Inside the Skeleton of the Whale

Inside the Skeleton of the Whale
Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley dialogue with partecipants who have seen the films of the performance and sent questions

Webinar in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English and Italian

Free participation; registration is required at the following link: https://bit.ly/4nl6zfV

Films of the performance are available HERE

Odin Teatret’s Inside the Skeleton of the Whale, directed by Eugenio Barba, premiered in 1997 and was last performed in 2022, the year Odin Teatret left Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium.

The performance has involved several generations of actors. In an early version, fifty spectators sit at a table, eat bread and olives, and drink wine. Another version, without tables, could accommodate up to two hundred spectators.

Subtitled “Before the Law” from a short story by Franz Kafka, the “skeleton” of the title refers to a essentiality that focusses on the dramaturgical backbone of a performance, which is to say the energy of the actors and of their physical and vocal actions.

Based on the structure of a previous Odin Teatret production, Kaosmos, but with texts from another production, The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus, Inside the Skeleton of the Whale reveals the complexity of information inherent in scores repeated for years, in a different context, without props, scenery, or costumes.