The Paper Canoe

by Eugenio Barba

An enormously exciting, beautifully written and very moving work. The Paper Canoe comprises a fascinating dialogue with such masters of theatre as Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Craig, Copeau, Brecht, Artand and Decroux.

Genres: Theatre, Nonfiction, Anthropology

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Eugenio Barba is an Italian author and theatre director based in Denmark. He is the founder of the Odin Theatre and the International School of Theatre Anthropology, both located in Holstebro, Denmark.

Reviews

[Keja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insight molto affascinante sulla "filosofia dell'attore" e sul lavoro minuzioso che questi deve compiere per instaurare una totale sovrapposizione tra mente e corpo, tra movimento e pensiero. Grazie Maestro.

P.S. Trovatevi qualcuno che parli di voi come Barba con Stanislavskij

[Jessica López-Barkl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have started working with a theater company in Sullivan County called the NACL Theatre, and they develop work inspired by Eugenio Barba's work. One of the Artistic Directors, Tannis Kowalchuk gave me the book to read in December, and it was a dense reading. It starts off pretty easy, but then it becomes a dream within a dream and even Ariadne is used as a metaphor. I started using the SQ3R reading technique to make sure I could retain some information from one chapter to the next.
I liked the book a lot. I thought it put into words things that I've thought about in my head for a long time, but didn't have the vocabulary, myself, for it.
I have several quotes to illustrate this:
“Performance study nearly always tends to prioritize theories and utopian ideas, neglecting an empirical approach. Theatre Anthropology directs its attention to empirical territory in order to trace a path among various specialized disciplines, techniques, aesthetics that deal with performing. It does not attempt to blend, accumulate or catalogue the performer’s techniques. It seeks the elementary: the technique of techniques. On one hand this is a utopia. On the other, it is another way of saying, with different words, learning to learn.”
“The performer’s work fuses, into a single profile, three different aspects corresponding to three distinct levels of organization. The first aspect is individual, the second is common to all those who belong to the same performance genre. The third concerns all performers from every era and cultures. These three aspects are:
(i) The performer’s personality, her/his sensitivity, artistic intelligence, social persona: those characteristics which render the individual performer unique and uncopiable;
(ii) The particularities of the theatrical traditions and the historical-cultural context through which the performer’s unique personality manifests itself;
(iii) The use of the body-mind according to extra-daily techniques based on transcultural, recurring principles. These recurring-principles are defined by Theatre Anthropology as the field of pre-expressivity.”
"The study of the performance practicies of the past is essential. Theater history is not just the reservoir of the past, it is also the reservoir of the new, a pool of knowledge that from time to time makes it possible for us to transcend the present. The entire history of the theater reforms of the twentieth century, both in the East and in the West, shows the strong link of interdependence between teh reconstruction of the past and new artistic creation...The historian without awareness of teh practical craft corresponds to the 'artist' shut withing the confines of her/his own practice, ignorant of the whole course of teh river in which her/his little boat is navigating, and yet convinced of being in touch with the only true reality of the theater..."
“ ‘Stage business’ does not belong only to the Western tradition. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Kabuki performer Kaneko Kichizaemone, in a treatise on the performer’s art entitled DUST IN THE EARS refers to a statement made by Matsumoto Nazaemon: in certain performances, when only one performer is dancing, the other performers turn their backs to the audience, sit in front of the musicians and relax. ‘I myself don not relax’, says Matsumoto Nazaemon. ‘Even though I am there in front of the musicians, I am performing the dance in my mind. If I did not do so, the view of my back would be so displeasing that the performance would be brought to a halt.’ “
“The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, an avid Western film fan, wondered why, in all the final shoot-outs, the hero shoots faster even if his adversary is the first to reach for his gun. Bohr asked himself if some physical truth might not explain this convention. He came to the conclusion that such a truth did indeed exist: the first to draw lives because he is faster, and is faster because he doesn’t have to decide, he is decided. This brilliant discovery was the result of the whimsical empirical research: Bohr and his assistants went off to a toy shop, bought water pistols, and back in their laboratory, dueled for hours and hours.”
“The theater’s raw material is not the actor, nor the space, nor the text, but the attention, the seeing, the hearing, the mind of the spectator. Theater is the art of the spectator.”
