THE CHRONIC LIFE (Det kroniske liv) | Madách Nemzetközi Színházi Találkozó

Odin Teatret

THE CHRONIC LIFE (Det kroniske liv) 12

Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Danmark

Director: Eugenio Barba

1 hours 10 minutes, without breaks.

ODIN TEATRET
The Trilogy of the Innocent
The Innocence of War and of Its Victimsga

Innocent is a luminous word. We don’t feel guilty because we are ware that guilt is a reaction of our conscience. And this reaction is not automatically associated with a misdeed that we may have committed considering it a legitimate defence. Let’s look at the face of war: that of a tiger. The tiger tears a child to pieces. This is obviously a tragedy, but it doesn’t tarnish the innocence of the tiger. Innocence does not take damage into account, it demands only purity of intentions. For those fighting in a war, innocence coincides with a respect for their role within the mechanisms of a struggle whose purpose is to exterminate the adversary. We don’t usually associate the word innocent with war, but with its victims, those who don’t commit outrages and destruction. We think of orphans, widows, women who experience the innocence of war on their bodies. Odin Teatret’s trilogy speaks of the many forms of innocence, asking the question: are we all, perhaps, innocent?

Trilogy - Third landscape: the future (2031)

Here people eat without being hungry and drink without being thirsty

The Chronic Life takes place in various European countries in 2031, after the Third Civil War. Groups and individuals converge, challenging each other over their diverging dreams, disappointments and hopes. A boy from Latin America arrives, seeking his father, who has inexplicably disappeared. “Stop searching for your father” people tell him while escorting him from door to door.

The boy is not saved by knowledge or innocence. Rather, a newfound ignorance leads him to his door. All this takes place to the bewilderment of all of us, who no longer believe the unbelievable: that a single victim’s life is beyond value, is worth more than God.

Actors:
Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Jan Ferslev, Elena Floris, Donald Kitt, Tage Larsen, Sofía Monsalve, Fausto Pro, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Julia Varley

Assistant directors: Raúl Iaiza, Pierangelo Pompa, Ana Woolf
Stage design: Odin Teatret; Jan de Neergaard, Antonella Diana
Costume: Odin Teatret; Jan de Neergaard
Dramaturges: Eugenio Barba, Thomas Bredsdorff
Literary advisor: Nando Taviani

Director

Eugenio Barba

Gobbi Hilda Stage

Eugenio Barba

Eugenio Barba was born in 1936 in Italy and grew up in the village of Gallipoli. 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 travelled to India where he studied Kathakali, a theatre form which was unknown in the West at that time. Barba created the Odin Teatret in October 1964. During the past fifty years Eugenio Barba has directed 76 productions with Odin Teatret and with the intercultural Theatrum Mundi Ensemble. 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.

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