Contemporary Acting Techniques in Eurasian Theatre, Performance and Audiovisual Arts: Intercultural and Intermedia Perspective

Eugenio Barba was born in 1936 in Italy and grew up in the village of Gallipoli. His family’s socio-economic situation changed drastically when his father, a military officer, was a victim of World War II.

Upon completing high school at the Naples military college (1954) he abandoned the idea of embarking on a military career following in his father’s footsteps. Instead, in 1954, he emigrated to Norway to work as a welder and a sailor. At the same time he took a degree in French, Norwegian Literature and History of Religions at Oslo University.

In 1961, he went to Poland to learn directing at the State Theatre School in Warsaw, but left one year later to join Jerzy Grotowski, who at that time was the director of the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole. Barba stayed with Grotowski for three years. In 1963, he traveled to India where he studied kathakali, a theatre form which was unknown in the West at that time. He wrote an essay on kathakali which was immediately published in Italy, France, the USA and Denmark. His first book about Grotowski, In Search of a Lost Theatre, appeared in 1965 in Italy and Hungary.

When Barba returned to Oslo in 1964, he wanted to become a professional theatre director but, being a foreigner, he was unable to find work. He gathered together a few young people who had not been accepted by the State Theatre School, and created Odin Teatret in October 1964. They rehearsed in an air-raid shelter their first production, Ornitofilene, by the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, which was then shown in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. They were subsequently invited by the Danish municipality of Holstebro, a small town in north-west Jutland, to create a theatre laboratory there. To start with, they were offered an old farm and a small sum of money. Since then Barba and his collaborators have made Holstebro the base for their multiple activities.

During the past 50 years Eugenio Barba has directed 77 productions with Odin Teatret and with the intercultural Theatrum Mundi Ensemble, some of which have required up to two years of preparation. Among the best known are Ferai (1969), My Father’s House (1972), Brecht’s Ashes (1980), The Gospel according to Oxyrhincus (1985), Talabot (1988), Kaosmos (1993), Mythos (1998), Andersen’s Dream (2004), Ur-Hamlet (2006), Don Giovanni all’Inferno (2006), The Marriage of Medea (2008), The Chronic Life (2011) and The Tree (2016).

Since 1974, Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret have devised their own way of being present in diverse social contexts through the practice of the ‘barter’, an exchange of cultural expressions with a community or an institution, structured as a common performance.

In 1979, Eugenio Barba founded ISTA, International School of Theatre Anthropology, thus opening a new field of studies: theatre anthropology.

Barba is on the advisory boards of scholarly journals such as The Drama Review, Performance Research, New Theatre Quarterly, Teatro e Storia and Urdimento. Among his most recent publications, translated into many languages, are The Paper Canoe (Routledge), Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt (Black Mountain Press), Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, followed by 26 letters from Jerzy Grotowski to Eugenio Barba (Black Mountain Press), Arar el cielo (Casa de las Americas, Havana), La conquista de la diferencia (Yuyachkani/San Marcos Editorial, Lima), On Dramaturgy and Directing. Burning the House (Routledge) and A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology in collaboration with Nicola Savarese (Routledge).

Eugenio Barba has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Aarhus, Ayacucho, Bologna, Havana, Warsaw, Plymouth, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Tallinn, Cluj-Napoca, Edinburgh and Shanghai as well as the Reconnaissance de Mérite Scientifique from the University of Montreal and the Sonning Prize from the University of Copenhagen. He is also the recipient of the Danish Academy Award, the Mexican Theatre Critics’ Prize, the Pirandello International Prize and the Thalia Prize of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC).

Tang Shu-wing studied Theatre Studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris after reading law in Hong Kong. He was strongly influenced by physical theatre, dance as well as visual arts and travelled to India to experience spiritual formation. Dubbed “one of the most talented theatre directors of Hong Kong” by the media, his works contain both traditional and contemporary features because of his multi-cultural background. Tang found No Man’s Land in 1997 with an aim of exploring various forms of theatre expression. He directed Three Women in the Pearl River Delta (1997), Millennium Autopsy (1999), The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (2000) and Deathwatch (2002).

