Photo: Annalisa Gonnella
@TROUBLEYN/ LABORATORIUM
Pastorijstraat 23, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium
Masterclass 6 hours / day
Troubleyn/Laboratorium continues its ‘Masters of the 21st Century’ series, welcoming international grandmasters. These masterclasses are aimed at professional performers who wish to deepen their knowledge and refine their craft.
Previous editions have featured Peter Brook, Raimund Hoghe, Franz Marijnen, Theodoros Terzopoulos & Savvas Stroumpos, Anatoly Vasiliev and Robert Wilson. In 2026, we are honoured to welcome renowned director Eugenio Barba, working with Julia Varley, to Troubleyn/Laboratorium from May 15th to May 17th.
The masterclass will deal with the different levels of organisation in a theatre performance, and the elementary aspects of theatre anthropology, among which:
DAILY PROGRAM
ABOUT EUGENIO BARBA
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. Barba 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. As the first theatre group in Europe, they worked out the new practice of training as a total apprenticeship. They rehearsed in an air-raid shelter their first production, Ornitofilene, by the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, which was 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.
Since 1964 Eugenio Barba has directed 76 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 (2012) 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.
In December 2020, Eugenio Barba established with Julia Varley the Barba Varley Foundation, with the purpose of supporting fields of action animated by people who are disadvantaged by gender, ethnicity, geography, age, way of thinking and acting inside and outside theatre. 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), The Moon Rises from the Ganges: My journey through Asian acting techniques, (Icarus/Routledge), A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology in collaboration with Nicola Savarese (Routledge) and The Five Continents of Theatre, in collaboration with Nicola Savarese (Brill).
Eugenio Barba has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Århus, Ayacucho, Bologna, Havana, Warsaw, Plymouth, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Tallinn, Cluj-Napoca, Edinburgh, Shanghai, Brno and Peloponnese 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 from The International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC).
Among the artists who have made a mark on the history of theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, Eugenio Barba is the only one who has worked in an innovative way in all fields of theatre culture: the artistic creation; the theoretical reflection; the transmission of the professional techniques and knowledge; the work on historic memory; the scientific research; the use of theatre in a social context, as a trans-cultural tool to activate relations between social and different ethnic groups.
Read more about Eugenio Barba's significant contributions to theatre HERE
ABOUT JULIA VARLEY
Julia Varley was born in 1954 in London, Great Britain, and joined Odin Teatret in 1976. Apart from acting she is active in directing, teaching, organising and writing. At the age of three she moved to Milan, Italy, where she did her schooling, including Philosophy Studies at Milan University. Before joining Odin Teatret she worked in Milan with theatre with Teatro del Drago, Centro Sociale Santa Marta and Circolo La Comune, and earned her living as an assistant film producer. With Odin Teatret, Julia Varley teaches in schools and universities and has synthesised her experience in four work demonstrations: The Echo of Silence, The Dead Brother, Text, Action, Relations and The Flying Carpet.
Since 1990 she has been involved in the conception and organisation of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) and of the University of Eurasian Theatre, both directed by Eugenio Barba. Since its beginning in 1986 she has been active in The Magdalena Project, a network of women in contemporary theatre. She is also artistic director of Transit International Festival, Holstebro, and editor of The Open Page, a journal devoted to women’s work in theatre.
In the framework of The Magdalena Project, Julia also takes part in the collaborative project “Women with Big Eyes” which has been performed in Denmark and Cuba. In connection with Odin Teatret’s intercultural productions and Holstebro Festuge, Julia has started an ongoing pedagogical collaboration with groups of young actors (“Ageless”, “Jasonites”, “Ur-Hamlet Foreigners”) both in Denmark and abroad. Julia Varley directs her regular longlasting students.
She has directed two productions with Pumpenhaus Theater in Germany (Auf den Spuren des Yeti and Blau), two productions with Ana Woolf from Argentina (Seeds of Memory and White is the Night), a children’s production with Hisako Miura from Japan (Fox Wedding) and two productions with Lorenzo Gleijeses and Manolo Muoio (Il figlio di Gertrude and L’esausto o il profondo azzurro) and another with Gabriella Sacco (The Taste of Oranges) from Italy.
She has worked as assistant director for the films Anabasis and On the Two Banks of the River, and for the production of the film Come! And the Day Will Be Ours.
Julia Varley has written two books: Wind in the West – a novel by a theatre character (Odin Teatret Forlag, Denmark) and Notes of an Odin Actress – Stones of Water (Ubulibri, Milan; Escenologia, Mexico; Alarcos, Cuba; San Marcos-Yuyachkani, Peru; Entretemps, France; Routledge, UK).
Her articles and essays have been published in journals such as The Mime Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Teatro e Storia, Conjunto, Lapis, The Open Page, Performance Research, Teatro XXI and Máscara.
