.xxiii

Cultural theorists like Richard Schechner and David A. Hollinger

have reacted against this problem proposing models like ‘interculturalism’
and ‘post-ethnicity’. These models share the basic idea of ‘cultures of
choice’ or ‘cultural affiliations’xxiv. In these models, cultural diversity is
celebrated, but cultures are not biologically or historically determined, nor

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are they as strictly defined as in the multicultural model. Instead, this

model claims that people should choose which culture they want to belong
to. The flexibility allowed in these models encourages cultural exchange
and fluidity, where ‘hybrids’- people with various cultural backgrounds or
affiliations- have a place. However, the challenges of interculturalism and
post-ethnicity are not completely denied by their authors and other writers.
Regarding the cultural hierarchies which still exist in America, Hollinger
points out that:

A time when all Americans are equally free to exercise their ethnic option is
the ideal of post-ethnicity. xxv

Similarly, a profound criticism of Schechner’s concept of ‘cultures of

choice’ is well articulated by more radical writers like Bharucha:

I would contend that it is harder for artists and cultural workers of the Third
World to work against the strictures of ‘cultural insiderism’ for the simple reason that
there are fewer opportunities for employment outside the ethnic stereotypes.xxvi

Another problem identified by Bharucha and other writers as

Bonnie Marranca, Gautam Dasgupta and Schechner himself, is related to
the descontextualization, transportation and appropriation of cultural
meanings in a society that promotes intercultural fluidity. I will dedicate
the next sections to this issue.

THE ETHICS OF INTERCULTURAL REPRESENTATION IN

THE WORK OF EUGENIO BARBA AND THE ODIN
THEATRE

3.1. Interculturalism and Historicity

One of the most common criticisms to intercultural practice is
the tendency to underestimate historical and cultural specificity. This, of
course, implies ignoring specific socio-political conditions which have made
the emergence of certain performance forms possible, as well as ignoring
the constant transformation of these forms and the significance that they
have for the people who practice them. This criticism is more or less fair in
different cases. I will not talk about commercial exotizations of non-
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Western cultures where this criticism suits well quite obviously. Instead, I
will take the example of the rigorous and internationally recognized work
of Eugenio Barba and the Odin Theatrexxvii.

In 1979, Eugenio Barba created the International School of

Theatre Anthropology ISTA, with the aim of studying principles underlying
the art of performance at a level that he calls ‘pre-expressive’. This is a
level which lies before language and meaning; namely, a pre-cultural level.
According to Barba, ‘good’ performances follow some basic and universal
principles which render the performers alive on stage. This applies
regardless of socio-cultural contexts and regardless of what these good
performances might mean to express. Given his great interest in the
‘secret Art of the performer’xxviii, Barba’s research is aimed at identifying
some ‘good pieces of advice’xxix thereby observing the work of the Odin
and of various actors the around the world, most notably Asian performers
trained in forms like Kathakhali, Nõ and Odissi. Judging by Barba’s
postulations and ways of working, one could say that the director believes
theatre to be an alternative reality where one can create the world anew,
with its own ‘universal’ laws of behavior and human relationships. Barba’s
description of concepts like ‘Third Theatre’ or ‘Floating Islands’ remind us
of Hollinger’s model of cultural affiliation. This time, an affiliation across
geographical boundaries and historical epochs as defined in socio-political
terms; an affiliation to the culture of theatre:

There are people who live in a nation, in a culture. And there are people who
lie in their own bodies. They are the travelers who cross…a space and time which have
nothing to do with the landscapes and the season of the place they happen to be
travelling through. One can stay in the same place for months and years and still be a
“traveler”…journeying through regions and cultures thousands of years and thousands of
kilometers distant, in unison with the thoughts and reactions of men far removed from
oneself…The discovery of a common substratum which we share with masters far
removed in time and space; the awareness that our action through theatre springs from
an attitude towards existence and has its roots in one transnational and transcultural
country.xxx

Hence, Barba’s ‘floating islands’ are independent from national

bonds and their historical contingencies, but their history and ‘roots’ are
attached to the lives of people who are and have looked for a certain kind
of ‘cultural transcendence’ in the extra-daily, the artifice, the preconditions
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for expressivity, the reverse of the ‘minimum effort maximum result’xxxi

formula. Thus, we could say that the history of the ‘floating islands’ is a
particular history of the aesthetics of performance with its leaders,
developments -even if not clearly linear- and thematic coherence. Within
the nation of these ‘floating islands’ there exist the rebels, the masters
who have energized the history of theatre now and then, and who are
outstanding figures in a culture that Barba sometimes calls the ‘culture of
transition’.

Certainly, Barba’s research focuses on theatricality, applied to

the context of theatre. Even narrower, he focuses on the context of what
some would claim to be ‘technique’ and Barba calls ‘pre-expressivity’.
Arguably, his research goes deep into details instead of broad, and in this
operation, Barba deliberately loses sight of extra-theatrical, socio-cultural
and political contextsxxxii. What Barba seems to do is an intercultural,
comparative and highly detailed observation of the micro-cosmos of the
performers’ bodies. He searches for transcultural principles underlying the
way in which performers acquire their extra-daily presence. To find these
principles, Barba observes, among others, the alignment of spine and legs,
the muscular tensions and distensions, the transition between movements,
and the dilations of actions in time and space.

A question at this point could be if one should demand from

Barba to consider a wider socio-cultural and political context in his
research. If the answer is affirmative, we could ask: For the sake of what
should we ask him to have this consideration? Of artistic excellence, of
ethical principles, of political awareness? Are artistic, ethical and political
questions inseparable? Does each aspect determine the meaning of the
other aspects? Is theatre giving meaning to its wider social context or is
social context giving meaning to theatre? I would like to suggest that
these questions are somehow at the heart of disagreements between
Barba –as well as other interculturalist artists and theorists like Schechner-
and scholars like Rustom Bharucha and Philip Zarilli. Bharucha expresses it
well when he says:

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Movements, however abstract or disembodied, cannot be separated from concepts of the

body and the universe. Once again, I repeat, is the substratum of life that gives meaning
to dance, not the anatomy of the performer, which is itself a reaction to particular
tendencies in history. xxxiii

Clearly, for Eugenio Barba the world of theater, although

undeniably interrelated to its wider social context, can be observed,
analyzed and understood intrinsically. When criticized by Zarilli for his
‘ahistorical’ approach, Barba has answered that:

The importance of studying the social and cultural contexts of a specific theatre is
obvious. But it is also obvious that it is not true that one understands nothing of the
theatre if one does not consider it in the light of its sociocultural context…A good method
is that in which the context is pertinent to the questions which have been put to the object
(Barba 1998)xxxiv

The ‘object’ in Barba’s case is undoubtedly theatricality at the level of pre-

expressivity. The context of such an object will thus be framed so that it
remains relevant to his specific aesthetic search. In his discussion about
the Odin’s work, Bharucha somehow takes distance from his primarily ethic
concerns, making some comments about the artistic consequences of
Barba’s ‘ahistorical’ approach:

In a production like Marriage with God…I …felt that Barba’s actors were working so hard
to shape energies through deflection, opposition, collision, transition, metamorphosis and
switches of character, that they were overwhelmingly energetic. I was numbed by their
virtuosity. But the strangest thing of all is that they left me entirely cold. I was not moved
by their particular uses of the body…At risk of emphasizing the banal in theatre, I must
affirm the need to see human beings on stage, however much they may ‘deform’ their
bodies in the interest of their ‘presence’.xxxv

Apparently isolated from the rest of his arguments, Bharucha

discusses here Barba’s work in Barba’s terms; this is, in terms of theatrical
artistry. Two years after the English publication of Bharucha’s comment in
his book Theatre and the World, Barba’s makes, also in the English
publication of Paper Canoe, a comment about the difference between the
life of the performer and his/her virtuosity:

