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.
This film is dedicated to Augusto Omolu, whose dances of the orixás in the Brazilian candomble made Eugenio Barba experience the thousand colours of energy. Augusto joined the ISTA ‘village’, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, in 1994, in Londrina, Brazil. Eugenio Barba comments: “The energy of the actor and the dancer is not something indescribable and mysterious. It is something precise, which everyone can recognise; energy is the ability to shape muscular and nervous potential in a situation of organised representation.
The question that the actor and the dancer must ask is not what energy is, but how to shape the different temperatures of energy effectively. How to move, how to remain immobile, how to put into vision one’s physical presence and transform it into scenic presence and therefore expression.”