SALT

Based on the short story Letter in the Wind by Antonio Tabucchi

Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark

Director: Eugenio Barba

Performed in Italian

1 hours, without breaks.

A woman’s odyssey. A woman travels from one Mediterranean island to another in search of a love lost. The ghost of her lover accompanies her on her journey, bringing her closer to an awareness of a definitive absence.

“The voice is truly mysterious. Of course, John attributed creative power to it at the start of his gospel: in the beginning was the Word, and with the word was life. Voice, life. Phonologists claim that the voice imitates the rhythms of life, because it follows the principle of breathing. Each phrase we pronounce is born, expands, stabilizes, diminishes, and dies. It breathes with us. The voice creates and the voice saves. The voice has a magical power, which was described in the oldest Greek myth, the one about Orpheus. […] The voice evokes. Ex-vocare: to call out. The voice can evoke the dead, pulling them out of darkness. […] It ‘resounds inside us’, as Kavafis said, and only we can hear it. And we don’t hear it with our ears, we hear it with our soul.

[…] There is magic to be accomplished and the Master takes the wand. […] What are the signs he is tracing in the air? There is a transformation occurring, we can feel it but it is impossible to know its nature. It is not unlike alchemy. […] Roberta Carreri, following the tracings in the air of the Master’s wand, has given my letters voice again. She has penetrated the opaque mirror of the writing. I see her: she is leaping inside a circle of gestures and words.” (excerpts from Antonio Tabacchi’s “The Voice, The Body: Reflections after a rehearsal of SALT”)

Actors:

Roberta Carreri,
Jan Ferslev

Music: Jan Ferslev
Scenic space: Antonella Diana and Odin Teatret
Costumes: Odin Teatret
Light designer: Jesper Kongshaug
Graphics: Marco Donati
Assistant director: Raúl Iaiza
Literary adviser: Nando Taviani
Scenic adaptation and directing: Eugenio Barba
Language: Italian
Coproduction: Fondazione Pontedera Teatro,
Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium Odin Teatret

Odin Teatret thanks Thomas Bredsdorff, Knud Erik Knudsen, Raphaëlle Doyon, Kaj Kok and Nathan Meister.

A coproduction: Fondazione Pontedera Teatro and Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, September 2002.

Director

Eugenio Barba

Kaszás Attila 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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