The difference between this life and the vitality of an acrobat… is obvious…
The acrobats shows us ‘another body’ which uses techniques so different from daily
techniques that they seem to have no connection with them. In other words, there is no
longer a dialectic relationship but only distance, or rather, the inaccessibility of a
virtuoso’s body…Daily body techniques are used to communicate; techniques of virtuosity
are used to amaze. Extra-daily techniques, on the other hand, lead to information. They
literally put the body into form, rendering it artificial/artistic but believable. Herein lies the
essential difference which separates extra-daily techniques from those which merely
transform the body into the ‘incredible’body of the acrobat and the virtuoso. xxxvi

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What Bharucha observes in Odin actors and Barba observes in

acrobats is, I insist, a concern of the aesthetic field. It is a problem that
philosopher Edward Bullough formulated in his aesthetic theory of
‘psychical distance’xxxvii as a case of ‘over-distance’, in which the spectator
fails to have an aesthetic experience due to the impossibility of relating the
artistic object to his/her personal reality. What is interesting here, I believe,
is the way in which Bharucha connects this aesthetic concern with his own
ethical and political concerns. The ‘overwhelmingly energetic’ Odin actors
are, according to Bharucha, a product of Barba’s obsession with the
stylization of traditional Asian theatre, where he identifies the secret to
combat the lifelessness of much modern theatre. Bharucha sees this
obsession as well as Barba’s rejection to realistic theatre as a position
which could only come from a Western avant-garde artist; a position which
somehow reinforces the image that the West has of the East as being
traditional, timeless and wise:

I resist the equation of ‘Indian Theatre’ with those ‘traditional’ laws of pre-expressivity and
extra-daily behavior that seem to preoccupy Barba. Certainly, I am aware of the traps of
realism and the limits of proscenium, but I believe that there are possibilities contained
within them that Barba has assumed and rejected. The point is that he can afford to reject
this theatre of ‘daily behaviour’ because it has evolved in his culture over a long period of
time. Whether I like it or not, I cannot afford to do so. I am compelled to question the
colonial ‘roots’ of realism in the Indian theatre and to see how it has incorporated
‘indigenous’ material and modes of expression.xxxviii

Where do Barba’s aesthetic preferences come from? Why does

his Anthropology of Theatre focus on the pre-expressive level? What
Bharucha shows us openly, is that he fails in having an aesthetic
experience when watching the Odin actors because his Indian background
and consciousness determines his sensitivity. Thus, his sensitivity –and any
spectator’s sensitivity- cannot be separated from his/her socio-cultural
background. Even though Barba’s dialectical and open approach to
meaning allows for a great diversity of interpretations, this very open
approach might be argued to belong to a socio-culturally rooted, Western
avant-garde theatre. In other words, the level of pre-expressivity might be
less universal than what Barba would wishxxxix. Arguably, the concept of
pre-expressivity is linked to a particularly Western way of understanding

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‘representation’, ‘language’ and, at the centre of all this, the issue of

‘meaning’. Let us give a further thought to this issue.

3.2 The Issue of Meaning

The language turn of deconstructionism and its underlying idea
that ‘There is nothing outside the text’xl has influenced the development of
a great deal of Western dance and theatre from the 1960’s on. Concepts
like ‘representation’, ‘literalness’ and even ‘expression’ have been looked
at with skepticism, and they have been radically fought against by a great
number of postmodern performance artists. In the cannon of Western
dance history, Merce Cunnigham and the American generation of ‘the
postmoderns’ have become icons of this language turn, where there are
not true meanings which should be read in, or beyond dance. The meaning
is, within this paradigm, in the factual aspects of the body in motion.
Dance expresses itself. Hence, the task of the artists is to re-create
language, challenging the belief in absolute or transcendental ‘truths’.
Realistic art or art that attempts to represent an accepted reality is seen as
authoritarian art, which encourages passive attitudes from the side of the
audience. In an anti-representative campaign, postmodern performance
presents –rather than represents- a world which might appear illogical,
fragmented, absurd, surprising and complex. Playing with the form of
language - where the act of playing deserves all respect- is a way of
playing with arbitrary meanings, a way of deconstructing what exists in
order to reveal reality’s vulnerability to change. As Roland Barthes
proclaimed in his famous article ‘The death of the author’, meaning is not
preconceived and fixed, but rather conceived in every encounter between
a text and its reader. This paradigm has affected, as it should, the way in
which people understand the world, and therefore the way in which artists
from the West understand and the arts of non-Western cultures. Such an
understanding is critically seen by scholar Anuradha Kapur, when she claims
that:

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In mounting an attack on mimesis, postmodernism claims as its territory non-

mimetic forms from all over the world. Thus theatre from the ‘Third World’ comes to be
defined by the needs and uses of postmodernism; forms from different cultural contexts
become evacuated of subject matter and are seen as a series of formal options.xli

How can Barba fit into this postmodern paradigm of

performance? Arguably, his cultural distance from Asia allows Barba to
perceive and analyze the physical actions of Asian performers separately
from their cultural contexts. This is an operation which Bharucha is
unwilling or unable to do, partly because of his Asian background and
partly because of his postcolonial awareness. This is how Barba himself
describes his relationship with Asia:

It is sometimes said that I am an “expert” on Asian theatre, that I am

influenced by it, that I have adapted its techniques and procedures to my practice. Behind
the verisimilitude of these commonplaces lies their opposite. It has been through
knowledge of the work of Western performers- Odin Teatret actors- that I have been able
to see beyond the technical surface and the stylistic results of specific traditions. xlii

In other words, Barba sees Asian performance with the eyes

allowed to him by his personal and cultural background, and this, I would
suggest, is manifested in his approach to meaning and language. Let us
look at the Theatrum Mundi, a work created during the concluding sessions
of each ISTA, under the direction of Barba and in collaboration with theatre
masters from Europe and Asia. Comparing his dramaturgical method with
‘Romanesque architecture’, Barba explains that he intertwines the
autonomous styles of the performers, finding the connections between
them at the pre-expressive level. This is:

..within the domain of rhythm and contacts, technique and relationships. The
fragments then become actions which can interact, thus creating a context… I do not
interfere with the fragments proposed by the actors, I choose them and make connections
between them.xliii

We could argue that even when Barba does not interfere or alter
the form of the actions, the new context created by his ‘Romanesque
dramaturgy’ implies interference in the meaningful content that these
actions might have in isolation, or within their traditional, usually Asian,
contextsxliv. Certainly, a dramaturgy based on the ‘pre-expressive’ level will
create a work with strong focus on formal qualities rather than on
meaningful content. Furthermore, we should remember that Theatrum

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Mundi is usually presented within the frame of the ISTA, where audiences
have been prepared to perceive theatre at a pre-expressive level. This, in
my opinion, is a systematic and throughout interference in the symbolic
realm of performance forms in which the meanings expressed through
theatrical actions might be of paramount importance otherwise. Now, it
would be unfair to charge the responsibility for such interference to Barba
alone. As it is known, the ISTA is thought of as a space of collaboration
between European and Asian theatre masters. Thus, even if the focus on
pre-expressivity has first been suggested by Barba, one should think that
the Asian masters have accepted this collaboration on the grounds of a
common interest. In this way, the interference of the ‘Romanesque
method’ in the meaningful content of theatrical actions from diverse
performance traditions might be seen as the result of an artistic and
human encounter where European and Asian artists are equally active
participants.

