Shakuntala among the Olive Trees

Author(s): Mirella Schino and Leo Sykes

Source: Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 92-111
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124304
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 REPORTS

Shakuntala Among the Olive

Mirella Schino

Translated by Leo Sykes

Mirella Schino reports on a 1993 project run by European director Eugenio Barba,
head of Denmark's Odin Teatret, in which thirty Western scholars, actors, and directors
worked with Barba and Sanjukta Panigrahi, Indian Odissi dance artist, in a trans-
cultural, communally oriented collaboration designed to explore ways of expressing the
Sanskrit classical drama Shakuntala in performance. The work was done in three
stages at Fara Sabina, Italy, and Holstebro, Denmark, under the auspices of the Inter-
national School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded by Barba. Through ISTA,
Barba is able to work on methods that differ from but cast light on his work at Odin
Teatret.

Mirella Schino, a member of Eugenio Barba's ISTA, teaches theatre history at the
University of Turin, Italy. She is the author of I1 Teatro di Eleonora Duse (1992)
and, together with Ferdinando Taviani, I1 Segreto della Commedia dell' Arte
(1982).

The Kalidasa drama The Recognition of Shakuntala has a flimsy plot that
is rich in allusions and refined internal references which are impercep-
tible at a first reading and reminiscent of a fable.' Let's begin with a
short summary of the play. While out hunting, a king meets a beautiful
maiden, Shakuntala, in a hermitage. He marries her in a secret but
accepted ritual, gives her a ring and leaves her, pregnant, promising to
return to collect her. Because of the curse of an angry ascetic, the king
forgets her: he will be able to remember her only on seeing the ring he
gave her. But when Shakuntala goes to her husband's palace, she loses
the ring in a river, and it is swallowed by a fish. So the king does not
recognize the girl and she is taken to her mother-a celestial nymph-
on Mount Hemakuta, the land of ascetic perfection. Meanwhile the
fish is caught and the ring found and returned to the king, who re-
gains his memory and finds himself without bride or child. He finds
them again, by chance, after a semidivine battle against a tribe of
demons, enemies of Indra, the king of the gods.

Asian TheatreJournal, Vol. 13, no. I (Spring 1996). ? 1996 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

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REPORTS 93

Shakuntala Is Multiplied
In 1993 Eugenio Barba directed a three-tier project cen
on Kalidasa's play The Recognition of Shakuntala.2 At the heart
project lay the meeting of two parallel paths: that of Barba, the fou
of Odin Teatret and ISTA, and that of Sanjukta Panigrahi, t
former of Odissi classical dance. For years now their paths had r
allel but they had only worked side by side in work demonstrati
The Shakuntala project was a great baroque monument-
singers, Odissi dancers, the Odin actors, musicians and perfo
from different cultures and styles, fireworks, and more-structu
a spiral that pivoted on a central but hidden point: the rediscove
collaboration. In the Shakuntala project the problem of transcu
collaboration-collaboration between East and West or between two
people who for years had been striving for difficult points of encoun-
ter-was simply resolved by adding, side by side, the two different ap-
proaches to the play: the different ways of telling its story. This is what
Barba first named "directions" and later "parallel dramaturgies."
This strategy resulted in performances (or, more precisely, non-
definitive performative forms around the theme of Shakuntala) in which
the working paths of Barba and Panigrahi were developed alongside
each other, like parallel tales, but did not seek integration. It was an
approach full of objective points of interest: the choice of parallel
dramaturgies; the selection of an equidistant meeting point (Barba
was to work on an Indian literary classic, somewhat removed from his
interests as dramaturg-director, whereas Sanjukta was to engage in the
practical task of directing Western actors for the first time); the pres-
ence of a "collective mind" comprising some thirty scholars and direc-
tors who collaborated in Barba's work; the idea, above all, of a journey
in various stages, each stage transformed into a new incarnation and
becoming part of an unforeseen time sequence.
But beyond these objective points of interest there was some-
thing else. There was the environment-that is, ISTA.3 Barba has con-
structed ISTA as a place of unusual collaborations: those with the Asian
artists (primarily Sanjukta Panigrahi) but also with the participants,
scholars, performers, and directors for whom, or with whom, Barba
constructs improbable and exciting levels of communal work. ISTA is a
world that has, above all, produced theoretical research into theatre.
The Shakuntala project threw light on another aspect, too, that until
now had remained hidden: the tendency to create theatrical forms
and theatrical material which are different from those Barba normally
employs as a director and yet which are, I believe, essential to under-
standing a more subterranean transformation in his work.

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94 Schino

ISTA, especially through the Shakuntala project, reveals itself

also as a mirror that reflects the profound logic of Barba's work, which
is otherwise difficult to single out. It is as though Barba has con-
structed a kind of creative world that runs parallel to-and yet is the
reverse of-his theatre. The impulses remain the same as those that
characterize his "normal" work with Odin Teatret, but the directions
(and therefore the working processes) are profoundly different. In his
work with Odin Teatret, for example, there is the need to overcome
the confines of his personal creativity as director-dramaturg. In recent
years (I first became acquainted with Odin Teatret in 1975), the direc-
tor has often left the initial development of the dramaturgy to the
actors. At ISTA the necessity is not so much that of overcoming the
individual limits, but rather that of creating a working community with
the participants who together generate ideas, associations, theories, in-
tentions, and something even more personal and imponderable: cer-
tain shared emotive states, which become producers of thought. It is
something quite different from the emotions of the individual.
This relationship, this unusual collaboration, constituted the
trunk of the Shakuntala project. But in order to see it in all its complex-
ity, it is necessary to begin with the branches, the carriers of questions.

