The Other Side of Theatre

Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley in conversation with Miguel Rubio**

Julia Varley: The title of this meeting, “The Other Side of Theatre,” stems from our interest in listening not so much to theatrical technique as to motivations and personal stories, with their details and anecdotes. The first question I’d like to ask concerns the first meeting between Miguel and Eugenio. It was in 1978, during a meeting of theatre groups organized by Cuatrotablas in Ayacucho, a small town in the Andes. What happened during this first meeting?

Miguel Rubio:
I have mixed feelings about my encounter with Odin; it was both fascination and rejection. I vividly remember the children watching Tage Larsen on his enormous stilts, and one of them saying, “Mom! Some gringos have been here!” My distrust prevented me from fully enjoying it. My mind couldn’t accept it.

At the time, I wrote a very harsh article for a left-wing magazine. The headline read “Yuyachkani Takes the Floor”; an article that rejected the invaders, the new colonizers, and the preachers. I remember going to Holstebro years later, Eugenio pulled out the magazine and said to me, “Do you remember this article?” Today we have a relationship of respect and deep friendship that makes us different but with very strong bonds.

Since then, our family has spread to Denmark, to distant Holstebro. Today, it’s so familiar to us that we come from another tradition, that of the old Latin American masters: Santiago García, Enrique Buenaventura, Atahualpa del Cioppo, María Escudero, Augusto Boal, Osvaldo Dragún, Vicente Revuelta, among others—masters who called us to invent theater.

Eugenio Barba:
When we arrived in Peru in 1978, Odin Teatret was accustomed to being attacked by European political groups. It was the decade of a new theatre culture. Many groups were ideologically left-wing, at least in their slogans, but in terms of theatrical impact—that is, sensory impact—they were very weak. So I considered Yuyachkani’s reaction natural. Of course, when anger or indignation remains just words, it’s like a surgeon who, filled with rage and indignation at the injustice of medicine in society, continues with his slogan instead of becoming a better surgeon and helping the patient.

It was very difficult to make those political groups understand that the real battle also consisted in honing the tools of the trade, not in talking in the hope of convincing. You can’t convince an audience if the show doesn’t reveal moments of doubt and self-irony that have to do with beauty, wonder, and a different reality.

Julia Varley: Now I’d like to move on to the power of the imagery you both create when you work on your shows. Where does this power of the imagination, this theatricality, this spectacularity come from?

Eugenio Barba:
I’ve absorbed some elements from my family’s culture, characterized by a certain social status, a particular way of thinking, behaving, and, above all, a particular approach to the ritualization of daily life. One of the strongest images I have is that of my grandmother, with whom I shared a room. My grandmother was old, had white hair, and every morning she would wake up at five, stand in front of the mirror, and spend a long time combing her long hair.
Walking in my bed, I would observe her gestures, her movements, her postures, whose almost ritualistic rhythm was so charged with energy and transparency. When I see my actors’ work, I wonder if I’m not trying to find in what they do—even if it’s very different from what my grandmother did—that same sense of archaism.

I’ve always wanted the theater to be a place where the actor could convey to the spectator that experience of not understanding something and, at the same time, having the feeling that the actor is telling them something very important.

Miguel Rubio: As a child, I lived in a working-class neighborhood near downtown Lima. Across the street from our house was the Heeren estate, where former President Pardo’s family lived. For the neighborhood children, it was a fantasy land. We would sneak in to spy on the family’s life, especially at the parties they threw in the overgrown gardens. At night, the butler would take bloodhounds for walks through the neighborhood. There were about fifty of them, rummaging through the garbage. Observing all these contrasts around me stimulated my imagination.

A few blocks away, there was a military barracks from which the president’s mounted escort departed. There were about sixty men on horseback, impeccably dressed, some carrying wind and percussion instruments. A colonial-style horse-drawn carriage brought up the rear. They were headed to the presidential palace to accompany the president to an official ceremony. All this happened right in front of my door. And fifty meters away, the church of the Virgen del Carmen, where festivals, processions, and fireworks were once held, completing the picture of a sumptuous theatricality in which I lived my childhood.