Now, concerning his work with the Odin actors, Barba explains
that the ‘meaning’ of his productions is as a dialectic tension between the
meanings of the director, the actor and the spectator. In turn, this dialectic
provides a tension which is solved by every individual engaged in the
performance: Barba, every actor and every spectator. The meanings read
by these persons are aroused by the physical actions of the performers, in
relation to each individual’s external and personal references. However, it
seems obvious that Barba’s work is more engaged with an intrinsic
research on the physical actions of the performers than with a research on
these actions in relation to external concepts or to the viewer’s extra-
theatrical context. Barba shares with other postmodern artists a skeptical
attitude towards ‘expression’:

Abstract meanings derive from ikebana through the precise work of analysis
and transposition of a physical phenomenon. If one began with these abstract meanings,
one would never reach the concreteness and precision of ikebana, whereas by starting
from precision and concreteness, one does attain these abstract meanings. Performers
often try to proceed from the abstract to the concrete. They believe that the point of
departure can be what one wants to express, which then implies the use of a technique
suitable for this expressionxlv.

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An abstract meaning, advises Barba, is not a good point of departure.

Similarly, ‘expression’, understood as a translation of abstractness into
language, is a process likely to fail. It seems to me that for Barba and the
Odin actors, abstract meanings are relevant as far as they work as internal
motivations for theatrical presence.

In his autobiographical notes, Barba tells us how he remembers

the fully present stillness of the women praying at church in Gallipoli, the
Italian village where he grew up. He remembers the ‘immobility of the
believer’, as a dynamic projection of the self, something magical which
Barba would continue to research in his Theatre Anthropology. The director
compares this life stillness with the stillness of the soldier, whose body is
faking obedience and respect whilst his mind is being and wishing
something else. The difference between the believer and the soldier,
explains Barba, lies in the internal motivations that they have for their
stillness –devotion for the former, fear for the latter. Interesting enough,
these motivations seem to have a lot to do with socio-cultural context,
which Barba is often blamed for dismissing. Arguably, Barba found a
motivation for this ‘life stillness’ in the context of theatre, or in the country
of ‘floating islands’ as he sometimes call it. His faith in God and his
devotion to church have perhaps disappeared, but his interest in the
‘immobility of the believer’ remains, now as an aesthetic interest.

The more general issue of transporting ‘the sacred’ to ‘the

secular’ is not uncommon in intercultural practice. Even when Barba can
be said to transport attitude or ‘physical principles’ rather than the whole
enactment of existing rituals –as Schenchner and Brook have attempted to
do-, we could claim that Barba is performing a kind of sacred-secular
transportation. In his critical view of interculturalism, Bharucha exposes his
skepticism towards assumed equivalences between the concentration and
consciousness of the actors, and the concentration and consciousness of
the believer. Concerning this transposition from the sacred to the secular,
Bharucha asks:

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What happens to the faith in rituals once its ‘actions’ are performed in a theatrical
context? Is faith transportable? I believe that if one has to reproduce rituals in theatre ,
particularly those associated with spiritual contexts, a confrontation of their ‘meaning’ is
as important as an examinations of their ‘actions’xlvi

It seems to me that Barba has dedicated his life to transporting

the faith culture he was part of in his childhood to a culture of theatre, in
his devoted dedication to his work with the Odin. Perhaps one of Barba’s
biggest achievements is to have been able to extract from the ‘culture of
faith’ and many other cultures, the very element he is interested in. Diving
consistently into that particular element has led him to provide a solid
body of work which he has shared with theatre practitioners of West and
East. Not only has Barba declared this transportation of faith to have been
highly significant for his work, but he also sees a similar process of
transportation happening among cultures he does not come from:

In India, the hasta mudra… originated in sacred statues and in prayer

practices. When used by performers to emphasize or translate the words of a text or to
add descriptive detail to them, the mudra assume, above and beyond their ideogramatic
value, a dynamism, a play of tensions and oppositions whose visual impact is decisive in
determining their believability in the eyes of the spectators…Balinese performers,
although belonging to Hindu culture, have lost the meanings of the mudra, but have kept
the richness of their micro-variations and the vibrant asymmetry of the life they
contain.xlvii

It remains to ask what this change of function –from sacred to

secular- implies, and under which conditions it occurs. According to
Bharucha, this transportation of faith is ethically questionable when it
violates the significance that certain texts or rituals have for the people
who practice it or believe in it. The ethical problem, claims Bharucha, does
not lie in the attempt to establish intercultural dialogues or in the essential
impossibility of achieving a complete understanding of ‘others’. The fault of
a great number of intercultural artists, explains Bharucha, is their lack of
concern about cultural meanings and about the very practical and
economical conditions under which ‘cultural transportations’ take place.
More often than not, Western artists benefit themselves from non-Western
cultures’ precious heritage, without giving back any significant economical
or symbolic recognition.

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One of Bharucha’s most critical expositions of this case is his

analysis of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, where he denounces the
banalization of the classic Indian text, as well as the disengaged attitude of
Brook’s team towards the Indian collaborators in the mega production.
According to Bharucha, Brook’s Mahabharata was not only a symbolic
violation but also an economical exploitation of Indian people; a good
example of the fallacy of intercultural practice and its utopia of encounter
and mutual enrichment. Following Bharucha’s reasoning, a production like
Brook’s Mahabharata could be compared to an ethnographic product; alas
one which privileges the anthropologist’s fantasies and economical
interests over the perception and wellbeing of his/her ‘informants’ –
Bharucha lets us know that the budget of Brook’s production was huge,
and that the ‘Indian flavor’ of the work was a predictable commercial
success in the West-.

Hence, our concern here is the ethical implications of cultural

descontextualization and recontextualization in intercultural practice. What
happens to non-Western cultures when their products are isolated and
scrutinized by anthropologists and intercultural artists? Could we blame
Barba for taking Asian performances out of their context for the sake of
artistic research? What have been the consequences of his research, let us
say, for practitioners of Odissi dance in India? How mutual are the
encounters between ‘European and Asian artists’ in the University of
Euroasian theatre? How equal are the economical conditions and benefits
for the Odin actors and their collaborators? What kind of human
relationships are created and developed during the ISTA sessions and the
barters? Unfortunately, a close examination of these issues is beyond my
possibilities at this stage. For the time being, I will content myself with
having pointed out some questions which could lead our discussion
towards less philosophical, more concrete issues. I will finish this section by
quoting Bharucha once more, regarding the lessons that intercultural
artists can learn from anthropologists:

It is at the level of interactions that the human dimensions of interculturalism

are, at once, most potent and problematic. Tellingly, they are almost never confronted in
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theatre research, quite unlikely the recent trends in anthropology, for instance, where the
racist and Eurocentric dimensions in representing other cultures have been extended
beyond the writing of ethnography to the actual social relationships- personal, social, and
professional- that are initiated between anthropologists and their subjectsxlviii.

3.3. ISTA, Barters and Festuges

Theatre can change only theatre; it cannot change society. But if you change theatre, you
change a small but very important part of society…When you change theatre you change
for its audience a certain way of seeing , a change in perception, a certain kind of
perceptivity.xlix

If Barba can be criticized for his ahistorical approach to

traditional performance forms, it is more difficult to criticize him for social
disengagement. Primarily, Barba sees theatre as an encounter between
individuals and as a way of constructing social bounds between people
from different parts of the world. The ISTA, the barters and the festuges
are all theatre events which encourage encounter within more or less
determined frames.

As we have mentioned earlier, the ISTA consists in an empirical

research on the art of the performer, which is carried out by masters from
all over the world. The research might include informal and continuous
communication between ‘the masters’, but it takes its most concrete forms
during intensive sessions in which all the members gather for discussions
and public demonstrations. Even though the basic concept of ISTA is a
creation of Barba, and ‘the masters’ who research are invited by Barba
himself, the ISTA sessions seem to be an open arena for participation.
From an ethic point of view, it seems to me to be significant that the ISTA
sessions have included scholars from different disciplines – including
anthropologists, sociologists, and feminists among others-, who have
published critical texts about Barba’s approach to theatre anthropology.
Barba, I would claim, has strong convictions, but he is open for discussion
and criticism. Indeed, I believe that Barba’s openness has contributed a lot
to the abundance of interesting discussions about his work, being the
criticisms by theatre scholars Rustom Bharucha and Phillip Zarilli some of
the most outstanding ones.

