Butterflies and paper canoes

By Nehad Selaiha
For five days last month, from 18-22 February, the Wallace Theatre became a destination for many theatre artists and lovers. Every afternoon they dropped everything, rushed through the crazy Cairo traffic and presented themselves with rare punctuality at the door of the theatre at 4pm. The occasion was a series of workshops and demonstrations, ending with a performance, presented by Eugenio Barba, the founder of the Odin theatre in Denmark and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and a major influence in contemporary theatre, with author, actress and director Julia Varley, an active force at Odin Theatre since she joined it in 1976. The event, planned and organised by AUC's Performing Arts Department, was primarily intended for the benefit of students and faculty -- an attempt, perhaps, to dislodge the long-standing tradition of realistic acting adopted by that department over many years and introduce fresh modes and influences. The Cairo theatre community, however, was not excluded and any one who showed interest was generously invited to take part for free.
Of those who came few had heard of Barba or read any of his works and could not be expected to grasp his complex, many-faceted thinking on theatre or the intricacies of his multi-layered training and working methods in such a short time. And even those who knew something about him -- either through the Arabic translation of James Roose-Evans' book Experimental Theatre from Stanislavsky to Peter Brook, which contains a chapter on him, or Ian Watson's Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, which appeared among the publications of CIFET last September -- found some of his ideas somewhat esoteric, teasingly paradoxical and even bizarre. And yet for many, these five long and intensive afternoon sessions, held in the cloistered dimness of the Wallace while the world whirled madly by outside, in Tahrir Square, provided an unforgettable experience, at once challenging, humbling and liberating.
Describing how he felt about our meeting place in his farewell speech on the last day, Barba compared it to one of those old catacombs in which the first Egyptian Christians retired to escape their persecutors and meet secretly with other disciples.
Fragments of real stories merge with others from poems, fictional tales and mystical insights and are interspersed with scientific accounts of the life-cycle of the butterfly and the theories of modern physics about the nature of matter, reality and atomic events
And true, the few Egyptian artists who regularly attended were all rebels, renegades in search of a new path, a new horizon. They came from the fringe, from the marginalised independent groups that started mushrooming in Egypt in the mid-80s and since then have been fighting for survival, against great odds, protecting their identity as an alternative to either the commercial of the subsidised mainstream theatre -- what Barba would call a "third theatre" (though in his case the term would refer to an alternative to traditional and experimental theatre). Barba has described such artists as small, floating islands or little paper canoes, floating from shore to shore across dangerous waters.
The sense of community -- even of conspiracy -- which Barba vividly felt and expressed in his metaphor of the catacomb was shared by our independent artists and translated into a bond of solidarity which transcended technical choices and artistic considerations. Not that these were ignored: indeed, they were given great and meticulous attention by both Barba and Verley. But the truly inspiring and often deeply moving aspect of their performance both in the workshops and demonstrations was the way technical procedures and aesthetic questions were constantly related to a deeper level of existence, to personal needs and wounds, ethical choices, questions of identity and cultural transcendence, to the dignity, wholeness and integrity of the human body as a creative and spiritual force. In this context the rigorous discipline, arduous training, complete dedication and ascetic living which Barba demands from his artists become a means of achieving the essence of theatre, not as performance or just an artistic form, but as a form of being and reacting -- as a way, as he puts it in his fascinating book Theatre, Solitude, Craft, Revolt, "of being present... and seeking more human relationships with the purpose of creating a social cell in which intentions, aspirations and social needs begin to be transformed into actions."
Theatre as a form of being and reacting regardless of styles or expressive tendencies is a key concept in Barba's definition of what he calls Third Theatre, and it is a concept that many independent theatre groups in Egypt and all over the world would readily embrace and identify with. Most of them would also agree with him that they "do not dream of themselves as being vehicles for great words, great messages, or great debates, but seek a way to bring the individual into contact with the individual, the different with the different."
Like Barba, who became disenchanted with Marxism during his three year apprenticeship with Grotowski in Poland in the early sixties and lost his faith in the power of political theatre to change the world, many of our young independent theatre groups believe that the real social value of theatre can most effectively be traced in the new relationships forged through the producing of performances between spectator and actor which can sometimes be subversive and disruptive at a deeper level than language. Out of this faith in relationships as the fertile soil for theatrical vitality, ISTA was born -- a neutral open space where the great masters from the east and west can compare their experiences and try to discover shared principles which underlie all performance, regardless of geography or culture, at the pre-expressive level, and constitute the secret art of the performer everywhere. The fruits of this research are recorded in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology composed by Barba and Nicola Savarese, and in explaining some of them to his audience at the Wallace, Barba used Varley to illustrate them.