The Branches of the Project

Work on The Recognition of Shakuntala took place in three stages.
The first phase was in a session of the University of Eurasian Theatre,
which is one of the activities of ISTA, and lasted from April 22 to May
30, 1993, in Fara Sabina (Italy). It ended with a closed performance in
which actors and spectators collaborated. In the second phase, the work
was taken up again in Holstebro (Denmark), where Odin Teatret is
based, for ten days at the end of August. Two of the Odin's actor-musi-
cians, Kai Bredholt and Jan Ferslev, had previously spent four weeks in
Bhubaneshwar, India, with Ragunath Panigrahi and his musicians, in
order to compose music they would be able to play together in the per-
formance. Although the work of these musicians and the Danish com-
poser Frans Winther is beyond the scope of this essay, it nevertheless
constituted a working base for Barba's project. In the third phase,
there was a long performance of various episodes on the theme of
Shakuntala from September 4 to 10, 1993, in Holstebro. This perfor-
mance took the form of an opera, composed by Frans Winther, during
the third Festive Week organized in Holstebro by Odin Teatret.4 It had
all the trappings of a public performance, but it was not definitive.
During the first phase of work, during the spring in Fara Sabina,
on a terrace overlooking the olive groves, we participated in the crea-

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REPORTS 95

FIGURE 15. The three Shakuntalas at the Holstebro performance: Sanjukta

Panigrahi (left), Roberta Carreri (center), and Lone Rasmussen (right).
(Photo: Fiora Bemporad)

tion of two parallel mise-en-scenes of Shakuntala, one led by Eugenio

Barba and the other by Sanjukta Panigrahi. The material elaborated
on this occasion (particularly that developed by the actors under the
direction of Sanjukta Panigrahi) created the basis for the mise-en-scene
that was to take place in Holstebro in September. The whole Shakun-
tala project was devised in such a way as to create the possibility of a
number of contradictions. These contradictions, regarding the story of
Shakuntala and the world of Kalidasa, are normal when a Western di-
rector is confronted with a text from a distant culture. But there was

also something else in Barba's work. There seemed to be a search f

contradictions in his own style, his own habits, his own abilities-an
all this in order to help in the conquest of what?

The Sound of ISTA

On the first day of the ISTA session in Fara Sabina, on Apri

1993, Eugenio Barba, Sanjukta Panigrahi, and all the participan
about Shakuntala. Was it a collection of ideas and material for the work
that was about to begin? Or was it perhaps a way of purging oneself o

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96 Schino

the different interpretations, of liberating oneself from them by bring-

ing them to light, in order to see more clearly? It was the usual buzzing
of ISTA-ideas always in motion, at times inexhaustible, at times seem-
ing to spring up and wither too quickly without having had the chance
to mature.

From this buzzing emerged seven themes connected t

of Kalidasa: the hunt as a risk and a penetration into the u
forest as a magical place of enchantment and the unkn
scandal; the link between knowledge and solitude; the bri
sion of Shakuntala as an illusion; necessary violence;
travel. These seven themes, not particularly narrative the
the basis of Barba's work. Sanjukta Panigrahi preferred to
literary path and divided Kalidasa's story into six episodes
seven themes.

But the discussion flowed freely, fluctuating a bit, as often h

pens in the dialogues of ISTA, where most of the participants hav
been collaborating for years and have shared many discussions
experiences. Eugenio Barba began by telling of his wanderings in K
dasa:

Eugenio Barba: Why Shakuntala? The first time I ever heard of it was in
Madras in 1956. I was in India, on my way to Calcutta, in order to visit
the house where Ramakrishna had lived. I went to all the places where
there was a Ramakrishna Mission. In Madras I met a Tamil Buddhist
who gave me a book of Buddhist sayings and a copy of Shakuntala.
got the impression she was some kind ofJuliet. Then I heard it spoke
of again in Poland. The performance Grotowski had made before Th
Ancestors of Mickiewicz, the first of his performances I saw, in 1960, was
Kalidasa's Shakuntala. There was an actor at his theatre who at that
time was conceited and full of himself, called Ryszard Cieslak. He told
me he had decided to join the theatre company after having seen Sha-
kuntala. Cieslak explained to me that at the end, when the two lovers
meet again, Grotowski had transformed them into two old people,
two totally decrepit old people who disappeared into the distance,
supporting one another. And this final image colored the whole work.
I was certainly not seduced by my first contact with Shakuntala. I
thought it was dreadful. But the work fit my way of thinking, because
it seemed to corroborate Grotowski's theory at the time, the theory of
archetypes: the passion of love as an archetypical situation in different
cultures. When thinking of how to organize this meeting in Fara
Sabina, and of how to create an equilibrium in the work between San-
jukta and myself, Shakuntala came to mind. In Salento, at the 1987
ISTA session, we had worked with Sanjukta and Katzuko on Faust.5 It
was a typically European story. What could it evoke for Sanjukta and
Katzuko? I asked myself what I would have done if I had had to work

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REPORTS 97

on an Indian classic. I realized that for Sanjukta Faust was rath

Shakuntala was for me.
When I choose a text, it must be essential to me. If it does not touch
something "painful" in me-not a wound so much as a shadowy area,
something I'm unable to dominate-then why use it? In my terminol-
ogy I call this relationship with the shadowy area "the secret." If this is
not present, then the work does not function. It is the "secret" that
must take the reins of the work. The technical, professional aspect is
important, but it must not dominate.
On rereading Shakuntala, naturally I recognized its greatness, but I
said to myself: "None of this corresponds to my experience." The clas-
sics are like a mountain which we use in order to see into the distance,
and on climbing the mountain we discover our uncertainties.