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Let us know discuss the ‘barters’. In the 70’s, Barba and the
Odin created a new kind of theatrical event in which performances were
exchanged. Thus, the Odin travelled to different places, offering street
performances and receiving local performances as a payment. Part of the
concept is that the performances are not the most important thing of the
event. What matters is instead the encounter, the process of exchanging.
In this way, theatre is treated as a cultural product rather than as an
aesthetic product. The dilemma that Barba finds between the social and
the aesthetic functions of theatre is interesting:

Theatre can, in a way, destroy its artistic quality and become a sort of
cultural instrument. By cultural I mean an instrument for creating relations, especially
among persons who could never be able to create a dialogue between them.l

The social concern that underlined the ‘barters’ led the Odin to
offer its performances in exchange for not only local performances, but
also material goods that would help satisfying needs of the hosting
communityli. Hence, audiences paid with books, musical instruments, or
with information which would contribute to the creation of libraries,
archives or publications about the community’s region. Such a will to help
solving the problems of the ‘studied’ or ‘visited’ community echoes
postcolonial approaches to anthropology, in which the ethnographic
research is expected to benefit not only the researcher’s community, but
also the community which is been studied. As Gerald D. Berreman put it:

This is the substance of the searching questions of the peoples of the third
world and others: namely, ‘What has been the effect of your work among us? Have you
contributed to the solution of the problems you have witnessed? Have you even
mentioned those problems? If not, then you are part of those problems and hence must
be changed, excluded, or eradicated. lii

When questioned about his social commitment, Barba has often

tried to explain that his political and social concerns are manifested not so
much in the meaningful content of his productions, but rather in the
human conditions and relationships created around these productions.
Indeed, the Odin is well known for being a community with an idiosyncratic
life style, almost an island with its own ethical principles and social rules.liii
Somehow agreeing with Barba, I believe that the weak point of the director

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is the apparent lack of historical and political awareness manifested not in

the context, but rather in the content - or non-content- of his theatre
productions.

Let us look at other kind of event. Since 1991, the Odin has
been organizing ‘festuges’, which are celebrations that include
performances, videos, films, exhibitions and concerts performed by and for
the people of Holstebro. The ‘festuge’ is an event that synthesizes Barba’s
reflections about theatre as a cultural encounter and as a form of human
relationship. In a letter written to Schechner Barba writes:

We remained in this non-man’s land for nine days and nine nights’ dissolving the theatre
into the town and absorving the reality of the town into the theatre. But mixing with
others puts the consistency of one’s own borders to the test. It is a way of deepening the
differences and of defining oneself. When performers throw themselves into the daily life
of a street or a market, they are not blending with the local people; they don’t establish a
communion with them. They are merely solidifying their own identities, and therefore
their own differences. This leads to the possibility of creating a relationship.liv

Granted, the event as a whole and what people actually

experience during its nine days and nights might be plausible in terms of
community building. What strikes me however, is the ‘themes’ chosen by
the Odin as red threads of these events. In his letter to Schechner, Barba
does not even mention ‘the theme’ of the festuge that he so emotionally
describes. I suspect that the ‘theme’ is of little importance to Barba and
that it is precisely in the ‘theme’ where Barba’s criticized lack of historicity
and political unawareness might be most visible. Describing the ‘festuges,
Ian Watson writes:

The ‘theme’, “Culture Without Frontiers”, was inspired by the 500th

anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the new world. As the press release for the event
described it, the festuge was concerned with the “Danish Columbus”, those Danes who
had spent time abroad and had returned to their native land”…enriched by experience
and with a new perspective, which gives impulse and ‘life’ to society at large (Odin
Teatret/Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, 1991). lv

Having been born and raised in Colombia, and having been

introduced into postcolonial studies, I find the quote above a little more
than indignating. Certainly, America can only be seen as a ‘new world’ to
be ‘discovered’ from the point of view of European colonizers. Moreover,
the ‘enriching’ experiences caused by the arrival of Columbus to America
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can only be celebrated by an ethnocentric and imperialistic mind. On the

one hand, I find it disturbingly strange that a person with the intellectual
competence of Barba can be so uncritical towards the ‘themes’ he selects.
On the other hand, I do not find it surprising that Barba is fascinated by
Columbus, given his identification with ‘the traveler’, with ‘the culture of
transition’, with ‘the floating islands’, with ‘the no-man’s land’, and in
general, with the adventure of encountering other cultures. In my opinion,
the ‘theme’ of this first festuge is coherent with Barba’s consistent
aesthetic interests, as much as it is coherent with his occasional lack of
political and historical awareness. Another case in which meaningful
content might be controversial from an ethical and postcolonial
perspective is the production of The Million. I will discuss this further in the
next section.

3.4 The Million: An Irony?

In terms of process, content and form, The Million seems to be a
work especially vulnerable to postcolonial criticism. Briefly told, Odin actors
went into a three month sabbatical during which most of them trained in
performance genres from foreign cultures. At their return to Holstebro, the
actors had acquired skills in kathakali, pentjal, legong and capoeira among
other performance forms. These skills and the experiences of the actors
during their trips became raw material for the production of The Million.
The work was first performed in Aarhus in 1978 and it remained in the Odin
repertoire until 1984. As Barba himself tells us, the creative process of The
Million happened during a time in which the director was starting to find
key questions that would become the core of the ISTA about one year
later:

Bewildered and skeptical, I watched these flashes of exotic skills, hurriedly acquired. I
began to notice that when my actors did a Balinese dance, they put on another
skeleton/skin which conditioned the way of standing, moving and becoming ‘expressive’.
Then they would step out of it and reassume the skeleton/skin of the Odin actor. And yet,
in the passage form one skeleton/skin to another, in spite of the difference in
‘expressivity’, they applied similar principles.lvi

These sessions in which the actors showed Barba their ‘hurriedly

acquired’ skills led not only to reflections about pre-expressivity, but also
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to the creation of The Million. The title of the work refers to the nickname
given in Venice to Marco Polo, whose descriptions of Asia were always a
‘million times’ more exaggerated than what anyone had ever imagined.
According to Watson, the characters depicted in the The Million:

Played a variety of exotic character…included Balinese dancers, a lion form

the Japanese kabuki, clichéd versions of a Mexican in a huge sombrero with a rifle that
would not stop firing and a Moroccan in Arabic-style robes, the Hindu Monkey King, a
macho Latino in an immaculate white..lvii

Similarly, the music included an Indonesian gamelan, as well as Western

popular tunes like “I left My Heart in San Francisco” and “Oh Susana”.

The multicultural look of The Million should not be so surprising

if one thinks that this work was produced precisely at the midst of a
revealing moment for Barba, when the director started to see that the
most specific and apparently unrelated performance traditions shared
some basic and vital principles. The Million is perhaps a celebration of this
common ground among diversity. At least this seems to have been the
perception of New York Times critic Mel Gussow who described the work as
a ‘vividly theatricalized carnival of all nations’lviii, and also the perception of
The Times critic Ned Chaillet who called the work:

..a dazzling celebration of theatricality that brings together striking images

from such places as Bali and Indialix.

Judging by these comments and by my own experience of

watching a video of The Million, I would argue that by the time of the
creation of this production Barba had not yet come up with a way of using
what he saw then as underlying principles of performance. Or
paraphrasing the director, Barba had not yet managed to cook in his own
way what he had taken from the outside. In my opinion, The Million
presents short fragments of performances which are exotic to the Western
world, coloring them with a rather hysterical and exaggerated vitality that
touches the limits of superficial humor. Echoing Bharucha’s criticism of
Brook’s Mahabharata, I would like to suggest that the cultural
transportation performed The Million resulted in a virtuosic, alas banal
reproduction of cultural products like the kathakali or the capoeira.