“The theatrical profession is also a country to which we belong, a chosen homeland, without geographical borders. Today we accepts it as normal that a Mexican philologist has discussions with an Indian philologist, that a Japanese architect share experiences on an equal basis with a Swedish architect, just as it appears to us to be a form of cultural insufficiency that Chinese medicine and European medicine have not become two complementary aspect of a single body of knowledge. It is not strange that performers meet within the common borders of their profession. It is strange that it seems strange.” (46-47)
“The expression ‘when you feel ten in your heart, express seven in your movements’ refers to the following. When a beginner studying the no learns to gesture with his hands and to move his feet, he will first do as his teacher tells him and so will use all his energies to perform in the way in which he is instructed. Later, however, he will learn to move his arms to a lesser extent than his own emotions suggest, and he will be able to moderate his own intentions. This phenomenon is by no means limited to dance and gesture. In terms of general stage deportment, no matter how slight a bodily action, if the motion is more restrained than the emotion behind it, the emotion will become the Substance and the movements of the body its Function, thus moving the audience.” – Zeami in THE PAPER CANOE, pg. 55
“IN the instant which precedes the action, when all the necessary force is ready to be released into space but as though suspended and still under control, the performer perceives her/his energy in the form of sats, of dynamic preparation. The sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire organism, which reacts with tensions, even in immobility. It is the point at which one decides to act. There is a muscular, nervous and mental commitment, already directed towards an objective. It is the tightening or the gathering together of oneself from which the action departs. It is in the spring before it is sprung. It is the attitude of the feline ready for anything: to bound forward, to withdraw, to return to a position of rest. An athlete, a tennis player or boxer, immobile or moving, ready to react. It is John Wayne facing an adversary. It is Buster Keaton about to take a step. It is Maria Callas on the verge of an aria.” (55-56)
“During apprenticeship, individual differentiation passes through the negation of the differentiation of the sexes. The field of complementarity dilates. This is noticeable when the work on the pre-expressive level takes no account of what is masculine and what is feminine (as in modern dance or the training of many theater groups) or when a performer explores masculine and feminine roles indiscriminately (as in classical Asian theater). The double-edged nature of her/his particular energy becomes tangibly evident. The balance between the two poles, Animus-energy and Anima-energy, is preserved…Also in the Indian tradition, performers work within the polarity of the energy and not according to the correspondence between the character and the performer’s sex. The styles of Indian dance are divided into two categories, lasya (delicate) and tandava (vigorous), depending on the way the movements are executed and not on the sex of the performer…The Balinese bayu is a literal interpretation of the increase and decrease of a force which lifts the whole body and whose complementary aspects (keras/vigorous and manis/soft) reconstruct the variations and nuances of life…Keras and manis, tandava and lasya, Animus and Anima, do not refer to concepts which are completely equivalent. What is similar, however, in different cultures, is the necessity to specify, by means of an opposition, the extreme poles of the range in which the performer mentally and practically breaks down the energy of her/his natural bios modulating it into scenic bios, that which enlivens, from the inside, her/his technique. These terms do not refer to women or men or to feminine or masculine qualities, but to softness and vigour as flavours of the energy. The warrior god, Rama, for example, is often represented in the lasya, ‘sof’, way. The alternation of Anima-energy and Animus-energy is clearly perceptible in Indian, Balinese and Japanese performers who tell and dance the stories of several characters; or in Western performers who, from the beginning, have been formed by a training which does not take sexual differences into consideration.” (63-64)
“During the years of my work with Grotowski, I spoke about the wishful thinking-concrete thinking polarity. Wishful thinking indicates a particular phase in the process of planning a production: giving free rein to the vision which obsesses us, dreaming with open eyes, believing in and letting oneself be magnetized by the suggestivity of the theme of the performance, letting the mythos triumph. Concrete thinking implies: profaning the fascination of the theme with cold analysis, vivisecting it with skepticism and a caustic attitude, transfixing it with our experience of reality, not what is known, but what I know.” (89)
