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This section presents an interview with theatre director Eugenio Barba of the Barba Varley Foundation. Topics discussed include the theatre training and apprenticeship of actors, the way being vulnerable allows an individual to understand art, the contribution of the Odin Teatret performance training to the well-being of actors, and his outlook for theatrical practices in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

This article presents views from several theater critics about performance studies and its effects on everyday life. Most of them agree that the varieties of performance studies developed by scholars and artists shape the performing arts field curving interests and methods in the field. One critic says that performance studies is not imperialist, but it can be. It can expand and touch cultural issues, issues of standards and the society and that the whole concept of the term imperialist depends on the perception of the students.

The article discusses the author's views related to theater and to the theatrical profession. The author relates that there is a paradox in the theatrical profession which states that it is the profession in exile and the profession of the exile. He argues that those who practiced in the theatrical field always lived the contradiction of strangers, as if they were in transit. He points out that theater often constituted a separate micro-society, discriminated and despised.

Presents a speech by Eugenio Barba, founder and director of Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, delivered on the occasion of conferring upon him the title of Doctor honoris causa by the University of Warsaw, on May 28, 2003. Comments regarding the play "Merdre!"; Significance of Poland in his career; Remarks with regard to theater.

In this essay Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, founder of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, and a Contributing Editor of NTQ, traces his own 'orphanage' from a professional family — and his discovery not only of an 'elder brother' in Grotowski, but of his two 'grandfathers', Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. He extends the metaphor to suggest how these two branches of a theatrical family tree, apparently of quite different impulses and temperaments, shared a working language, however differently this translated into their theatre practice. He sums this up as a common concern with 'showing how thoughts move', and relates this in particular to the ways in which the theatre lost, preserved, and has slowly rediscovered the work of Meyerhold, and to how the 'disconnected tradition' of his work re-emerges in unexpected places. This takes Barba on a journey from the home where Meyerhold received his friends in Moscow, as lovingly restored by his granddaughter, to Mexico and Colombia, where Seki Sano brought to a new continent his own discoveries from the 'theatre paradise' he believed he had found in the Soviet Union, in which 'the discoveries of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were part of the same baggage', thus passing, 'through the rigour of the craft, the meaning of a theatre that lives through revolt and a feeling of not belonging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A master practitioner-theorist, looking back at a lifetime of work, asks the question, "What is theatre?" He answers, "It is a particular way of moving"—an ethos, a behavior that reveals the incorporated knowledge of a craft, and at the same time, something we call values, our life's compass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is theatre? How does theatre connect the past to the present to the future? What are its essential characteristics? Barba answers these questions in terms of his own life's journey and his nearly 40 years of work with Odin Teatret, a group of "theatrical Bedouins" always on the move literally and conceptually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues the importance of keeping the spectators in mind but not the public in theater. The public ordains success or failure, that is, something which has to do with breadth. The spectators, in their uniqueness, determine that which has to do with depth--they determine to what extent the performance has taken root in certain individual memories. The necessity of distinguishing between public and spectators derives from the will to consciously exploit an inevitable condition, even though some or many reactions can be unanimous and common, communion is impossible. Intense relationships can be established, but they are based upon reciprocal estrangement. This estrangement is not only a source of difficulties but can be exploited as a precious source of theatrical energy. Instead of trying to construct a performance as an organism which speaks to all spectators with the same voice, one can think of it as being composed of many voices which speak together without each voice necessarily speaking to all spectators. During the work on a performance there must be a moment in which the director crosses over to the other side and becomes the representative of spectators. The director must be loyal to them in the same way that he or she must be loyal to the actors. For a director to be loyal to the spectators does not just mean to interest them, to excite them, to entertain them, to move them. It means to master the techniques necessary to break up the unity of the public on the mental level.

This article focuses on the influence of Western theatre on Asian theater and vice versa. It is possible to consider the theatre in terms of ethnic, national, group, or even individual traditions. But if in doing so one seeks to comprehend one's own identity, it is also essential to take the opposite and complementary point of view: to think of one's own theatre in a transcultural dimension, in the flow of a tradition of traditions. All attempts to create antitraditional forms of theatre in the West, as well as in the East, have drawn from the tradition of traditions. Certain European scholars in the 15th and 16th centuries forsook the performance and festival customs of their cities and villages and rescued the theater in Athens and ancient Rome from oblivion. There are theatrical images that have inspired the revolutions led by all antitraditional Western theatres in the 20th century. However, the Oriental theatres are no longer approached through tales but are experienced directly. In the meeting between East and West, seduction, imitation, and ex-change are reciprocal. The divergent directions in which Western and Eastern theatres have developed provokes a distortion of perception. In the West, because of an automatic ethnocentric reaction, ignorance of Oriental theater is justified by the implication that it deals with experiences that are not directly relevant to us, that are too exotic to be usefully known. This same distortion of perception idealizes and then flattens the multiplicity of Oriental theaters or venerates them as sanctuaries.