The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work

Abstract

Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.