Since 2008, the Odin Teatret Archives (OTA) has become one of the many activities undertaken by The Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. The task of OTA is to outline the living memory of Odin Teatret by collating, organising and then producing documentation, alongside posing questions and tracing routes for cognitive exploration. The work of OTA focuses on the different forms of memory; identifying and investigating their nature and interrelations:
- Archival memory, static: conservation, inventory and catalogue of papers, photographic and audio-visual
documents;
- Private memory, subjective, mobile, “in first person”: production of “oral sources” - statements or “life stories” by the protagonists of Odin Teatret’s history and some members of its audience;
- Social memory, i.e. Odin Teatret’s group memory, the various directions of its collective research, its features as an autonomous micro-tradition: production of monographic chapters and multimedia close-ups.
- Historical memory: at the opposite end of the spectrum to “archival memory”. For this purpose the work of the archives is focussed on the contextualisation of documents through information or chronologies, as well illustrating and exploring possible points of reference for the research into cultural history, politics and sociology;
- Technical-artistic memory, the memory specific to the theatre culture, not only the micro-tradition of Odin Teatret. Throughout the years Eugenio Barba and the Odin actors have engaged in a complex comparative research on the “principles” of the actor’s craft, specifically through ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. The OTA evaluate and preserve these documents produced from the research.
The Odin Teatret Archives were not only conceived to accurately conserve the traces left behind by Odin Teatret but, in addition, to trigger its future life. Their task is not limited to safeguarding the remains of an important theatre activity spanning across more than half a century. But, to also function as a way in which one can secure the conditions to sustain a multiple, mutating and non-univocal memory. This can encompass a whole network of relationships, not solely limited to the life of one single theatre.
The site “Odin Teatret Archives” is not an on-line archive. It merely shows the contents of Odin Teatret Archives through a series of examples which also provide glimpses of Odin Teatret’s visions, history, multifaceted activities and its net of relationships covering a period of fifty years.
CONTACTS
Responsible for the Odin Teatret Archives: Simone Dragone - simone@odinteatret.dk
Francesca Romana Rietti, Ph.D., general advisor and responsible for the update of Eugenio Barba’s bibliography edited by Lluís Masgrau