These visually evocative images, which I had lived with for so long, I rediscovered later during trips with the group to traditional Andean festivals. This theatricality of cultures gave us the impetus to question the notion of text-based theater, and it became a fundamental tenet of our theater: theater is not literature, theater is not a literary genre. This is reinforced when we observe other forms of writing in our history. Our native cultures did not have literary writing; writing was imposed by force. Therefore, reevaluating these other forms of writing was crucial to recognizing what is written on the body, on ceramics, textiles, murals, and so on.

This is also one of the reasons why, at Yuyachkani, it was natural to work from the body and objects. We use many objects, not necessarily constructed ones, but found objects that are given new meaning on stage. Our latest work, Discurso de Promoción (Graduation Speech), brings together all the objects used at the end, giving the impression of a vast landfill. These objects were mostly abandoned in the Yuyachkani warehouse.

Julia Varley: Both Miguel and Eugenio have worked with the same people, with a group that’s been around for over 50 years, with the same people.
We know of some groups that are just a couple, but Yuyachkani and the Odin Teatret are very rare examples of people who have stayed together for decades. As directors, what drives you to continue—or perhaps to stop working with, I don’t know—the same people?

Eugenio Barba: Working with the same actors goes against the very nature of theatre. Theater’s DNA is built on a double contingency: on the one hand, it must be able to generate income to support those who do it, so the economic aspect is crucial, and this affects the production system, the results, the actors’ techniques, their entire material culture. The other characteristic of our profession’s DNA is the ephemeral nature of relationships. All theater companies, ensembles, groups—they all dissolve after a certain period. There is a contractual term that they respect, and then they leave, due to lack of work or to look for something better.

This was Stanislavsky’s great utopia: an art theatre, a director, actors, and other collaborators with a shared aesthetic affinity and artistic vision. He spoke of ethics and considered the actor an artist, a creator endowed with dignity and originality. I founded Odin Teatret as a group of amateurs. Some actors left, but a core group always remained. This made me think, “I want to work with these actors until I die.” But in the theatre, people stay as long as there are common interests, a stimulus—be it artistic, economic, or political. Sometimes they fall in love and their partner can’t join the group, so they go where the love is. Other times, the work itself isn’t stimulating, and they look for something more interesting.

This forced me to find a completely different dynamic within my group. On the one hand, I try to create stimulating situations to work together on a common project that unites us. On the other hand, there are times when each member of Odin Teatret can pursue their own individuality, their own idiosyncrasies, and their own desires. That group dynamic of introversion and extroversion, centrifugal and centripetal, within Odin Teatret has allowed this unnatural duration of our working relationships.

Miguel Rubio:
I think the healthiest thing is for the new generations to exercise their right to create their own projects, just as we did with our teachers. Yuyachkani can be an inspiration or a point of reference, but not a constraint on creation. I think I’m clear on this, and it doesn’t scare me. If Yuyachkani were to end with the physical disappearance of its members, I hope it ends well, with dignity. I wouldn’t want anyone trying to replicate the experience in the name of what we did. I haven’t had time in these years to think about whether or not I want to work with my colleagues. I haven’t had time because it’s been so, so dizzying, so intense, so powerful that suddenly I realize that in two months we’ll be celebrating fifty years of work, and I’m amazed at how time has flown by and how this process has been.

We’ve experienced crises and responded to them with our work. It’s been a constant challenge, nourishing and grounding our development. We also live in a country in constant crisis.

I think theatre thrives, grows, and develops through its relationship with the outside world, rather than through what happens within the confines of the theater. It’s a sense of constant challenge that fuels the desire to learn.