Between 2004 and 2011, Tang Shu-wing worked at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), where after five years he became Dean of the School of Drama. While at the Academy, he directed Phaedra (2005), Hamlet (2006) and Princess Chang Ping (2007) and trained scores of new performers. In 2011, Tang founded the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio. The Studio’s Detention (2011), a non-verbal drama, was performed 127 times and reached a total audience of 25,000. His work Thunderstorm (2012) was called “a perfect combination of dance and drama”. He directed Titus Andronicus (2012) and Macbeth (2015) (renamed The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2019) and became the first Hong Kong director who presented Shakespeare’s plays in Cantonese at the Shakespeare’s Globe. Macbeth toured 6 European cities in 2017 and was staged at the Guangdong‒Hong Kong‒Macao Greater Bay Area Culture and Arts Festival, Festival Hong Kong 2019 – A CulturalExtravaganza@Shanghai and the Hong Kong Week in Taipei. Titus Andronicus 2.0 (2009), an embodiment of physical theatre and minimalist aesthetics, continues touring.

Tang’s opera works include King Arthur (2009), Les Contes d’Hoffmann (2018, HKAPA) and Datong (2015, Hong Kong Arts Festival), which was showen at an event marking the 20th Anniversary of HK’s Return to Motherland in London. Tang Shu-wing also shares his experience through writing. His publications include Analysis and Reflections on Meyerhold’s Theories of Acting, “Titus Andronicus”: Approach in Minimalist Aesthetics & Physical Theatre and Detention – Out of Curiosity. He has served on or advised numerous public bodies and platforms, including the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, the Consultation Panel of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), Hong Kong Dance Company and Hong Kong-Taiwan Cultural Co-operation Committee.

Danny Yung is an experimental art pioneer and one of Hong Kong’s most influential artists, Yung is a founding member and co-artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron. In the past 40 years, Yung has been working extensively in diverse fields of arts, including theatre, cartoon, film, video as well as visual and installation art.

In the span of his 40-year career, Yung has been involved in over 100 theatre productions as director, scriptwriter, producer and/or stage designer. His theatre works were staged in multiple cities across the world, including Tokyo, Yokohama, Toga, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, London, Lisbon, Rotterdam and New York. In 2008, in response to a commission from the Hong Kong Arts Festival, he created Tears of the Barren Hill, a theatre work reflecting on the innovation of traditional Chinese theatre and the institution of cultural exchange, which earned him the Music Theatre NOW Award of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, Yung, in collaboration with the renowned Japanese theatre director Makoto Sato, showed The Tale of the Crested Ibis, a cultural exchange project which combined, for the first time, elements of noh and kun theatres as well as traditional arts and cutting-edge (robot) technology. The annual Toki Festival, curated by Yung since 2012, develops the concept of the Crested Ibis, or Toki, in an effort to enrich young kun performers’ experience and promote exchanges between contemporary and traditional performing arts in Asian regions.

Yung is among the pioneers of Hong Kong’s experimental film and video. His short films, videos and installations have been shown in Berlin, New York, London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Hong Kong since 1980s. His Tian Tian Xiang Shang conceptual comics, figurines and sculptures have been exhibited in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Ann Arbor, Paris, Milan, Washington DC, Seattle, Toronto and Mexican City.

The artist keeps a close eye on the arts and cultural policy and on education development in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. He currently serves as chairman of the Hong Kong–Taipei–Shenzhen–Shanghai City-to-City Cultural Exchange Conference and a member of the Design Council of Hong Kong. He was also appointed the inaugural Dean’s Master Artist in Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2013, and he on the Management Board of the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity and the advisory boards of the Department of Cultural Studies of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University and the School of Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

In 2009, Yung was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his achievements and contributions to cultural exchanges between Germany and Hong Kong. In 2000, Yung organised the Festival of Vision, an 11-week programme of cross-cultural festivals and conferences held in Berlin and Hong Kong. The festivals brought together more than 1,000 artists and other cultural practitioners from 35 cities in Asia and Europe. In 2014, commissioned by the 48th Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Yung designed the Gateway – Tian Tian Xiang Shang, a broad-scale flower-plaque bamboo installation celebrating Lingnan flower plaques. The installation, which is 35 metres wide, 10 metres high and 6 metres deep, was on display at the National Mall, Washington DC.