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Perhaps a more sophisticated appreciation of The Million could

provide us with other tools for interpretation. However, I believe that the
literality with which the work represents cultural stereotypes not only
inhibits a nuanced reading of the work, but it also reinforces colonialist
prejudices towards non-Western cultures. Suggesting that there is more
about The Million than a superficial celebration of multiculturalism, Watson
quotes a comment by Danish critic Henrik Lundgren:

The production contrasts run the gamut from the capricious to the
aggressive, but its underlying tone is one of fertile, sharp edged ironylx

Interpreting The Million as an irony seems to me to be a rather easy way

of justifying the exotizations performed in the work. Moreover, if we
suppose that The Million spoke an ironic language which contradicted its
own celebratory tone, we could still say that audiences were likely to miss
the point, thereby running the risk of interpreting the work in an
undesired, colonialist way. Furthermore, having discussed the way in
which Barba deals with meaning in his works, it seems most unlikely that
he might have planned to convey some specific message in the form of a
complex irony. As far as I understand, Barba stands for free and diverse
interpretation of meanings, thereby legitimizing the reading of those
spectators who saw in The Million a celebratory and humorous display of
exotic cultures. Is The Million and irony? I do not think so.

DEFEATING COLONIALISM

Cumbia-Kumbé
Some people say that one becomes more nationalistic when one
lives abroad. I am not sure I have become more nationalistic whilst living in
Sweden, but what I can say is that I have experienced an increasing need
to ‘talk about Colombia’, and more recently, to ‘talk about’ what it means
to me to be Colombian. Starting as a sheer infatuation with the folk music
and dance from the coast regions of ‘my country’, the process of creating

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Cumbia-Kumbé has grown into a self- attempt to decolonize myself,

denounce exotization, perform political activism and question my own
subjective position in the middle of all this. If I find it relevant to bring up
this process here, is because the development of Cumbia-Kumbé has been
accompanied and affected by my studies on postcolonialism, and lately by
my entrance into the field of anthropology. As I stated in the first sections
of this essay, I believe that anthropology and performance walk similar
paths in their aim of defeating colonialism. Cumbia-Kumbé can then be an
example of how this interdisciplinary collaboration can take place.

In its first versions in 2004 and 2005, Cumbia-Kumbé was

thought as homage to the native Americans and Afro-Colombian people,
whose historical suffering and cultural resistance have blossomed into the
most moving and vibrating dance and music forms, being the cumbia one
of the most representative ones. A good number of reflections have
followed this first, deeply felt motivation. One of the earliest ones came
when I realized that the concept of the ‘other’ was confusingly relative,
causing different kinds of exotizations. Being a Colombian recently arrived
in Sweden –when I started making the piece I had been in Sweden for
about two years-, my cumbia was appreciated by Swedish people as my
voice of difference, equating my cultural identity with this dance.lxi Being
used to think a lot about what I want ‘to say’lxii, this time I decided to let my
guts and instincts go –whatever this might be-, choreographing the piece
without questioning too much what the movements could mean. My
decision was strengthened by the emotive response I got from several
spectators, something difficult to resist. However, the process continued
and I started to ask myself if I was actually entitled to dance cumbia and if
I was doing it correctly, this is, like the Afro-Colombian people do it in the
Atlantic coast of Colombia. Quite obviously, the doubt made me see that in
a Colombian context, performing the cumbia would be representing ‘the
other’. I come from the Andes region of Colombia, where the African
influence is minimal and the folklore is extremely different from the
folklore in the coasts. I realized that I was exoticizing myself –and the rest
of Colombians- in Sweden, as well as exoticizing Afro-Colombian people in
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Colombia. My dance seemed to strengthen stereotypical characteristics

like the ‘organic’, ‘animalistic, ‘melancholic’, ‘resistant’ and ‘celebrative’. I,
like many Europeans and Colombians, imagined these characteristics to be
typical of Afro-Colombian people. My antidote to this reflection was to add
a layer of auto-criticism. I would open a forum after the performance, in
which the audience could criticize my piece using tools from postcolonial
studies. The forum would be guided by Doctor Yael Feiler, who is expert in
the matter. In the only forum I have had the chance to organize, I realized
that the feedback of the audience was telling not only about my exoticizing
clichés, but also about the spectators’ prejudices about Colombia. They
were, as in the first version, fascinated by the strength, vitality and
emotionality of the piece; but it did not occur to them to think that this
fascination had another side, the cost of exoticism.

What did I really want to achieve with the piece? Inform?

Seduce? Give a moral lecture? Move? I believe that the power and the
danger of performance, is the multiple layers and levels of signification
that it allows for. I decided to elaborate these layers in order to create a
more nuanced vision of Colombia. So far, I had partly managed to inform,
seduce and move some spectators. The work was lacking a political
dimension, a power of transformation that could affect the conceptions of
the audience and my own conceptions. It lacked a confrontation with the
exotic elements which were the key of seduction. Illuminated by Edward
Said, I started checking the stereotyping features of the piece, and I made
the first changes. My choice of ritualistic music from Ghana and folk music
from the Atlantic coast of Colombia gave a sense of what postcolonial
critics have identified as ‘eternal’, ‘non-modern’, ‘ahistorical’ or ‘fixed in
the past’. Out of this reflection I changed the music and decided to dance
to a recorded text instead. This text questioned the relationship between
me, the auto-represented Colombian woman, and the witnesses of this
representation, the audience.lxiii I believe that this change made the piece
start looking less as a folk- inspired dance, and more as a conceptual
contemporary dance work. One does not need to be folkloristic to make a
piece about Colombia.
30
 Sara Regina Fonseca

In the meantime, other layer was been added to the piece.

Feeling that self-knowledge and intellectual exercise were not enough
reasons to make use of Afro-Colombian cultural heritage, I decided that it
was important to try and give something back. This came, I would say, as a
good lesson from what are called applied and advocative anthropology -
often exchangeable concepts, applied anthropology aims at affecting
policy, whilst advocative anthropology takes party in order to join a cause-.
By this time I was coordinating a project of dance and social intervention
called Kriget och Festen –War and Feast-. In some way, working in this
project has become for me a way of participating in the solution of
problems, giving something back to those who are inspiration for my work
in Sweden. Furthermore, I have often been told that a way of helping the
victims of violence in Colombia is spreading information at international
levels. Cumbia-Kumbé has become a way of contributing to this too.

Keeping in mind that the piece should give a sense of present

and evolution –as opposed to ancestral and ahistorical-, and willing to
make the audience feel part of the ongoing violence in Colombia, I found a
powerful symbol: Chiquita Bananas. The usual exotic picture of Colombia
includes its tropical weather and its generous nature. When one is trying to
avoid the obvious ‘bad sides’ of Colombia- namely corruption, poverty and
violence- one talks about its rich culture, nice people and delicious fruits,
among others. These marvels are true to a great extent, but they are, I
believe, not necessarily the opposite side of the ‘bad side’. In some way,
fixating Colombia with its reach culture, fruits, etc; is negating its problems
and also negating the relationship between the ’positive sides’ and the
‘negative sides’. Exoticism and colonialism are at the centre of this. I come
back to my example: Chiquita Brands, with its Afro-American woman stock
on each fruit, is emblematic of the ‘good sides’ and the ‘bad sides’ of
exoticism. The successful multinational company marketing is based on all
the ‘positive’ clichés about the tropic, whilst its bosses are pursued for
their involvement in massacres of unionists, as well as for having paid 1.7
million dollars to terrorist groups in the banana zone of Urabá Colombia.lxiv
Maintaining the exotic picture of Colombia, in the case of Chiquita Brands,
31
 Sara Regina Fonseca

is directly linked to maintaining the violence in this country. Both

strategies are supportive of neo-colonialism in its most undesirable forms.
Besides working as a historical account and as an emotional embodiment
of cultural syncretism, Cumbia-Kumbé would hopefully work now as a
straight forwards denunciation of the role that each of us plays, eating
Chiquita bananas, in the violent situation of Colombia.