Julia Varley: Theatre is politics through other means. What does this mean in these uncertain times? Miguel, I know you’ve worked extensively for the Museum of Memory, which exists in both Ayacucho and Lima. Odin Teatret has had many experiences of exchange, moving away from theatre as performance and seeking to make theater a direct experience for the audience. So the question is: in these times, if theatre is politics through other means, what paths do you see today?

Eugenio Barba: It’s crucial to define the words we use, especially when we imagine everyone understands them. What does politics mean to me? If I try to explain it, politics is a desire for change. I don’t like what exists! That’s why I was a communist, because I thought politics could change. After my time in Poland, a communist country with censorship, secret police, lack of freedom of expression, and travel bans, all of this inoculated me against politics and ideologies. But the desire for change remained. So how do you engage in politics without engaging in political discourse, through the media that normally characterizes politics, which we know to be the art of compromise? This is theatre for me: emotional communication: dance and song that express what touches the deepest part of the human being.

As a young man, I thought a revolution could change society. Today, I think I’m simply a humble teacher in a school with ten students, and my job, despite what’s happening in the world, is to give those ten students the best I can. Giving the best means that everyone must learn to defend their difference. Because what you call identity, for me, is difference: the conquest of one’s own difference! People say to me, “At your age, you can relax. Why do you continue, why this stubbornness?” It’s stubbornness because I don’t want that nostalgia to die. If it dies, the whole meaning of what I’ve done all my life dies with it. So I continue to send signals to a very small group of people; some of whom I don’t even know where they are or how they’re doing; maybe they’ve read one of my books, they don’t know me personally. But I know that this small group exists, and to them I’m like a school teacher in a small village in India. To those students sitting on the floor, I try to teach them the mystery of writing, of those symbols on paper, so they can write their own poems. I’ve already been writing my own poems, along with a group of actors and actresses, for fifty-six years.

Miguel Rubio: The first show we staged fifty years ago was called Copper Fist, and its inspiration came from what we saw in the streets of Lima: marches of women, mothers, wives, and children denouncing the massacre of twenty-five miners/workers in the city center.

We were thinking about what show to put on, and in the streets there was this impressive mobilization of women with their children and their imprisoned husbands. Therein lay the real challenge. Why not create a show that would serve that struggle? So we decided to go to their assemblies and tell them, “We’ll create a show to tell your story.”

We didn’t even know how to do it. We went to the prison to visit the incarcerated miners and interview them. The women in the group went to the community kitchens to prepare food, we went to distribute flyers and participate in all the assemblies, and when we finished, after eight months of working on the show, the workers were released from prison and returned to their homes. We had to go to the mining camps to present the work.

When something is true, it has a source of beauty. I don’t seek beauty separated from truth. So I believe this operating principle was important in choosing what we do. Not having a political position in our country is impossible, because even citizenship is denied us. In a country like ours, the most basic rights of citizens are denied. That’s why it’s natural for us to always think in political terms.

There were years when Yuyachkani didn’t stage a play per se; we did action. That action was important; it nourished our vision of theatre, because going from performing theater at the entrance to a union hall at six in the morning to performing theatre on a bus while miners, workers, walked by, sneaking into a mining area, performing theatre in a meeting with fifteen hundred miners, all wearing hard hats and under a light—it was beautiful, impressive… even more impressive was what happened after the performance, when the workers came to express their solidarity, to talk about the performance, to discuss it.

And passing on that learning has been very, very important, and I believe this is what has fueled this political vocation that we have never hidden. Many people who review our works would say: these people haven’t done theatre, because where are the works of those who do… classical works? But we have done theatre by putting our bodies where they needed to be put, and we have done so by bearing witness to our time. We are actors, witnesses of our time, and in this, we have perhaps created a single work with many acts. I believe we have continued the journey begun with our first work.

*The interview is an excerpt from “Conversation on the Nameless, 2021”
**Peruvian director, theater researcher, and founding member of the Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.