Now it is Sanjukta who speaks. She has known Barba since 1977
and has participated in ISTA since the first session in 1980, but this is
the first time she talks as a director. She describes Shakuntala, the
character rather than the play.

Sanjukta Panigrahi: It is such a well-known story for us, so accepted,

that it frightens me to think of doing it other than the way it is written.
Because whether the story is right or not, true or not, this is how it has
been accepted. For me personally, Shakuntala represents the true in-
carnation of the Shakti. Shakti means power and strength. Strength
does not mean vigor. There is strength in intelligence, in beauty, in
happiness, in sensitivity. Shakuntala, above all, is an incarnation of the
most pure Indian femininity. But at the same time she is able to con-
trol her emotions. She is not weak, she is strong. It is the nature of her
beauty that attracts the king, the power of beauty. Later she is married
in an unconventional but accepted manner-a custom that still exists.
Then, once she is married, she must wait patiently for a long time. She
waits, with much determination and patience, and then she goes to
the king's court. This is a part of the story that for me cannot be differ-
ent from the tradition. Her determination helps her to take her
revenge on the king, a strange revenge. She is expecting a son and she
wants to raise him with such power that the king will eventually be
forced to recognize him. In this case she drew her strength from ma-
ternity. In India, patience and forgiveness are strongly associated with
femininity.
Her determination sustains her to the end, against everything. No, I
do not think she is a weak woman. The story has a happy ending and
the two lovers are reunited. But in spite of this great reconciliation,
she has lost much. She has lost all those years of youth and beauty. She
achieves her aim. But even though she becomes rich and happy she
has nevertheless lost a great deal. I do not have much more to say, and
I must admit that it is going to be very difficult for me to work with

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98 Schino

Eugenio because he is really very clever. In the other meetings he has

always worked with his actors, whom he knows very well, and who he
himself has trained. Of course I also know them well. I have to admit I
feel lost without my gestures, my movements. But I shall try.

And now come the voices of the participants. I have kept them
as I took them down in my notes: incomplete, sometimes incompre-
hensible like an intuition, as contradictory as the sound of ISTA.

Ferdinando Taviani: Let's forget for a moment the fable-like motivation

of the hermit who is not greeted and who takes revenge on Shakun-
tala, erasing her from the king's memory. If we forget this, the story
becomes demented. Something disappears from the memory of the
king, who is deprived of his mental powers. He forgets. His bride ap-
pears before him, and he does not even recognize her. He remembers
nothing. It's as though we were in a Wells story. Or, rather, in a film of
Ophuls. One could say that Ophuls had used the structure of the story
of Shakuntala for Letterfrom an Unknown Woman: a girl who falls in love
at first sight and continues to love a man who loves her and then for-
gets her as though he had never seen her. A son. The woman who
leaves. The difference is that this modern, Western version of course
ends in the death of all concerned. And naturally in place of the king
we have an artist, a prodigious musician, because in the modern world
it is artists who give the sensation of great conquests and great victo-
ries of a purely personal nature, as once the king warriors had done. If
I had to stage it, I would concentrate on the scene with the bee. This
bee brings us nearer to home. A bee is often the hidden protagonist
of the pastoral plays of the Renaissance; it is the representation of a
kiss: the bee sucks the nectar, but it also stings, as in Tasso's Aminta.

Frans Winther: There are at least three worlds. The real conflict is not
between the forest and the court but between the reality enclosed
within these two polarities and the heavens. It's true: there's the
nature of the forest on the one hand and the civilization of the court
on the other, but both are under the eyes of the heavens. There is not
a line between two extremes, but a triangle with a base and a vertex.

Piergiorgio Giacche: The forest is the wild or pure place for the ancho-
rites, but above all it is the place to be conquered by civilization
through hunting. The hunt is a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice of the
enchantment of nature in the name of the necessary organization of
the world. And on the other hand, for Shakuntala, the king is not love
but the necessity of having a child, the acceptance of the child, the
forfeiting of her religious space to return to society. The drama seems
to me to demonstrate what it is necessary to lose in order to give birth
to Bharata, the father of India. It teaches the pain of history.

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REPORTS 99

Nicola Savarese: The king fighting against a bee can be shown to be

ridiculous. But on the contrary it can also be the highest demonstra-
tion of his ability as a warrior. Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, he
strikes a blow. It is precision and a refined nature that distinguish the
great professional of death, not the extent of the massacre.