“To the adult, indeed, children’s drawings appear to be free, fanciful, but inadequate, often clumsy, scrawls. But they actually adhere to an ironclad logic. A child does not draw what he sees and how he sees it, but what he has experienced. If he experiences an adult as a pair of long legs from which a face suddenly bends over him, he will draw this adult as a circle on top of two sticks. Or else he will paint his own ‘portrait’, giving himself enormous feet because he is happy with his new shoes. If his mother is more important to him than his father, when he draws his parents he will make his mother bigger than his father. He will draw a rectangle with a pole sticking out from each corner because a table is a flat surface with four legs…What makes children’s drawings ‘infantile’ is not their approximate or ‘primitive’ nature, but the presence of only one logic. However, many ‘good’ drawings made by older children or adults also adhere to only one logic. The fact that they are more recognizable, that they are more recognizable, that they demonstrate the possession of shared rules, does not make them less banal. The same thing happens with performances. There are performances of which one understands nothing, others which one understands everything. Both are inert…In the works of a good painter, numerous logics act contemporaneously. The artist is part of a tradition, whose rules s/he uses or consciously breaks, causing surprise. In addition to transmitting a way of seeing, s/he also represents a way of experiencing the world and translates unto the canvas not only the image but also the ‘gestus’, the quality of motion which has guided the brush. Thus one can say that the painter has ‘kept the child in himself’, not because he has kept his innocence and ingenuity (oddly enough, we like to think that children are innocent), not because he has not been domesticated by a culture, but because, with the concision of his craft, he has woven together parallel, or rather, twin logics, without substituting one for the other.” (92-93)
“I Made Pasek Tempo continues speaking. He tells about the Bhagewan (master) Dhomya and his student Utamaniyu, who looked after his master’s cows but was given nothing to eat. It is a long, complicated, obscure story. Everything Utamaniyu does to get food is rebuked by his master. Desperate, he eats some maduri leaves, the sap of which is poisonous. He goes blind and falls into a well. The Bhagewan pulls him out, asks him how he happened to fall into an empty well. Utamaniyu replies: ‘I asked others for food and you said I was greedy; I licked the cowsmilk that had fallen on the grass and you reprimanded me; I ate maduri leaves and I lost my sight.’ […] Bhagewan Dhomya approves: ‘For the first time, you are sincere. Now you may consider yourself my student.’ […] A few months earlier, in the sophisticated atmosphere of a conference on interculturalism organized by Richard Schechner and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Sanjukta Panigrahi had described her decade of work at ISTA and her collaboration, at first apprehensive and prudent, with masters from other cultures and theatrical genres. She had concluded by referring to something of which swhe had become convinced: ‘The buildings are different, but they rest on the same ground.’ […] “When I began’, Sanjukta remembered, ‘the teacher did no correct me, did not say anything. He made me sit and work with eye exercises. Day after day. I went home and complained to my mother. “The guru knows nothing”.’ […] I Made Pasek Tempo shows me a copy of the ADIPARWA, the classic containing the story of Dhomya and Utamaniyu. I ask him if, at his age (sixty-five? Seventy?), he still likes to read. He answers:
There are two things which are difficult:
-to become a pragina pradnian, a complete performer who knows how to dance, play instruments, who knows the classical texts, how to teach and also how to learn;
-menjiwai, to make one’s soul and thoughts live, to give life to what one wants to achieve, to make one’s own spirit of the topeng, of the mask, so that whatever it is that one wants to transmit through the characters, the spectators can feel it, appreciate it, and say: ‘This is truly the dalem, the king, the panisar, the clown.’” (95)
“The pre-expressive level is therefore an operative level; it is not a level that can be separated from expression, but a pragmatic category, a practice which, during the process, develops and organizes the performer’s scenic bios and generates new relationships and unexpected possibilities of meaning…As a level of organization of scenic bios, the pre-expressive has a consistency of its own, independent of the consistency of the ulterior level of organization, that of the meaning. Independent does not mean devoid of relationships. It means that this distinction has to do with the logic of the process and not of the result, where the various levels of organization must blend into an organic unity, must reconstruct the believability of life by means of the artifices of art, and where every detail must contribute to the unity of the whole.” (108)
“At the beginning of a career, training is a way to introduce a young person to a specific theatrical environment. If s/he is sufficiently obstinate, perseverant, not self-indulgent, giving up the exercises which have already been mastered and searching for or inventing others, and if, above all, s/he does not say, ‘It’s not useful anymore, the important thing is elsewhere!’, then with time, training will carry this young person towards individual independence. The function of the training inverts. At the start, it serves to integrate the beginner into an environment. Later, it serves to protect her/his independence from the very same environment, from the director, from the choreographer, from the spectators. It becomes, as Patrice Pavis said, the performer’s ‘physical diary’. A diary is not simply a factual account. It can also be a treasure chest of technical, ethical or spiritual riches which can inspire one and upon which one can draw during a creative process.” (110)
