Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-12T16:25:12.400Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Third Theatre: a Legacy from Us to Ourselves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology has always been substantiated by a body of written theory. In earlier issues of NTQ he has developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual – most recently, in NTQ20 (1989), discussing the way in which the actor's body is falsely perceived as an ‘instrument’, somehow separate from himself, and exploring the processes which give the actor a true ‘second nature’, distinguishing his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’. In the present article, he looks rather at the company or the lone practitioner pursuing a vision of theatre beyond the safe confines of institutional theatre. Such ‘Third Theatre’ may be short-lived – sometimes to be revered in retrospect, sometimes almost lost to history, sometimes confined to a theory never realized in practice. Eugenio Barba looks at the elements which these disparate kinds of ‘Third Theatre’ have in common, including a shared concern with the search for meaning, necessarily combined with a ‘personal discovery of the craft’ – that ‘patient building up of our own physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional relationship with texts and spectators, without conforming to those balanced and proved relationships current at the centre of theatre’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)