Raimondo Guarino: The king enters the forest of the hermits, violating
the peace of a place that it is his duty to protect, and thus the theme
of necessary violence is introduced. Violence is necessary until the im-
perfect stock, that of the hermits, is transformed into the perfect stock,
that of the king. The whole play revolves around the theme of the
social acceptance of violence. The king and Shakuntala are married in
a traditionally accepted but informal wedding devoid of rites: the gan-
dharvic wedding, held without parental consent. But gandharva is the
Sanskrit name for the centaurs, that is, a wedding without the involve-
ment of the couple's families, without a social contract and associated
with the animal world.

Mirella Schino: To me the story seems out of focus, and I confuse it with
other fables in which something is lost and then refound in the bell
of a fish, as is the ring in Shakuntala, allowing the recognition to tak
place. In a tale by Capuana, for example, an ear is found in the belly
of a fish, and this too is essential for recognition. But in this tapestry,
which to me looks a little faded, there emerges a tightly woven se
quence: Shakuntala's forest clothing is removed and she is dressed in
a festive bridal gown and adorned with jewels. Covered with a veil, ac
companied by a procession, she finally arrives, with her magnificen
entourage, before her husband. He approaches her and lifts her veil.
He sees a beautiful, young, pregn'ant woman. He does not recognize
her. And then suddenly the ceremony and the procession disintegrat
and dissolve. She has no choice but to turn around and prepare to
leave, alone.

Janne Risum: It is a love story that becomes a cosmic battle. And for me
it is important that the cosmic forces always be present during the per-
formance, represented in some way. But how?

The image ofJanne Risum gave Barba the idea of the two gods, or th
gods' messengers, who guide the action of the performance, wearin
bowler hats, like two zanni descended from the heavens.
Alberto Grilli speaks of the empty chair that Eugenio Barba ha
chosen as the emblem of this ISTA. In his opening speech Barba said
that he wanted an empty chair next to him at every work session. It was
a rather ceremonial chair, dug out from Teatro Potlach's storeroom
and given a quick coat of green and gold paint. The rule was that n

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100 Schino

one could sit in it except one of the characters in Shakuntala during

the performance.

Alberto Grilli: It made a strong impression on me when Eugenio spoke

of a chair, because I had imagined Shakuntala as sitting in a chair for
the whole performance, while the action took place around her.

Then Alberto suggests that the chair (which during the various work
sessions is carried here and there) could move by itself during the per-
formance. It is an idea that Eugenio Barba will later translate into the
central motif of the final "performance" of this session in Fara Sabina.
Meanwhile the circulation of opinions and buzz of interpretations is
running out.6
After the discussion in Fara Sabina, the work began: one week
in which to construct material in the style of open heart surgery before
the eyes of the participants.

Poetry and Prose

In the mornings Barba would take one of the seven themes
agreed upon on the first day. Together with his actors and Sanjukta-
and with the help of the Indian and Western musicians and the "collec-
tive mind" of the participants surrounding him-he wove a scene. The
seven nonnarrative themes that had evolved from the discussion on
the first day began to generate strange characters who had nothing to
do with Kalidasa, like the two celestial zanni in bowler hats (Iben Nagel
Rasmussen and Julia Varley) or the unlikely trees about to be felled.
(We participants played the trees and were also to play the animals
killed by the king.)
Barba's method for constructing the performance material was
impromptu, consisting of reduced rehearsals, continuous variations,
and fresh scores for the actors. Sometimes it was an improvisation
based only on some general preliminary agreement among those who
took part. Although this way of working is apparently foreign to Euge-
nio Barba the director, despite its aesthetic limits it is useful to Eugenio
Barba the researcher and experimenter. When the work on composi-
tion happens fast, the composition coincides with its execution and
makes the logic of theatrical creation emerge-a fascinating process
for those who research into the nature of the theatre. But it is tiring
and unrewarding for the actors, who do not have the time or the space
in which to elaborate their own scenic scores creatively. Thus they inev-
itably become the instruments of others' improvisations. These condi-
tions were perhaps all the more tiresome as they were so contradictory
to the normal working conditions of the Odin actors.

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REPORTS 101

In this we see Barba's impulse to push the offered material one

step further, making it jump from one meaning to another, and with
this his reluctance to throw away that which has already been created.
Where can this lead? For now it is only possible to say that through a
dense net of invisible affinities and identities he seems to want to break
the barriers that separate his performances from each other.
In the afternoon it was Sanjukta Panigrahi's turn. She too was to
work in an uncharacteristic manner. Nevertheless, like Barba, she re-
mained faithful to her own style-but in the manner of a poet who is
obliged to write with the usual flavor and associations but using the
words of a foreign language. She worked with a text that was familiar
to her but impossible to realize in its entirety in the short span of the
Fara Sabina session. She lacked the gestures of her dance, the detailed
codifications, and had to work with the Odin actors who had none of
these at their disposal. She was deprived of anything more than single
gestures; she was deprived of her dance rhythms.
In Odissi dance the narrative is as fascinating as a lyrical move-
ment. It composes and interweaves elements that could be considered
descriptive were they not reduced-incarnated in the body of a single
dancer-to a single and effective brush stroke. The dancer is the deer:
on looking closely it can be seen depicted in mimetic detail, but in the
same moment the dancer also shows the trees of the sacred forest, the
chariot and the bow of the hunter, the flowers, the hermit, the caress
of the king, and Shakuntala who receives it. She has the mobility of a
flame. She consumes what she touches.
This dramaturgical complexity begins to disappear once th
actors who interpret the story become more numerous. This is not a
issue that relates only to the staging of Shakuntala. The coincidenc
between the single actor and the single character obliges the mime
microsequences-which in the dance appear as elusive as in lyric song
-to expand into an extended narrative. It is dance in prose. Whereas
Barba sought to resolve his problems by dissolving the text and pr
ceeding toward abstract themes, Sanjukta Panigrahi asked for a prec
scenario containing the principal points of the story.
On the last day, the material is divided into divergent rivulets
The material created by Sanjukta Panigrahi is put to one side and w
become the source from which Barba will draw material for the perfo
mance of Shakuntala in Holstebro in September. The material create
by Barba, however, will be burnt up in Fara Sabina, in a strange perfo
mance centered around an empty chair, a closed, perhaps even pr
vate, performance, only for the participants. But I will speak later o
this performance, which eventually constituted the real trunk of th
whole Shakuntala project, because it was an experience to be narrate
rather than a performance from which to draw questions. Examine

