This film is part of the Project of Knowledge Sharing “Learning to see – Ten lessons in Theatre Anthropology” by Eugenio Barba, Claudio Coloberti and Julia Varley. Theatre Anthropology is the study of the human being in a situation of organised representation. In the film Eugenio Barba indicates and comments the shared technical principles aiming at building the performer’s presence in different acting and dancing traditions.
The film is dedicated to the Japanese dancer Katsuko Azuma. Eugenio Barba comments: “I was in Tokyo in spring 1980, and a director friend took me to see her lesson. Standing in front of the pupil, Katsuko showed one movement at a time, and the pupil repeated it. Katsuko turned her back to me. For more than an hour I saw only the impulses of her back. I fell in love with her spine. And I invited her, in October 1980, to Bonn, Germany, to the first session of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. The demonstration by Katsuko Azuma in the film is followed by that of Keiin Yoshimura, Japanese dancer of kamigata-mai, the dance of the nô theatre at ISTA in Albino, Italy, in 2016. Finally a demonstration by Odin Teatret actor Torgeir Wethal and a painting by Diego Rivera illustrate further the concept of the pre-expressive level within Theatre Anthropology – the level of the performer’s scenic presence.