Barba's four directing workshops were so condensed, so crammed full of ideas, stories, names, personal recollections and technical and historical information that it was sometimes difficult to digest all one was offered. Barba, however, managed to make everything he said or did come across as quite interesting and even entertaining. Small and dark, with soft, silvery hair and always in sandals and a short, sleeveless vest over a shirt, he seemed completely at ease, like a man leisurely moving around his own living room. He talked informally, adopting an intimate conversational tone as if confiding personal memories to a friend. His presence was riveting even when one's mind wandered and lost track of what he was saying. Without a trace of pretentiousness or pomposity, he presented a rare image combining the candid and fresh simplicity of a child and the wisdom and profundity of an ancient sage.
But Barba's workshops and the ideas and theories he propounded would have had a lesser impact without Julia Varley's valuable demonstrations. Her first, entitled The Echo of Silence, was devoted to vocal training and the creative management of the actor's voice to interpret the text and enrich it with new rhythms, echoes and associations, and the second, The Dead Brother, concentrated on the creative use of the imagination in physical improvisations to compose movement scores, create a vital stage presence and make perceptible the multiple meanings embedded in a text, what its words try to conceal or leave unsaid. These demonstrations made Barba's theories come alive, giving them substance, a pulsating dynamic presence, force and, most crucially, credibility. Alone, on a bare stage, without sets, lighting, costumes or props, except for one chair, Varley managed to enthrall her audience mentally and sensorially, command their deep respect and even inspire them with a sense of awe. She was the embodiment of the creative performer, of the disciplined, dedicated, hardworking artist, in full command of her instruments, material and techniques; she was also a concrete, living and irrefutable validation of Barba's insights and the road travelled by the Odin Teatret for over 35 years.
But the highest point of Varley's contribution in those five days was her performance, on the last day, in Dona Musica's Butterflies, an Odin Teatret production for which she also wrote the text and designed the scenography. It is a strange and haunting text which uses theatre as setting, material and starting point, and the dialectical relationship between theatrical character, actress, author and director as a vehicle to explore the meaning of identity, reality and theatre, in the end revealing their fragility, vulnerability, uncertainty and transience. Varley revives a character, Dona Musica, she had acted in a previous performance, Kaosmos, and sets her on the stage to talk and tell her story. But what Dona Musica presents us with is a curious montage of what seem at first wildly incongruous elements. Fragments of real stories merge with others from poems, fictional tales and mystical insights and are interspersed with scientific accounts of the life-cycle of the butterfly and the theories of modern physics about the nature of matter, reality and atomic events. But, as in all highly poetical or mystical compositions, through the seeming chaos one can glimpse a unifying force, best described as a surge, a flow.
Early in the play Dona Musica mentions that her name in Kaosmos was inspired by another character in Paul Claudel's Le Soulier de Satin, then remembers that he had made his Dona Musica say: "When words can only be used for dispute, why then not be aware that through chaos there is a sea of darkness at our disposal?"
She later describes what the real actress, Julia Varley, had tried to achieve in her representation of her on stage in terms that vividly evoke the sea: "Infinity, to be and not be, flowing and changing, the shadow, what cannot be known and understood, the dance and the dancer who are one and the same... alteration, motion without rest, rising and sinking without a fixed law; it is only change that is at work here; it is like water in its movement."
Another unifying force is the image of the butterfly which weaves in and out of the text and visually dominates the performance. Like the sea, it is never fixed, constantly changing and though fragile it has survived longer than dinasaurs. Soon, the image of the white butterfly darting among carnations links up with the image of the paper canoe (which Barba used as a title for one of his books) and we are back in a circle to the sea. All are metaphors for life and in the performance Varley adds others, like the candle burning inside a small coffin-like box and the garden shaped like a circle, bordered with flowers and finally invaded by death in the shape of a dancing figure with a skull for a head, holding a flower in his grinning mouth and sporting on his chest a blue butterfly, pierced and framed.
Why a blue butterfly?
"Because it is precious," Julia explains. "It only lives one day." The final image is of death sitting on Dona Musica's chair, beside her small round table, and wearing her long white wig while the actress, Julia, having removed her makeup and wig, quietly withdraws. It was funny, horribly grotesque and infinitely sad.
This performance, the first by the Odin Teatret in Egypt and the Arab world, brought together all the threads we had been following in the workshops and demonstrations of the previous days, weaving them into a vivid, coherent image which not only bodied forth the methods, techniques and aesthetic values of that rare group of artists, but also revealed their existential preoccupations, the philosophical influences on their work, and the rich and diverse cultural sources on which they draw. It was a grand finale for a marvellous week.
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