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102 Schino

in retrospect, the continuity of the work on Shakuntala lies between the

preparatory work in Fara Sabina and the performance in Holstebro,
skipping the performance in May, or perhaps burying it deep within
itself. For all these reasons this is not the moment for telling about the
last day in Fara Sabina.

Beneath the Fabric of the Years

In September, in Holstebro, Shakuntala became a performance

in different episodes within the context of the third Festive Week orga-
nized by Odin Teatret. It took place in the covered square in front
the town hall and library, a red-brick courtyard divided in two by some
steps and an elevated terrace. Along the edge of the terrace, where
theatre stages have footlights, the Holstebro municipality had plante
-with typical Nordic nostalgia for the Mediterranean and the sun
four olive trees. During the first rehearsals Shakuntala found herse
among the olive trees: she appeared and disappeared behind the tree
as though in a wood. And Barba liked it so much that he made this
half-visible Shakuntala, veiled by olive trees, the central image of his
impromptu performance.
Flowing together in the performance were the material devel
oped by Sanjukta Panigrahi with the Odin actors in Fara Sabina, a new
ninety-minute dance by Sanjukta based on the story of Shakuntala pr
pared in Bhubaneshwar and Holstebro, and an opera on the sam
theme (classical music in a neomelodic style) composed for the occa-
sion by Frans Winther, who has collaborated as a musician with Odi
Teatret for years. The work of Frans Winther and the music compose
by Ragunath Panigrahi for Sanjukta's new dance were not part of the
material developed in Fara Sabina.
In this new context the work from Fara Sabina disappeared like
a closed chapter. Barba separated the two phases of the process pre-
cisely as though they belonged to two different worlds. It was an abrupt
break and difficult to accept for those who had participated in Italy
For the few spectators who had been present at both the sessions on
Shakuntala, the image of Sanjukta dancing among the olives seemed
perhaps the only bridge between the two phases of work, a faint reflow-
ering of the deeply moving final performance in Fara Sabina, a tow
set in an area dense with olive trees.

The Bee and the Warrior

In Fara Sabina, Sanjukta Panigrahi had spoken of the years of

beauty and youth that Shakuntala had lost during the course of the

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REPORTS 103

FIGURE 16. The Holstebro performance of Shakuntala: Isabel Ubaba (left), Rob-
erta Carreri (center), and Torgeir Wethal (right). (Photo: Fiora Bemporad)

story. Although Sanjukta had declared her total acceptance of the story,
this seemed to be a contradiction as far as the fable-like aspects of Kali-
dasa's play were concerned. And it was perhaps therefore-or because
it was linked to the final theme of the mise-en-scene by Grotowski-
that it had fascinated Barba. In reality perhaps both Sanjukta Pani-
grahi and Eugenio Barba had been caught in one of the small invisible
traps that Kalidasa has scattered throughout his text: subliminal scenic
effects that are interiorized, effects we do not notice we have experi-
enced.

There is an indication of regret for the lost years in Kalidasa,

and it has the face of the forgetful king. The use of the curse in order
to justify the king's loss of memory, and all the complicated fable-lik
peripeteias of Kalidasa's version as opposed to that of the Mahabharata
serve to create a very brief scenic effect, a couple of verses, almost in-
visible and perfect, in which the overall plot is inverted. Here, for a
brief moment, it is Shakuntala who fails to recognize the king.
When they meet again at the end of the play, and face each
other after years of separation, Shakuntala's face is still recognizable
even though her beauty has become more austere, more fitting to the
hermitage in which she finds herself after having been rejected by her

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104 Schino

husband. Instead it is the face of the king, pale and devastated by the
long years of worry for the fortunes of his wife and son, by the pain of
separation and the sense of guilt, that causes Shakuntala, for a brief
moment, to disdainfully reject him. (Seeing the king "pale with re-
morse," Shakuntala says: "This does not seem to be my lord! Who then
is this man? Defiling by his embrace my child?")7 It is only for an
instant, and then follows the happy ending.
But this is Kalidasa's way of working: creating small moments of
suspense and interruptions. Similarly the hunting episode-which in
the Mahabharata opens the story with the bloody scene of piles of ani-
mal bodies killed and left behind in a trail of epic slaughter-is trans-
formed in Kalidasa into two moments which at first glance look ele-
gant to the point of affectation and on rereading become enigmatic: a
mysterious deer, chased but not killed, and the king's action (which, at
least verbally, is inappropriately hard and violent) against a bee that is
bothering Shakuntala.8
In Holstebro, Kalidasa's happy ending is kept-except for a
truly unexpected Shakuntala, who is now very old and appears from
beneath her veil to show her white hair. This white hair-the image of
the double meeting with her husband and with her own old age-is the
bridge on which Eugenio Barba and Sanjukta Panigrahi finally meet.