Finally, I would like to point out another aspect which lies at the
cross-roads between anthropology and performance; namely, the
questions of subjectivity and objectivity. On the one hand, contemporary
performance theory and practice move between a tendency to focus on
the factual physicality of the body - a concern which had a strong influence
in the Western world via Merce Cunningham and the group of ‘the
postmoderns’- and a concern with emotional expression and
representation of content – a tendency of which the work of Rudolf Laban,
Kurt Joss and Pina Bausch are emblematic-. A good example of a dynamic
play between subjectivity and objectivity might be the work of British
company DV8 Physical Theatre, whose last piece ‘To be straight with you’
could be said to border the limits of a journalistic documentary on
homophobia, with an equal load of physicality, emotionality and
information delivery. On the other hand, anthropology, in tune with the
insights of deconstructionist approaches to language, has evolved a critical
view of its apparent objectivity. As a result, reflective ethnography
emerges as a way of not only recognizing but also exploring further the
subjectivity of the researchers. This dynamic between objectivity and
subjectivity, I suggest, is often enriched by interdisciplinary encounters like
those between anthropologists and performers. In some way, a sense of
responsibility has encouraged me to use a kind of anthropological
approach to my artistic process. Thus, I have used historical and
ethnographic material in order to learn more about the people I am talking
about, and I have even presented some ‘factual information’ –with the due
skepticism towards objectivity- during the performance.lxv

32
 Sara Regina Fonseca

This border-line between subjectivity and objectivity, between

emotion and knowledge, puts anthropologists and performers in an
interesting situation. I will talk from my own experience. After almost five
years of reflections and intellectual questioning, I wonder if I am willing to
give up that deeply felt, first motivation that made me start working on
Cumbia-Kumbé. To be honest, I am not quite willing to do so. But, should I
do so? In a way, I would like to argue that my emotional- romantic if you
want- relationship to Colombia is still as true as it was before. The
intellectual approach I have gained during the last five years has added
complexity, rather than abolished my earlier subjective approach. An
approach which is clearly embodied in my physicality- I have not yet
changed the original movement material in a significant way-.
Consequently, I do not think I ‘should’ give up that instantaneous physical
and emotional response to the subject I am talking about. I have come to
believe that the political potential of performance lies in the possibility of
juxtaposing parallel processes: one can embody emotionality and at the
same time comment critically upon it. Perhaps, one of the reasons why the
concept of art has survived a long history is that art elicits subjectivity,
imagination and pleasure with a minimal amount of skepticism. As a
dancer, I believe that embodied emotions are real, no matter how
questionable they might be from an ethical point of view. Having said this,
I also believe that intellectual questioning can transform those emotions
with time. At the end of the day, I believe that the confrontation between
embodied emotions and intellectual questioning is a unique strength of
performance, with a great potential to unveil colonialist assumptions. My
next step with Cumbia-Kumbé, I have decided, will be to add an auto-
biographical layer to the work. Learning a lesson from reflexive
ethnography, I want to make the following statement: ‘Everything you are
witnessing here is, after all, a very personal view and a subjective
judgment. For the same reason, everything you witness here is very real
and has a lot to do with you’. For some universal reason, it seems to me
that when we identify big issues with specific individuals, we are more
capable of finding personal connections with those issues. A reflexive note?
33
 Sara Regina Fonseca

I will end this essay by quoting Bharucha once more, regarding his process
as director of Gundegowda, his Indian version of Henrik Inbsen’s Peer
Gynt:

I realized, not without a sense of irony, that in criticizing orientalism, one

does not necessarily have to suppress one’s own fantasy of the Arabian Nights. This would
be the surest way of denying ourselves an ‘Orient’, which we are in a position to laugh
at…The problem, therefore, had to do less with ideology than with fantasy: I was
censoring my Orient.lxvi

CONCLUSION

The relationships between intercultural art, cultural anthropology and

colonialism are complex and paradoxical at times. On the one hand, the
colonialist world existing between the 17th and the 20th centuries has
created certain conditions in which the First World has established its
economical and allegedly cultural superiority over colonies or ex-colonies
of the Third World. Being a part of this puzzle, anthropologists and artists
have often reproduced and even reinforced colonialist fantasies about the
‘other’, ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, and ‘exotic’, as being fascinating, threatening
and non-modern. On the other hand, these very fantasies have been used
by several anthropologists and artists in order to criticize and even reject
the ideology and the practices of the First World, not least of the
colonizing enterprise of Europe. Thus, Romantic and Modern artists
somehow kept the stereotyped opposition of the civilized vs. the primitive,
but they inverted the values. In this context, the ‘other’ was noble,
respectable and even desired. It is my belief that these apparently
contrasting reactions towards non-Western cultures –namely rejection and
love- are two sides of the same coin. The coin of colonization in which the
separation between West and East or First and Third Worlds implies or is
implied in a structure of power where the rich countries shape the way in
which the poor countries are supposed to behave, be imagined and be
consumed. In the work of Eugenio Barba and the Odin, I would argue that
a colonialist attitude is evident in only certain aspects. One of those is
Barba’s conception that there is a universal way of perceiving
34
 Sara Regina Fonseca

performance, in which certain power created by physical principles

overrides cultural specificity and meaningful content. This specific power,
called ‘pre-expressivity’ by Barba, is problematically ethnocentric when it
is uncritically understood as being ‘universal’. Harmless as it seems to be,
pre-expressivity implies significant modifications and even annulations of
the cultural meanings embedded in the performance forms which Barba
‘plays with’ during typically Western postmodern dramaturgical processes
like the ‘Romanesque method’. Another aspect which shows a colonialist
mentality is Barba’s celebrative representation of historical colonialism in
America and of exotic stereotypes of non-Western cultures. This is evident
in the themes and raw material chosen by Barba for the Odin’s first
‘festuge’ and for the production of The Million. In general, Barba can be
said to maintain a paradoxical position in which his search for the
universal, transcultural and the pre-expressive- in theatre depends on
cultural differentiation that allows for encounter and exchange with ‘the
other’. The ‘other’ in this case, is usually the Asian performer, who Barba
tends to identify with ‘traditional’ performance forms and with a kind of
universal wisdom arguably scarce in Western theatre; an ‘other’ that we
could see as a special kind of ‘noble savage’. Finally, drawing from this
brief analysis as well as from postcolonial approaches to anthropology and
art, I would like to suggest that practicing intercultural performance can
become a way of fighting ethnocentrism and colonialism, when artists
consciously make use of certain strategies such as reflexivity, auto-
criticism, social engagement and juxtaposition of layers which allow for
nuanced visions of ‘othering the other’.