“The expression ‘body-mind’ is not an expeditious formula to indicate the obvious inseparability of one from the other. It indicates an objective which is difficult to reach when one passes from daily behavior to the extra-daily behavior which the performer must know how to repeat and keep alive night after night. The performer who begins from the inside must deal with the risks inherent in an accidental sequence of movements which tends to succumb to entropy and, with time, to be carried out mechanically…The performer who begins from the outside, who uses a design of movements, or what the Japanese call a kata, modelled by her/himself or others, is in danger from the outset of submitting mechanically to pure dynamism, instead of living in it. Does this mean that the two ways are equivalent? No. It is more probable that an internal movement can be condensed from a well-executed and incorporated kata than the contrary, that a kata, with precise and repeatable form, can emerge from an internal movement. Without the precision of the external shape, the action cannot be fixed and therefore repeated independently of the performer’s state of mind…Until he worked with the actors of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht criticized ‘the mystical and cultist’ nature of the Stanislavski system. Later, practical experience made him realize that the divergence between his ideas and Stanislavski’s concerning the actor was not due to a real contraposition but to a different point of view: Stanislavski looked at the author’s text from the actor’s point of view; Brecht, on the other hand, looked at the actor on the basis of the author’s demands…In other words, Stanislavski’s method was work on the pre-expressive, on which Brecht could also construct the form of the expression based on alienation. ‘Now it will be my turn to defend Stanislavski from his supporters’, Brecht exclaimed after having seen a Moscow Art Theatre performance (Ostrovski’s BURNING HEART), based on the precision of the actors’ scores which made their acting unrealistic and ‘alienated’. Since he identified Stanislavski’s ‘theory’ with perezhivanie, he added: ‘Now I will have to say of him what is said of me – the practice contradicts the theory.’” (114-115)
“The performer follows several roads at the same time. It is not important which roads they are, what the method may be, which way is the ‘way to the beyond’. It is important that at least one of these roads be secret, shielded from the spectator’s gaze.” (118)
“Louis Jouvet suggests the use of certain empirical procedures when collaborating with Chance. He says that the work must go through two phases: a period of dissolution of order, acquired knowledge, and certainties; and then a moment of recomposition. The phase which he calls ‘dissociation’ consists of a conscious fall into disorder, into the fragmentation of the materials, into the abandonment of the interpretive plans, into refusal of technical principles and stylistic experimentations, until one arrives at a ‘mobile irresolution’, at an uncertainty which he defines as ‘necessary in order to free the intelligence’. It is this state of voluntary turmoil which makes possible the ‘multiplication of ideas, attempts, points of view, until a paradox is reached’. It is the moment in which one declares war on everything one knows, not just because of a taste for the different, but ‘to create doubt within oneself, to elicit the mystery’. It is voluntary ruin, a systematic deterioration and destruction which recall the alchemists’ way of thinking, but which in Jouvet are precise indications of work.” (119)

[David Lozano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugenio Barba writes more thoroughly on the techniques of theatre performance than any other director I know. His books are astonishingly detailed studies of the corporeal language of the performer, quoting lectures and books from masters of theatre that have never before been translated into English, and drawing on personal reflections and anecdotes from his own legendary career as one of the “theatre reformers” from the 20th century. It’s a great loss for contemporary and future practitioners that Eugenio Barba is not a significant point of reference for the creation and study of theatre in the United States. Read his books while you can.

[Anna Castillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got to read this text for my a class at the dance university.
He has a great and personal opinion on what a performer has to look for after technique.
Its a very relevant and difficult question to solve.
Loved the text and helped me a lot for my creative processes.

[Ahmet Bakir Sbaai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discovering this book was a godsend. After a year of academic boredom: endless research and exams, I discovered Eugenio Barba. The field is completely new: I had never read in the anthropology of theater, the man's life is fascinating, and his language is seriously poetic. I started translating the book into Arabic from the first reading.

[Norma Fuentes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aún me cuestiono ciertas miradas coloniales que percibo en Barba pero no cuento con suficiente contexto como para tomar una postura.