What Do the Gods See?

The performance in Holstebro, which was the only pub

shown product of the research into Shakuntala, took place over
evenings. Each evening a new episode was presented. The scenes
those decided on by Sanjukta Panigrahi in Fara Sabina: the k
hunt, the curse, at court, the fisherman, the sadness, in paradise
on the seventh evening a recapitulation of all the episodes. Fo
seven evenings, before the performance began, two children
blonde European girl and one Tamil boy, went and sat on two cha
honor that had been specially prepared for them. (Recall tha
theme of the Festive Week in Holstebro was "Mixed Marriages.")
came onto the stage, knelt before an unknown god,Jaganath, the
that Sanjukta always has on stage for her dances, and then went a
in the auditorium.

On the last evening in Holstebro the whole of Shakuntala's

story was shown-but no longer from the point of view of the human
spectators, underscored by the gaze of the two children. The story
was now seen from above: through the eyes of the gods. The children
were blindfolded, almost as though to protect them. The program
said:

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REPORTS 105

The story has been sung and danced for you during the last six eve-
nings, as is appropriate for a terrestrial audience. Tonight, you will see
it as it is seen by the celestial observers, the gods, for whom we are all
a theatre, and who happily enjoy themselves, while time passes amidst
human tragedies.

The gods sat on the stage wearing elegant clothes, their faces
covered by masks while, in the auditorium, the two children were blind-
folded. What did the gods see that was so different from the fable that
had been shown during the preceding evenings? It is difficult to re-
member a performance seen only once, but I am certain of at least two
new and violent images that appeared on the last evening: a real fish
that was disemboweled, slowly and with difficulty, in order to find the
ring hidden within its body, its severed guts hanging out and blood
running down. And the unexpected apparition, in the final moment
of recognition, of an ancient Shakuntala, white haired and thin, who
appeared from beneath the veil-one more act of violence or cruelty
behind the veil of the fable.

And during the performance, calmly, the gods rose one by one
to deposit a fistful of earth onto a red carpet, which in the end becam
a heap, a black mound, the ghost of a grave.
At the end, all the characters made their exit in a procession,
followed by the spectators. Outside an explosion of fireworks awaited
them, a wild event in the placid town of Holstebro.
Despite such intelligence on the side of the direction, the per-
formance was in some ways disappointing. The actors' scores were too
fresh, the montage and the ideas too visible, and the pile of earth and
guts of the fish could not be properly seen, up there, on the stage. The
guts had not yet become touching. Perhaps they would have become
so, but in this performance they were just disgusting, and the inten-
tionally revolting surface of the scene had not had time to fill with
emotion.

The performance was a rough cast and, perhaps because of t

limited time available, it revealed the wisdom of thought, rather t
the director's craft. Indeed, assessment of the provisional result w
be entirely superflous if it did not lead to a further consideration.
appointment, or perhaps the desire to judge the result, often inhib
the historian witness from looking at something very important: w
happens to performances, especially unfinished ones? And materi
that does not die has, in recent years, become an essential instrum
for Eugenio Barba.
Already the dramatic parallelism that characterized Shakunt
has been passed onto the first stable "product" of ISTA, The Jung

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106 Schino

Book.9 Barba made this performance immediately after that of Kali-

dasa, and it was also presented in September 1993 during the third
Festive Week. It shows Kipling's story through the confrontation of two
"books" that present the different scenic traditions of Europe and
India: the written book and the danced book. And beyond this paral-
lelism something more than a simple contemplation of differences is
born for a moment, when the two dissimilar sisters, Iben Nagel Ras-
mussen and Sanjukta Panigrahi, dance together.
Just as The Jungle Book, with all its diversity, dips one of its tenta-
cles into Shakuntala, so the Holstebro Shakuntala carried its own small
secret, the slender root of pain from the work in Fara Sabina, so dis-
tant and apparently left behind. This was its stumbling block-and the
reason it was able to become more than just a baroque divertissement,
with opera singers and fireworks, which was both fascinating and
homogeneous. It is also why its spectacular nature split into sharp, still
strident tones, foreign to the overall pattern, yet which were clear signs
of a more complex life. At the heart of the Holstebro Shakuntala there
was an older, almost imperceptible, bitter root: the taste of the olives
from Fara Sabina.