35
i
The term ‘exotic’ should be understood with certain scepticism in this context. Something is
‘exotic’ when its appearance fulfils the expectations of being different, unknown, fascinating,
and somehow impossible to grasp in its totality. Thus, something is not essentially ‘exotic’, but
is made exotic when it is put outside its context and adapted to the expectations of certain
viewer.
ii
In intercultural art and cultural anthropology, ‘the other’ is usually related to cultures which
are foreign to the artist or to the anthropologist. In anthropology, ‘the other’ is represented in a
documentation and accurate analysis known as ‘ethnography’. In intercultural performance,
‘the other’ is represented in a performance.
iii
The term ’postcolonialism’ should be understood not as a chronological moment in history
which succeeded the times of colonial properties, but as a multi-phased and decided resistance
against remaining imperialistic attitudes which pervade contemporary discourses, power
structures, and social hierarchies. Thus, a scrutiny of ethnocentric attitudes, prejudices and
actions in anthropological and artistic practices can be considered to be a postcolonial approach
to the study of these disciplines.
iv
There is indeed a significant amount of literature dedicated to ‘postcolonial performance’. At
the moment, I can recommend two books: Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins Post-colonial
Drama (1996), London; and J. Ellen Gainor(ed.), Imperialism and Theatre, (1995), London.
v
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was a wave of academics and artists who drew
connections between anthropology and performance. Some notable authors are Richard
Shechner, Victor Turner, Irving Goofman Clifford Geertz, and Eugenio Barba, who funded in
1979 the International School of Theatre Anthropology, ISTA.
vi
Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View quoted by Joan Vincent in
Vincent, Joan (ed.) The Anthropology of Politics A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critic,
Oxford (2002), p.22
vii
Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape, California, (2003), p.33
viii
Ibid

ix
Joan Vincent (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics, A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critic.
Oxford, (2002), p.17
x
Dell Hymes in Reinventing Anthropology. New York (1969), p. 27
xi
A main figure in the political and intellectual postcolonial movements of the 20th century,
Edward Said developed the theory of ‘orientalism’, claiming that the way in which the West
understands, imagines and represents the East –principally the Arabic Muslim societies- as
being essentially opposite to the modern West, embodies imperialist interests and prolongs the
historical domination of the West over the East. This theory became broadly known and
influential through his book ‘Orientalism’ (1978).
xii
In his lecture ‘Anthropology and Globalization’, Keith Hart mentions Emmanuel Kant’s
approach to Anthropology in the 18th century as well as Jean Jacques Russeau’s thoughts about
modern society as sources of inspiration for his own view of Anthropology in the 21st century.
Key work in youtube: Keith Hart. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukFe9IpTCYk
xiii
The concept of the ‘noble savage’ maintains the opposition between ‘the primitive’ and ‘the
civilized’, but it reverses its values. Disappointed with civilization, Romantic artists idealized
‘the savage’ by converting the negative aspects of the stereotyped non-Western people –the
stereotypes so strongly criticized by Edward Said- into positive aspects of which Westerners
were sadly deprived. In his article ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
refers to the American Indians in this way: ‘The example of savages, most of whom have been
found in this state...’ – an ideal state posterior to ‘the primitive’ and prior to ‘the civilized’-
‘...seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it, that it is the real youth of the world,
and that all subsequent advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection
of the individual but in reality towards the decrepitude of the species’. Rousseau quoted by
Ronald L. Meek in Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge (1976), p. 82.
xiv
Here a definition of ‘the exotic’ from a postcolonial perspective: ‘An exoticist perspective
constitutes ‘the other’ as the domesticated and known other, positing the lure of difference
while assimilating its object to the circuits of consumption (of ideas, experiences, objects,
images, and so on). It constructs the other, or projects otherness, from the point of view of the
hegemonic Same, the known, the familiar’. ‘The New Exotic? Postcolonialism and
Globalization’. Conference by the Postcolonial Studies Research Network, University of Otago,
(2009). http://www.otago.ac.nz/humanities/research/networks/postcolonial/#forthcoming
xv
The original version of La Shylphide was choreographed by Filippo Taglioni and starred by
Maire Taglioni. It was first shown in Paris in 1832, when Scotland was considered to be an
exotic country within Europe.
xvi
La Chachucha is a folkloric dance from Andalusia which became widely famous through the
choreographic interpretation of Romantic ballerina Fanny Essler around the 1830’s. Historian
Carol Lee explains that ‘Essler studied folk dances of Spain, thus adding a colourful dimension
to her work. She incorporated the lively spirit and rhythms of Spanish dances into her own
staccato style...’.Carol Lee in Ballet in Western Culture, London (2002), p.156
xvii
Mohammed Shafaruddin in Islam and Romantic Orientalism. London, (1994) p. viii-ix
xviii
A postcolonial analysis of Ruth Saint-Denis’ and Vaslav Nijinsky’s works might lead to very
different results. On the one hand, Saint-Denis introduced her dances as representations of
Oriental dances, denying what many critics see as a highly subjective and Western
interpretation of the Orient. Her Western audiences, in turn, seemed to have legitimized her
works as genuine Oriental dances. On the other hand, Nijinsky’s works seem to have been
perceived by audiences as very personal –and insulting- interpretations of an ambiguous
‘other’. The exotic features of his ballets might be more related to the exotic context given by
the Ballet Russes, and to the fact that audiences saw Nijinsky as an exotic character outside
the theatre as well as inside the theatre. In her essay ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky’s Faun’, scholar
Penny Farfan claims that: ‘Although the Faun's mythical origins were in ancient Greece,
Nijinsky's Faun was, for European audiences, an exotic and eroticized "oriental" other’. South
Central Review 25.1 (2008),
http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/south_central_review/v025/25.1farfan02.html

xix
The labels of ‘African’, ‘world’ and ‘ethnic’ are telling of a Western perspective which
separates the West from the rest of the planet. Thus, Africa is seen as a homogeneous whole,
and anything that is not Europe and North America is seen as ‘the world’, a big generalization.
In a more respectful approach to cultural difference, ‘ethnic’ usually emphasises variety, alas
one which is stereotyped as colourful, sensual and traditional. Needless to say, ‘ethnic dances’
are only those dances practiced by minorities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

xx
Talal Asad (1991) in his "Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the
Anthropology of Western Hegemony" in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of
Ethnographic Knowledge (George Stocking, ed). http://instruct.uwo.ca/anthro/301/asad.htm
xxi
Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe, London (1995), p. 10-11
xxii
Rustom Bharucha in The Politics of Cultural Practice, London (2000), p.41
 xxiii
This argument has been developed, among others, by scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod in her
article ‘Writing against Culture’, in Richard G. Fox; Lila Abu-Lughod, Arjun Appadurai, Jose F.
Limon, Sherry B. Ortner, Paul Rabinow, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Joan Vincent, Graham Watson and
Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, New York (2001).

xxiv
David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America, New York (2000)
xxv
David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America, New York (2000)P.39
xxvi
Rustom Bharucha in The Politics of Cultural Practice, London (2000), p.p. 40-41
xxvii
Eugenio Barba founded the Odin Theater in Oslo, Norway in 1964. Later on the Odin moved
to Holstebro, Denmark.
xxviii
One of the key books of Barba is, Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savaresse A Dictionary of
Theatre Anthropology The Secret Art of the Performer, London (1991).
xxix
‘Good piece of advice’ is an expression often used by Barba in verbal interviews and written
texts. The expression has been one of Barba’s Achilles tendons for criticism.
xxx
Eugenio Barba quoted by Richard Schechner in the foreword of Ian Watson’s Towards a Third
Theatre. London (1993), p.xv
xxxi
Eugenio Barba often explains the use of ‘extra-daily’ techniques in performance as using
energy in an opposite way to the way we use energy in daily life. Thus, whilst we attempt to
use the minimum energy for maximum effect in our ordinary actions, on stage we invest the
maximum of energy to perform seemingly simple actions like standing and walking.
xxxii
I say ‘deliberately’ because it is clear that Barba acknowledges the ‘historical-cultural
context’ as one of ‘three levels of organization’ which define the performer’s profile. This level –
second in his classification-, is more specific than what Barba calls the ‘pre-expressive level’,
the third level of organization and the main subject of Theatre Anthropology. The other level of
organization–first in Barba’s classification- corresponds to: ‘the performer’s personality, his/her
sensitivity, artistic intelligence, social persona’. Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe, (1995), p. 10.

