Eugenio Barba
THE NEW HOUSE OF OLD DREAMS
Now that we have won the bet of staying together almost an entire lifetime, we have burned our house. But we are going to build another one, still with the same name, still with the same dreams.
Today, 4 November 2022, we, Eugenio Barba, Judy Barba and Else Marie Laukvik, founders of Odin Teatret in Oslo on 1 October 1964, have founded the Odin Teatret Association, which will continue with performances and activities in Holstebro and abroad.
We have a long past behind us. Our memories are not regrets; they help us to free ourselves from illusions and certainties. We learned to be proud when we were overwhelmed with fatigue, not to shy away from challenges, not to calculate the time needed to refine a detail, to trust our obstinacy, to reject our tendency for mediocrity.
We do not know if at our age and in our time it is worth continuing. An obsession pushes us to belong to the TRADITION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE, whose origin dates back to Isadora Duncan and Stanislavski, and which includes Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Brecht and Helene Weigel, Artaud, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Atahualpa del Cioppo, Santiago Garcia and Patricia Ariza, our older brother Jerzy Grotowski, and the hundred thousand tribes of the Third Theatre.
Odin Teatret lives on. Not a day goes by without some sign. Someone, somewhere needs these signs.
PRESENT AT THE FOUNDATION CEREMONY: Eugenio Barba, Judy Barba, Else Marie Laukvik, Ulrik Skeel, Tage Larsen, Julia Varley, Rina Skeel, Claudio Coloberti, Dorthe Kærgaard, Leif Beck, Lisbet Gormsen, Antonia Cezara Cioaza, Jakob Nielsen and, in absentia, Jan Ferslev and Anne Savage.