On an Empty Chair
On looking closely, the uniqueness of Odin Teatret does not li
in its strength or in the beauty of its performances. I think, rather, tha
it lies in its capacity for constructing a performance like an entire
world, so dense with references that it is complete in itself, and ye
equipped with sharp hooks that always catch onto something beyon
the theatre. It is not important whether these external thoughts be
long to the spectators, the actors, the director, or the community, o
whether they are emotional or intellectual threads. What is importan
is that those same hooks, on which the strangest thoughts are caugh
always return everything to that space traversed by the actors.
Barba's performances pulsate with a continual movement o
self-restriction and opening. In the internal performances of ISTA-in
which the "audience" is made up of people who are united by a pro-
found and longstanding bond with Barba's theatre, in which the shar
ing of an emotional state generates meanings in itself-this qualit
becomes heightened. The performances become so full of interna
references that they are no longer only theatre. It would be improper
however, to give these a different name, because they are primarily
means of looking at the very heart of Barba's theatre, without its pro
tective covering, unnaturally exposed to the light of day. What was th
deeper meaning, at the beginning of the Fara Sabina session, of this

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REPORTS 107

Shakuntala, for us participants of many ISTAs who were interested in

Barba's work? It was obvious: it was Sanjukta and the work that has for
years united Eugenio Barba and Sanjukta Panigrahi. In order to get
closer to Sanjukta, Barba had chosen to create a neutral territory far
from their usual practices: an Indian play for him, the work of director
for her. Furthermore Shakuntala was, to our eyes, the reference to
something else for Eugenio Barba: the staging of the same play by Gro-
towski in the past and thus the link between Barba and Grotowski.
We all sat in a circle with Barba, the empty chair at his side, on
May 22, 1993, at this ISTA, dedicated to Fabrizio Cruciani, scholar, who
had died at the age of fifty on August 31, 1992. In deciding to devote
ourselves to the incongruous and distant theme of Shakuntala, most of
us probably thought: now that we all have to justify our work in the
eyes of our dead, it is only right to go back to our roots. And among
the roots that bind Barba to the earth, it seems that Sanjukta and Gro-
towski are perhaps the most tenacious, the most profound, yet the least
conspicuous in the results of his work.
Then, naturally, the river of interpretations and theories about
Shakuntala swept away all thoughts not rigidly linked to Kalidasa. Per-
haps it was only on the last day that we realized there was no longer a
"performance." It had disintegrated to make way for something else.
After retreating into itself, the performance opened up and was nour-
ished by the emotions of us participants in a crudely evident way never
used in Barba's "real" performances.
Barba had maintained there was almost nothing in Shakuntala
that refers to life as we know it. And in the end the bridge theme
(especially on first sight) is not one that interests the two sides standing
at either end of the bridge. It brings them into contact, it unites them,
but perhaps only because it means little to either of them. For Gro-
towski, too, the interest lay beyond the story, not in the story itself. The
"beyond" for Barba and Sanjukta, in Holstebro, was old age.
In Fara Sabina it was something else, something more literal:
beyond the performance there are the ties between the people who
make it. What happened on the last day in Fara Sabina was precisely
what one should avoid: a performance that was purely a net of internal
allusions, incomprehensible for those who had not seen the work
grow. The structure of the performance was the relationship of osmosis
between the director and his spectator-collaborators, some diffident,
but in solidarity, some old ISTA companions, some new members, all
well known.
It is not only a question of collaboration, but also one of union.
The meaning of this union was the material from which the perfor-
mance Shakuntala was made. Since the first day of work on Shakuntala,

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 108 Schino

the real problem was how to make even the lateral thoughts that go
through our minds pass over this slender bridge. The forest, violence,
solitude-our dead? During this long week of work we participants
and observers had put some themes to the test as an act of intellectual
virtuosity. A requirement of the work was that we were used in some
scenes in walk-on parts, as part of the scenery. It was interesting for us
to experience, firsthand, that to "participate" in a performance does
not mean that one has greater emotion and understanding-but less.
It was a banal use of the spectator-participants that was then trans-
formed in the most unexpected way.
Simplicity and the unexpected, when combined, are two divini-
ties very dear to Barba.

The Last Day

During the previous days, five or six of us had been selected for
the hunting scene by the two messengers of the gods in bowler hats,
Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Julia Varley. We were made to lie down on
the ground to represent the carcasses that the hunter-king leaves in his
trail.

On the last day the two actors continued, without stopping at

the usual five or six, until we all lay on the ground, incapable of seeing
the performance that continued. It was the surprise Barba had been
saving for us: the only spectator left was him. We only saw (perhaps
some of us even closed our eyes) some mutilated fragments of images:
the tall black feather on the hat of one of the actors; a corner of the
white tent that was our sky. We listened with our ears and our memo-
ries to the scenes we had seen created before our eyes on the previous
days. Poor spectators, not unaware, yet witnesses only to minute frag-
ments of the story.
During the previous days there had been certain images, cer-
tain small scenes-the woman who cried over an empty chair, the chair
that began to move without anyone carrying it, the earth that was
thrown onto the red carpet upon which a game of dice had taken
place-which had given us all the impression that the performance
was changing, or was about to be changed in the most unexpected
manner.

The theme of death had made its entrance. W

of the threads woven into the tapestry of the perf
chiaroscuro in the story of Shakuntala? Did our
these shadings onto the performance, or was
walked, anxious and perplexed, across the slend
fable and toward something else.