xxxiii
Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture, New York
(1993) p.58
xxxiv
Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre, London, (1993), p. xiv
xxxv
Bharucha, Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture, New York (1993)
p. 60
xxxvi
Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe, London, (1995) p.16
xxxvii
The theory of Psychical Distance was developed by Edward Bullough in 1912, and is
substantially influenced by aesthetic-attitude theories from the 18 th and 19th centuries.
According to this theory, aesthetic experience consists in a particular attitude of the spectator
which is defined by a balanced distance between the appearance and content of an ‘art object’
and the personal background of the viewer. Ideally, the art object will encourage an ‘outmost
decrease of Distance without its disappearance’. In this sense, Bharucha’s perception of Odin
actors and Barba’s perception of ‘the acrobat’ can be said to fit the case of ‘over-distance’.
xxxviii
Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture, New York
(1993) p.52

xxxix
A similar criticism has been made by scholars like Phillip Zarrilli who attended the 1986
ISTA. At this point it might be interesting to point out that Zarrilli consciously uses arguments
which are familiar to the critics of ‘universalism’ within the field of cultural anthropology.
Indeed, one of Zarilli’s strongest criticisms to Barba is that the director dismisses most of the
theory and practice existing within the field of academic anthropology, inventing his own and
inconsequent version of theatre anthropology: ‘Barba’s voice remains single, essential,
comprehensive and authoritarian’. Phillip Zarrilli quoted by Richard Schechner in Ian Watson,
Towards a Third Theatre, New York, (1995) p.xiii
xl
Jacques Derrida quoted by Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism, London (1983), p.82
xli
Anuradha Kapur quoted in Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama, London
(1996), p.p. 9-10
xlii
Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe, London (1995), p.7
xliii
Eugenio Barba, taken from the Odin Theatre webpage,
http://www.odinteatret.dk/ista/ista.htm
xliv
Most of the styles ‘intertwined’ in Theatrum Mundi are traditional Asian styles heavily based
on storytelling. In 1986, for example, Theatrum Mundi was ‘a spectacular anthology of female
characters, played by male and female masters like Sanjukta Panigrahi and her elderly master
Kelucharan Mahapatra, famous for his interpretation of female roles; the Kathakali dancers
Sankaran Nambodiri and K.N. Vijayakumar; the Balinese dancer Swasthi Bandem, Ni Puti Ary
Bandem, Desak Made Suarti Laksmi, Ni Made Wiratini; The Japanese Buyo dancers Katsuko
Azuma, Kanho Azuma, and Kanichi Hanayagi, a Kabuki actor, specialised in female roles
(onnagata); a very young trio from the Peking Opera of Taiwan, Tracy Chung, Ivonne Lin, and
Helen Liu, and finally the great Pei Yan-Ling - the most famous interpreter of male roles in the
classical theatre of the People's Republic of China’. Link to the web page of Odin Theatre:
www.odinteatret.dk/ista/Productions/mundi.htm
xlv
Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. London (2006)
p.15
xlvi
Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture. Oxon,
(1993), p.34
xlvii
Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe. London (1995), p.p. 26-27
xlviii
Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture. Oxon,
(1993) p. 84

xlix
Eugenio Barba quoted by Ian Watson in Towards a Third Theatre, London, (1993), p. 31
l
Ibid, p.29
li
It is important to point out that Barba and the Odin have carried out their barters in different
ways. Arguably some of them are easier to criticize than others. Unfortunately I do not have the
mediums to offer a deep analysis and an ethical discussion about this intercultural practice at
the moment. For a postcolonial view of the ‘barters’, look at Nicholas Arnold’s article ‘ The
barter concept and practices of Eugenio Barba’s Odin theatre: Cultural exchange or cultural
colonialism?’ in The European Legacy, Volume 1, Issue 3 May 1996, pages 1207-1212. The
reason why I won’t discuss this article is that I lack a subscription that allows me to access it.
lii
Gerald D. Berreman, ‘“Bringing It All Back Home”: Malaise in Anthropology’ in Dell Hymes
(ed), Reinventing Anthropology, New York (1969), p.90
liii
I could myself experience the community feeling of the Odin during a one week workshop
about the relationship between voice and movement. Ready to be disappointed given my high
expectations, I was surprised by the community feeling at the isolated house of the Odin, in the
isolated Danish village –getting to Holstebro was rather complicated-. As soon as I entered the
building I understood that I was in a kind of sub-society with its own rules: rules of trust,
generosity, sharing and hard work.

liv Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe. London. (1995), p. 144

lv
Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre. (1993) London, p. 179
lvi
Eugenio Barba, Paper Canoe. London (1995), p. 6-7
lvii
Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre, (1993) London, p.115-116
lviii
Mel Gussow in his article ’Stage: ‘Million’ by Odin group of Denmark’, in The New York Times,
May 10, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/10/theater/stage-million-by-odin-group-of-
denmark.html
lix
Ned Chaillet quoted by Ian Watson in Towards a Third Theatre (1993) London, p. 116
lx
Henrik Lundren quoted by Ian Watson in Towards a Third Theatre, (1993) London, p. 117
lxi
Ann-Marie Wrange wrote: ’Sara Regina Fonseca med kraftful colombianskt patos i Cumbia-
Kumbé’, Dans Tidningen, nr5/2007, p20.
lxii
Wanting ‘to say’ something through dance is, for me, an artistic choice. I am aware that
dance does not work as a literal translation of verbalized thoughts, but I believe that dance
equals language in its communicative potential, a potential that can be ignored, avoided or
consciously used. The latter is my choice.

lxiii
This was the second version of the text: ‘Cumbia-Kumbé/You are a child of many Gods/Of
greed, compassion, of mystical souls/White skin black heart/An instant of love in a foreign
land/The other who scares but charms/Flesh in the lips/Faith in the heart/Dark in the soul/Pride
in the dance/That panther now worships one God/That Virgen now dresses in
extravagances/Cumbia Kumbé/Black skin white heart/A land which was foreign for
both/Encounters of blood and love/That panther now dresses in white/That Virgen now dares to
be glad/You cradle the pains/You sing, you dance/The daughter of all/Cumbia-Kumbé’. It is clear
for me now that this text reveals my romantic vision of Colombian cultural syncretism: the
native Americans, the Spanish conquerors and the African slaves. This romanticism consists in
being pride of our ‘universal cultural heritage’ which makes Latin American culture a very
complex one, full of contrasts, underlying meanings, resistances, emotional paradoxes. I still
have this romantic idea, but I am more aware of its vulnerability. Six months later I changed the
text again. The romantic paradoxes remain, as I still feel they are true, but I juxtapose them
with an awareness of the presence of the audience and the question of difference. Am I
different from them? Why do I want to be ‘the other’? Why do they want me to be the ‘other’? I
started to think that this ‘differentiation’ was a political decision more than an essential fact.
Here are some extracts from of the text ‘I am an unfinished deal of war and love/Of greed,
compassion, of mystical souls/I have died many times/Many times have been reborn/I dance to
forget, to remember, to resist/You look at me from the distance/ To escape from yourself/And
perhaps, to escape from me...I keep looking inwards/To defend myself...A discrete Jaguar, an
exuberant Virgin/Once, I hated the sword/But fell in love with the mother of God/Here I dance
my rage/ There I dance your soul / Hold tight my dance /It’s bleeding my children/It’s singing to
life/I whisper the scars of my present/I show you the gaps of my past/You look from the
distance/And I have to say/Despite of my dance/And your life away/You and I DO BELONG
TOGETHER‘
lxiv
The links between violent massacres in Latin America and Chiquita Brands Company has a
long history, and the articles and documentaries about it is well known within activist groups. I
provide here one link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONCTOiKT42U
lxv
The last scene of Cumbia-Kumbé is a festive dance. I open the scene by running among the
spectators distributing bananas, and announcing the party. Each banana has a paper-made
banana leaf attached, with printed information about a number of facts related to Chiquita
Brands’ violation of human rights in Colombia.
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Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice, London (2000), P. 84