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REPORTS 109

FIGURE 17. Fara Sabina: the last day. (Photo: Fiora Bemporad)

One of the most important aspects of Barba's theatre (and not

only his) is the necessity the spectators feel of digging down within
themselves with the seriousness of someone determined to resolve a
problem that concerns them-not an enigma, but a thread of me
ing. What does this mean? What does this performance mean for
I remember the final moment of the last day in Fara Sabin
no longer a rehearsal, not really a performance. The actors w
dressed in white. At the end, in the very last scene, when we w
finally able to rise from the ground, we spectators, participants
performance that no one other than the director saw, knew tha
had to go to one end of the terrace, and remain still as in a pho
graph.
We found ourselves facing the actors at the other end, all white,
distant, two groups divided by the long terrace on which we had
worked. At opposite sides of the scenic space we, anomalous specta-
tors, faced the actors, who slowly opened their hands, as though to tell
us that the performance was about something else, and let a handful
of earth fall onto the stone floor. It was a confused and vaguely painful
moment, perhaps because we had just got up from our uncomfortable
"dead" position. I found myself wondering, as though the perfor-
mance reflected a true situation, why we had to go along this long road
of meetings, discussions, collective work, only to find ourselves con-

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110 Schino

fronted as remote groups and categories, as if we were about to aban-

don each other for no plausible reason? It was a particularly incon-
gruous and puerile question in the middle of a touching situation. But
I think it was the literal translation of one of the deep meanings of
this strange thing that Barba, or perhaps all of us, had created in Fara
Sabina, which was simply a moving, shared, already distant, prayer: the
prayer of the dead, as they recede into the distance, for us the unfor-
tunate living, burdened by our shadows, spectators of fragments of
reality.

NOTES

1. The prose and verse drama The Recognition of Shakuntala

the six works that can be ascribed with certainty to Kalidasa, who
lived between the end of the fourth and the first half of the fifth
Shakuntala also has a long tradition in European culture. For a de
count of the Western tradition of Shakuntala and of Kalidasa's stor
the bridges between Asia and Europe, see Savarese (1992, 145-239)
2. The project took place within the framework of the Inter
School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and the third Festive Wee
nized in Holstebro by Odin Teatret. The overall project involved t
dancer Sanjukta Panigrahi; the actors of Odin Teatret (Roberta Car
Nilsen, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Isabel Ubeda, Julia Varley, Torgeir
the Danish composer Frans Winther; the musicians Kai Bredholt an
slev of Odin Teatret; Ragunath Panigrahi with his Indian musicians
conclusive phase in Holstebro in September 1993-a Danish orchest
choir from the local music school; a conductor (Flemming Vistisen)
(Lone Rasmussen); and a tenor (Jens Krogsgaard). On the final ev
Holstebro, September 12,1993, the actors of the Teatro Tascabile di
Italy, and those of the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani also part
3. ISTA is a mobile organism created by Barba. Its first sess
held in Bonn in 1980. The sessions do not have a fixed work structure or a
continuous work theme. Some of the veteran participants have defined it
thus: a place for rediscussing everything in order to traverse an organized
earthquake together. It could have become one of those international bodies
in which one meets occasionally in order to compare the results of one's
work, but instead it is the opposite: a place in which doubts flower.
4. The Festive Week is a biennial event based on the central theme of
"culture without borders." The third Festive Week was based on the subject
"Mixed Marriages." It is to be understood both literally and metaphorically:
on the one hand, as actual mixed marriages and the children of these unions
(Knud Rasmussen, 1879-1933, the Polar explorer who was both of Inuit and
Danish origin); on the other hand, the theme provides an infinite number of
possibilities for many kinds of mixed marriages-for example, between differ-
ent art forms (painting and music, opera and jazz, classical ballet and modern

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REPORTS 111

dance, Asian performance and Western theatre) or between soldiers and pac-
ifists, business and culture, children and pensioners, nature and technology.
5. Katzuko Azuma (Faust), dancer, Nihon Buyo; Sanjukta Panigrahi
(Mephistopheles), dancer, Odissi; and Kanichi Hanayagi (Margaret), dancer,
Nihon Buyo, also an accomplished kabuki onnagata, took part together with
some Odin actors and Japanese, Indian, and European musicians in the stag-
ing of Faust during the 1987 ISTA session in Salento.
6. The voices I relay belong to: Ferdinando Taviani, theatre historian,
Italy; Frans Winther, composer, Denmark; Piergiorgio Giacche, anthropologist,
Italy; Nicola Savarese, theatre historian, Italy; Raimondo Guarino, theatre his-
torian, Italy; Mirella Schino, theatre historian, Italy; Janne Risum, theatre his-
torian, Denmark; Alberto Grilli, director, Italy.
7. Kalidasa, The Loom of Time, Act 7, p. 275.
8. The king says to the bee: "While the chastiser of the wicked,/great
Puru's scion, rules over this rich earth,/who dares behave in this churlish
manner/to guileless, young girls of the hermitage?" Kalidasa, The Loom of Time,
Act 1, p. 179.
9. Directed by Eugenio Barba, performed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen
and Sanjukta Panigrahi, music by Ragunath Panigrahi, Kai Bredholt,Jan Fer-
slev, Hemant Kumar Das, Kishan Dal Sharma, and Ganghadar Pradhan.

REFERENCES

Kalidasa. 1989.

The Loom of Time. Translated from the Sanskrit and Prakrit by Cha
Rajan. New Delhi: Penguin.
Savarese, Nicola. 1992.
Teatro e spettacolofra oriente e occidente. Rome and Bari: Laterza.

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